How good are the Apple M4 chips when rendering in Blender?
Robbie Tilton compares several Mac setups including the M2 Ultra, M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also includes a Windows 4080 and 3080 test. Which will render fastest? Are Apple chips good enough to compete with Nvidia for 3D renders?
The graph bars are a bit off regarding speeds imho, but the new Apple chips are very impressive.
Only gripe is that you’re buying into a locked system.
No replacing your graphic card or adding RAM in the future.
If you don’t mind that, it’s a solid buy if you can stand OSX ;)
great review. Yes, Ive been really thinking about switching to Apple for some time. These numbers give me more to think about. Thank you!
I would never by any rendering computer that could not be upgraded, especially a laptop! There is a good reason the best GPUs have 2 or 3 fans on them and a big power supply. After 2 years, I recently decided to upgrade my GPU to an Asus RTX4060. It will never be held back by any sort of throttling or overheating, and I can upgrade it to an RTX7060 (in a few years!) without trashing the whole computer.
I think some miss the point of Blender working so well on Macs now. It’s not about just choosing a machine to work with Blender. It’s that those that do use Macs for mobile game development, video editing, graphic design and so forth can now use Blender just as much as everyone else can. It can become a creative tool to create content on either platform now.
Blender was always supposed to be cross platform and system independent. Now that is more true than ever before. It’s really about the tools and what creatives can do with those tools. The hardware and OS don’t matter as much.
Yes some people prefer Macs and love them. No reason why they shouldn’t enjoy Blender as well. It’s not a competition. We can all be a Blender user family.
As for upgrading I find that process over rated these days. Macs have great resale value and sometimes upgrading a graphics card can only go so far on an older system. They are not endlessly upgradable. Systems fail as well and a home built PC typically has no resale or trade in value. A high end Mac can even be traded in with Apple which is a very safe and easy process. It doesn’t yield a lot of money but when one subtracts that from the price of the Mac it really brings a new Mac into a very affordable point.
For example a new M4 Pro is about $2,000. I can trade my M1 Pro to Apple for $700. That means I can get a brand new much faster M4 Pro MBP for $1,300. I could do the same for a Mac mini and spend about $600 on a $1,300 machine.
The trade in value is something some don’t really consider but I think of it like a discount program