What a great look for a ‘hobby’ renderer!
Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
241–250 of 328 posts
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why most artists highly prefer gpus is it gets their cycle time down. Farms often use CPU’s still because of cost and less pressure on a single image render time. Usually what one does is break the shots down into individual elements rather than render everything as once and then composite it in. Rendering it all in one go can prevent touchups to individual elements. But I am much more VFX than pure animat…
> Funny thing I mostly know what I am talking about. You are only however talking about your subjective experience and projecting it onto the entirety of the industry. I've worked in both animated features and VFX at a few of the bigger studios. What sort of studio do you work at? I'd suggest looking at the landscape of big feature films and seeing what studios are using GPU rendering. It's rare to see any of the big…
> What sort of studio do you work at?
Wrote and sold software into the VFX industry. Most notable Deadline, a fairly popular render manager. Also wrote/sold another dozen or so tools into the industry.
While CPU renderers are popular among the old crowd, no one wants to use them because they are super slow. The cycle time is brutal and it kills artist productivity. Artists want redshift, octane, GPU cycles, and hybrid Pixar Renderman, basically anything with multi-GPU support. Wherever artists can they want GPU-based renders because they are fast.
Large feature film shops are laggards in adopting new technology and often have a ton of workflows/plugins that can not be easily changed. They have their tired and true pipeline. But up and coming studios tend to be nearly completely GPU-based, because it cuts costs, even if it limits things a bit (but much less than before.)
This is also why you see Unreal Engine getting into architectural rendering -- again because it is a much nicer workflow than waiting around for a few hours for V-Ray to finish up.
Many children TV shows are GPU-rendered now right out of game engines, in part because of the cycle time and the lower visual complexity of the scenes.
So I think we are both right. Large studios are using CPU-based rendering -- you are correct. Artists and more nimble studios are using GPU-based rendering as much as they can because it reduces cycle time while being roughly equivalent costs (well except for the last 2 years because of crypto screwing up GPU prices.)
Remember my original statement you took offence to was:
"3D artists these days want their render boxes to be filled with gpus so they can use cycles or redshift or octane to render fast."
and
"The reason why most artists highly prefer gpus is it gets their cycle time down. Farms often use CPU’s still because of cost and less pressure on a single image render time."
I was speaking about what artists want and I am absolutely correct on that. And what artists want will filter into the rest of the industry -- although a bit slower now because of stupid GPU prices.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.
Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise. I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.
> So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.
I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's 100 efficient, and the amount of houses with a heat pump is <1%
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.
I'm an AMD fan. The comparison should not even be close TBH. We're talking about a laptop chip that can run on battery for an extended period of time that performs as well and sometimes better than the high end consumer AMD desktop chip. Kudos to Apple. I'm not suprised. Apple has the lead in the fabrication process, 5nm vs 7nm. I eagerly await a true apples to apples comparison when AMD uses the same 5nm process.
I'm definitely not an Apple fan but what's available on the market at any given moment is an apple to apple comparison of what companies are able to do. I mean: any modern army (or pary of) would crush Roman legions, but they had to do it 2000 years ago.
The article ends wondering about the impact on PC OEMs. I presume they are extrapolating the performance improvement curves, talking with Microsoft about Windows on ARM and working at HW contingency plans in case they have to leave a sinking x86 ship. I don't think they are resting on promises of big improvements from AMD and Intel.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively. But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency,…
It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load. I do love this review though: "It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."
Memory bandwidth is nothing for most workloads. Besides a scant few Geekbench figures, I have genuinely never encountered a workload that was bottlenecked by my ability to transfer assets to the GPU. Is 100gbps of PCIe bandwidth not enough for your needs?
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?). The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop. I agree on the pricing (I a…
> I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively. I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?
This is the real question, my money is on 5-10%.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#248I always wondered why Apple was pushing so much functionality into the iPhone that almost all users really didn't need. I was thinking it would get them ready for coming AR glasses and whatnot, but it was also preparing them to win on the Mac side as well.
You might not need that full power now, but it certainly helps with the longevity of the devices. That's another pretty important factor IMO
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be cool if they try to decouple the GPU and CPU for server units somehow.
From what we’ve seen, the M1 design is quite modular. I don’t see a reason why they could not use 4 or 6 high-performance CPU clusters and a low-core GPU for a server part of they wanted. No GPU at all might be impractical because a lot of things in the OS might have come to expect one. Anyway, it’s academical because I don’t see them doing that. Expect maybe to power their own datacenters, but then we’d never hear a…
Well, considering how well the M1 variants are performing in the performance/watt category and this is one major cost factor for data centers, I would assume Apple by all means is going to use their own chips in the future. And then there is no good reason not to sell a tons of them to anyone who is willing to pay Apple prices for server hardware. (Which aren't that bad, compared to other server hardware prices)
But this might a bit in the future as they barely can make enough of them for the MacBooks. I even would assume that the launch of the other computers in the lineup has been put to a later time to be able to keep up at least a bit with demand.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel's new Sapphire Rapids is also doing on-package HBM
IT'S NOT HBM! NEITHER IS APPLE'S MEMORY! Stop spreading this myth, please just look at a Vega GPU die shot and you'll know what HBM looks like. You cannot put HBM on a PCB package. HBM is connected with a silicon interposer.
My apologies. I even checked some of the press on it before commenting to double check it, and tech press has been calling it that too.