M1 MAX support ?

[lindsay_gomes1]

Hello When is Arnold gonna come out for the M1 MAX I know for a fact its supposed to be rendering much faster compared to redshift right now that's super fast on the Mac silicon we need it ASAP are we looking at it happening at-least by this year ?

this is sad cause I really love Arnold and its potential but seeing how far behind it is now 😕

[Stephen.Blair]

We're working on it, with help from Apple. There's no specific date or time that I can give right now.

[thiago.ize]

I think there might be some confusion on what M1 Max support means. This chip contains both CPU and GPU hardware. I haven't investigated this, but I suspect redshift is doing GPU rendering on the M1 Max. Perhaps this dramatic speedup you're referring to is for a certain non-apple GPU (was this a desktop nvidia 3090 or a 10 year old macbook integrated gpu?) to moving to apple's new integrated GPU?

Arnold has no immediate plans to do GPU rendering on Apple hardware. What we are working on is letting the CPU arnold renderer run natively on the cpu part of the M1 so it doesn't need to get translated by rosetta. This will very likely give a nice speedup, but depending on your standards, you probably are not going to consider it to be "much faster" (definitely not 10x faster nor probably even 2x faster). You can look online for benchmarks on apple rosetta overhead to get an idea of what kind of speedup you might expect. Sorry I can't say what exact speedup you'll see -- we won't know that until we finish porting it.

[rico]

It's nice to see these questions answered in such detail here. Unfortunately, there were no answers to them in the past. However, this does not make the decision for the future any easier. I am currently working with Arnold and with Redshift. Arnold is the best renderer in my eyes with the best workflow and integration. However, Redshift is much faster and runs very stable.

In any case, it is a pity that there will be no GPU support for Anrold. I think this will unfortunately make the renderer unattractive for Mac users in the future.

[Anonymous]

Great finally some more details, thanks for that. Although I love Arnold, Redshift is the best option now for silicon Macs. It runs on GPU cores, is stable and already running pretty fast on the current M1 machines. When Apple is going to increase the GPU count on the high end mac pro's (64/128 cores), CPU rendering is not interesting anymore.

[joelTCAQF]

I agree with the other M1 users here. Arnold rendering was quite good on my old intel Mac but the world is changing and openly acknowledging that there is no plan to utilize modern macs potential speed doesn’t seem like a super great sign for the future of Arnold. It’s a bit disappointing. 

[Stephen.Blair]

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@joelTCAQF wrote:

I agree with the other M1 users here. Arnold rendering was quite good on my old intel Mac but the world is changing and openly acknowledging that there is no plan to utilize modern macs potential speed doesn’t seem like a super great sign for the future of Arnold. It’s a bit disappointing. 

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Nobody said there was no plan. There is a plan, and we are working on it.

[joelTCAQF]

Well, kind of - I was referring to the admission:  "Arnold has no immediate plans to do GPU rendering on Apple hardware."

Admittedly "immediate plans" isn't technically "no plans". But maybe you'll forgive me since companies often use "have no immediate plans" to put off expectations indefinitely.  

And to be fair, maybe you don't equate GPU rendering with taking full advantage of "M1 potential speed". Hard to know from out here.  In any case I think we're all just hoping that we won't have to start shopping around to take advantage of our machine's speed.

[Stephen.Blair]

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@joelTCAQF wrote:

Well, kind of - I was referring to the admission:  "Arnold has no immediate plans to do GPU rendering on Apple hardware."

Admittedly "immediate plans" isn't technically "no plans". But maybe you'll forgive me since companies often use "have no immediate plans" to put off expectations indefinitely.  

And to be fair, maybe you don't equate GPU rendering with taking full advantage of "M1 potential speed". Hard to know from out here.  In any case I think we're all just hoping that we won't have to start shopping around to take advantage of our machine's speed.

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Sorry, I equated M1 chip with CPU rendering, because we get a lot of questions about Arnold on M1.

GPU rendering without NVidia Optix (which requires NVidia cards) is not something I would tell you to expect in the short-to-medium term. In contrast, Arnold on M1 is going to happen, I just can't divulge dates or timelines.

[cucubano]

So would this lack of support for M1 max explain the "pre-populate GPU" taking way longer than 15 minutes, concluding you should not pre-populate GPU on M1 max?

[Stephen.Blair]

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@cucubano wrote:

So would this lack of support for M1 max explain the "pre-populate GPU" taking way longer than 15 minutes, concluding you should not pre-populate GPU on M1 max?

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Arnold GPU is not available on macOS, because NVidia drivers are not available on macOS.

How did you run pre-populate GPU ?

[cucubano]

Just the way shown in the LinkedIn/Learning (formerly Lynda) lesson on Bifrost: right from the BiFrost menu.

[Stephen.Blair]

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@cucubano wrote:

Just the way shown in the LinkedIn/Learning (formerly Lynda) lesson on Bifrost: right from the BiFrost menu.

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In C4DtoA, Prepopulate is on the Arnold > Utilities menu, but only on Windows or Linux.
There's no Bifrost menu in C4DtoA.

In any case, no matter what plugin or host application you are using, pre-populate GPU doesn't mean anything on macOS. Arnold GPU is not supported, and trying to prepopulate will do nothing on macOS

[cucubano]

OK. On Mac it actually starts "pre-populating" but stays there for ever. Unless you are aware that it "will do nothing" you think the computer is working because it pops-up a progress line that never moves that says "pre-populating". Thanks for you reply.

[peter_horvath]

M1 CPU support is now available in C4DtoA 4.5.0 / Arnold 7.1.4.0. 

[peter.fagerberg]

Thank you, @peter_horvath and the rest of the Autodesk team!! It took a while (!), but you finally made it happen - well done! Now we can start using our expensive Apple hardware to the max. 🙂

/A really happy C4D+Arnold user

[tompkins.ge]

Well done! Performance on a Studio Ultra feels excellent.

Only problem I ran in to was files created on a Windows system would lock up C4D when opened on the Mac Studio. Easy workaround was to merge the file into a new scene which worked instantly. 

Thank you for all the hard work.

[peter_horvath]

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Only problem I ran in to was files created on a Windows system would lock up C4D when opened on the Mac Studio. Easy workaround was to merge the file into a new scene which worked instantly. 

Hmm, not sure why. File was made with the same Cinema 4D version on Windows, right? What kind of assets were in the scene? Only textures? Absolute or relative paths?

[tompkins.ge]

Was made with same version of C4D on both systems.

Contents were a rigged hand holding a product. Simple lighting. Few textures mixed between .jpg and .tx, all relative paths. After the merge I saved the new file to the original's directory and the textures all worked automatically.

[08-expense-deep]

Hi Tom

Nice to see your excitement. How would you generally rate Arnold's performance on M1s though? Would you be able to compare it with other renderers you've tried with Apple Silicon?