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Mac Studio & M1 Ultra


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On 8/8/2022 at 8:24 PM, Mark Aceto said:

Took the Studio out of the box just shy of 2 months ago on June 11. I was absolutely 100% expecting dust to be an issue with this design, so I've diligently dusted my desk surface every other week.

 

Today, as I was swapping out some cables with the new monitor, I tipped it on its side, and discovered this:

 

IMG_7447.thumb.JPG.bf5495140e150d784fd8873136364fba.JPG

 

This is the first computer that I've had to vacuum, and it looks like I'll be setting a reminder to do it monthly!

 

Again, I'm not surprised by this idiotic design whatsoever. I even have an old Google search for trivets to help elevate it off the desk.

 

Lord Jony Ive of House InnerCaps may be long gone but Apple are still haunted by function following form.

 

Cripes. I wonder if you could use a foam strip around the bottom edge to collect this dust before it gets to the grille... without causing overheating issues.

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15 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

Been onsite with the 2019 MBP (maxed out with latest GPU) for a week now, and I want to throw this thing at a wall. I got used to the Studio / M1 Ultra (working on the same file all day everyday for the past 2 months). Going back to what you used before is always the acid test, and this is excruciating. There's no contest. When it's moving, it's slow. When it's not moving, it's constant beach balls / Force Quits. I can't wait to get home, and get back on the Studio.

 

Btw for context, what this means for me is not just a case of raw speed in the benchmarking sense. It means I'm finally using VW in ways that I've never been able to on a Mac. For example, workflows that include lots of RW to help visualize lighting and projection design, heavy model imports from vendors that I can't import on this machine because I just get the SBBOD, higher quality / LOD settings for various render modes... all while project sharing and referencing shuttle files.

 

On that note, the referenced 100 million point cloud still works pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good on the MBP. Whatever VW is doing with point clouds is super efficient.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/13/2022 at 4:44 AM, line-weight said:

On Friday I tried unticking "Use VectorCaching for faster drawing" in VW preferences but it didn't make much difference.

 

Just did a quick test of what you suggested - I had "save viewport cache" and "save VGM graphics cache" both ticked, but unticked them, saved doc, closed VW and restarted.

 

This is in VW2021:

- File reduced from >2GB to 1.2GB

- Opening the file in VW immediately occupies 14.9GB of memory according to Activity Monitor

- By cycling through a few saved views, without editing anything, I could get it up to 21GB quite quickly

- closing the file left VW occupying 6GB of memory (no other files open except for an empty "Untitled 1" file).

 

So my impression is it doesn't improve things.

 

I see there's also a box "save site model cache". I've not tried unticking that yet, might try that later/tomorrow.

 

Just set a new record over here: disabling graphics caching (shortly after enabling it) reduced file size from 727mb to 254mb.

 

Considering I had to Force Quit VW after it stopped responding, I still see no value in caching graphics to disk if you have a decent GPU. It's not worth tripling the file size (and associated memory) for whatever "gains" there presumable are... Unless you're on a 2012 MacBook Air with an integrated GPU.

 

537435115_ScreenShot2022-08-25at1_48_54PM.png.9e13d72b1fa66cbb64d0bbbce59d797c.png345525931_ScreenShot2022-08-25at1_49_27PM.png.41ef295fe3f57b6eaa0afa33eb812615.png
 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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Been fighting all day with high geometry files provided by vendors. GPU is at 2%. RAM is roughly 20%. A single CPU core is pegged, and the other 19 are idling, so this is just further evidence that the additional cores mostly benefit rendering because there are still so many operations that are, and will continue to be, limited to single core.


This isn't a dig at VW. I just wouldn't want anyone to feel buyer's remorse about spending the extra dough on more cores if they don't need em for rendering. Real world context is everything.

 

Will be interesting to see how M2 and the mythical Mac Pro can possibly help with this but it's gonna have to be in the form of faster single core clock speed, so... not sure how much Apple can move the needle (not that Windows would necessarily be much better at single core performance).


