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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#211

Post by berkut »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #208
hunterloftis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._ This is backwards - Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc. There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based trac…

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed . What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering. Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago. Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago. Autodesk Arnold After Effects Chaos V-Ray Weta Gazebo and Manuka ...all GPU…

Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films: it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).

After Effects doesn't really belong on this list?

Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look.

Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for very little benefit, it's pure CPU now and has been for > 7 years).

Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

Smaller facilities which are happy using the stock shaders are though.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#212

Post by yxhuvud »

speed_spread wrote: post #104
glasshead969 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.

If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

> And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#213

Post by KennyBlanken »

m0zg wrote: post #61
KennyBlanken wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the author is pretty intellectually dishonest when he says that his new MBP beat out a "somewhat old" xeon. That's a ten year old CPU.

That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that. If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop. There's been some progress in terms of power efficiency on laptops, but even there 5+ year…

> That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that.

Single core performance on current i9 processors benchmarks at twice the performance of the Haswell chips. Multicore performance is ~4x.

They definitely slept for a while and AMD started taking their lunch money with Ryzen and EPYC but "nothing has really changed since Haswell" is blatantly wrong.

> If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop.

Wrong again, mostly because quicksync in that old a processor won't handle current popular streaming video codecs so you end up with non-accelerated video decoding unless you've got a discrete GPU.

> memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods.

No advantage from people upgrading from a Haswell's DDR3-1600 (13GB/sec) to Comet Lake's DDR4-2933 (94GB/sec), eh?

Either it's not worth upgrading from Haswell or it is.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#214

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

paulmd wrote: post #162
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think x86 can't go as wide as ARM? (I predict your answer will involve something about decoders and nothing about uop caches.) What goalpost have I moved? I have said one (true) thing: that you should judge by performance rather than by implementation details. You are falling victim to the Megahertz Myth, just the other way 'round.

OK, here’s the performance. Factor of 2.2X over its peers (other laptop SKUs) in multithreaded performance, going head to head with 5950X in some (floating-point) scenarios. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png Why do you think megahertz myth is relevant here? Core for core A15/M1 is plainly faster than any of its peers, ignoring clocks, and it is even farther on top when you do look at clocks (i…

>OK, here’s the performance. Factor of 2.2X over its peers (other laptop SKUs) in multithreaded performance, going head to head with 5950X in some (floating-point) scenarios

Finally a sensible comparison! As I said, it is quite impressive.

>it doesn’t mean low-clocked x86 magically beats A15.

Nor did I ever say it would.

What I have said is a simple truth: leading on IPC and trailing on frequency is not obviously an advantage. I don't understand what it is you think I said. Pretty much everything you are writing is a non-sequitur.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#215

Post by breakfastduck »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #209
jaaron wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily true. I know several studios in Los Angeles that do 3D final renders on CPU, such as Disney Animation. GPU rendering works for realtime, but the memory constraints on GPU limit its use in the high end. Everyone in the field is looking at GPU and some significant advances have been made, but it's definitely not true that "nobody" is doing rendering on CPUs.

Do those studios do final renders on someone's Macbook Pro? Is the article about performance in a final render pipeline? Is this chip sold by apple in a cluster/datacenter-friendly package?

That's not what anyone was disputing though, is it?

Talk about moving the goalposts.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#216

Post by yxhuvud »

paulmd wrote: post #162
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think x86 can't go as wide as ARM? (I predict your answer will involve something about decoders and nothing about uop caches.) What goalpost have I moved? I have said one (true) thing: that you should judge by performance rather than by implementation details. You are falling victim to the Megahertz Myth, just the other way 'round.

OK, here’s the performance. Factor of 2.2X over its peers (other laptop SKUs) in multithreaded performance, going head to head with 5950X in some (floating-point) scenarios. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png Why do you think megahertz myth is relevant here? Core for core A15/M1 is plainly faster than any of its peers, ignoring clocks, and it is even farther on top when you do look at clocks (i…

Sigh. IPC matter when you are comparing within the same architecture, as that means the comparative performance vs other cores of the same architecture ends up (somewhat simplified) as IPC * frequency. It is utterly irrelevant when comparing across architectures as the instruction sets are different. IPC matter when comparing Ryzen to Intel, and between A15 and A16, but it doesn't matter at all when comparing A15 to anything x86-based.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#217

Post by KennyBlanken »

berkut wrote: post #211
KennyBlanken wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed . What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering. Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago. Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago. Autodesk Arnold After Effects Chaos V-Ray Weta Gazebo and Manuka ...all GPU…

Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films: it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around). After Effects doesn't really belong on this list? Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look. Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for…

> Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films

You didn't say "feature films", you said "film and TV." You're goalpost-shifting / no-true-scotsman'ing.

> it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).

The Arnold I mentioned that is GPU accelerated? Or a different Arnold? Just checking.

> high end VFX facilities

Again with the goalpost shifting / no-true-scotsman-ing

> aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

They doing that rendering work on laptops?

What is the article talking about? Server farm hardware?

We're done here.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#218

Post by Dagonfly »

Thaxll wrote: post #64
pier25 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.

An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.

Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT):

A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€.

A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together).

That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desktop 3060 and 3080. So between 700€ and 1400€.

Tl;dr: A 3440€ Macbook competes with a 2000-2700€ desktop depending on your workload. The desktop has no peripherals and no USB4/TB4.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#219

Post by vinay427 »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #101
DeRock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a laptop with one of them for comparison?

One of my laptops is a Dell Precision 7760. Xeon W-11855M, NVIDIA RTX, 128GB ECC RAM. I don't need too much storage, but you can get it with 14TB if you want. Note mine is a 6-core. There is an 8-core available w/ the Xeon W-11955M, which is faster than mine. It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rat…

“A little thicker” is a bit of an understatement. At its thickest point, it’s apparently 71% thicker than the thickest point of the 16-inch MacBook Pro (2021), and 55% thicker at its thinnest point compared to the thickest point of the Mac. That’s a huge difference for portable electronics.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#220

Post by pixelpoet »

berkut wrote: post #211
KennyBlanken wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed . What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering. Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago. Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago. Autodesk Arnold After Effects Chaos V-Ray Weta Gazebo and Manuka ...all GPU…

Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films: it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around). After Effects doesn't really belong on this list? Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look. Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for…

> Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

Surprised no one has mentioned Redshift Renderer yet; GPU-based, supports out of core for both geo and textures, and OSL.

Nevertheless, I agree that "nobody renders on CPU" is just patently false - one need only look at the Corona Renderer numbers to instantly disprove that.

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