The constraint I see with single core is like that quote from The Mythical Man Month, "A woman can deliver a baby in 9 months but 9 women can't deliver a baby in 1 month." You just gotta sit there and wait for that one core from start to finish regardless of how much money you throw at multiple cores.

 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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On 8/26/2022 at 6:45 AM, Mark Aceto said:

Will be interesting to see how M2 and the mythical Mac Pro can possibly help with this but it's gonna have to be in the form of faster single core clock speed, so... not sure how much Apple can move the needle (not that Windows would necessarily be much better at single core performance).

 

 

 

MaxTech's Youtube channel reports that new M2 Pro and M2 Max should be 3nm technology and NOT 5nm as M2 currently in commerce, due to thermal throttling problems 

Let's see what happens...

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On 8/26/2022 at 12:45 AM, Mark Aceto said:

Been fighting all day with high geometry files provided by vendors. GPU is at 2%. RAM is roughly 20%. A single CPU core is pegged, and the other 19 are idling, so this is just further evidence that the additional cores mostly benefit rendering because there are still so many operations that are, and will continue to be, limited to single core.


This isn't a dig at VW. I just wouldn't want anyone to feel buyer's remorse about spending the extra dough on more cores if they don't need em for rendering. Real world context is everything.

 

Will be interesting to see how M2 and the mythical Mac Pro can possibly help with this but it's gonna have to be in the form of faster single core clock speed, so... not sure how much Apple can move the needle (not that Windows would necessarily be much better at single core performance).


The constraint I see with single core is like that quote from The Mythical Man Month, "A woman can deliver a baby in 9 months but 9 women can't deliver a baby in 1 month." You just gotta sit there and wait for that one core from start to finish regardless of how much money you throw at multiple cores.

 

I always wondered if a multi core machine could be developed that had instead of additional "efficiency cores" it had an overclocked or hi speed core.

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23 hours ago, Andrew Pollock said:

I always wondered if a multi core machine could be developed that had instead of additional "efficiency cores" it had an overclocked or hi speed core.

 

On Windows, yes. It's up to Apple if they want to do that for us (along with a hardware accelerated GPU for realtime ray tracing in UE/TM).

 

The other thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is I can bring these same high poly / heavy geometry models I receive into Rhino, and it handles them with ease (even on an Intel MacBook Pro). So, yeah, the bottleneck is single core but... 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...
7 hours ago, neal-2002 said:

This is looking positive for future apples new processors (Mx) - raytracing…if they can do it on an iPhone - hopefully we’ll get it in macs soon….twinmotion etc..

 

https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/23/apple-chip-gpu-blunder/

 

Quote

The report says engineers were “too ambitious with adding new features” and prototypes had much higher power draw than the simulated estimates expected. This meant the GPU would have impacted battery life too much to be usable, and incurred thermal issues. As a result, it couldn’t be used for the iPhone 14 Pro line.

 

Battery life would not be an issue in the Studio or Pro but not holding my breath for these marketing trolls to spin how power efficient a lame duck workstation is.

 

Quote

The new GPU would have supported advanced features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing, according to The Information.

 

This is what I've been holding out for, and wishfully speculating is the reason for the Mac Pro delays. Without hardware accelerated ray tracing, they may as well not release a new Mac Pro. Unless they want to make it compatible with NVIDIA GPU's. Meanwhile, it's been 3 years since that overpriced dinosaur has been updated. We know where there priorities are (making sad TV shows).

 

The fact that they've been losing engineers to rivals started up by engineers that left Apple... does not bode well. Apple as  a company is more profitable than ever, so it's successful in that regard, but I miss the days when they cared about making great products for professionals. They're running out of runway before I swap this Studio for a budget MacBook Air paired with a Windows workstation. Judging by their track record, they're 100% OK with that.

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