mac studio / mac pro m2 ultra

hi corona users
i’m still running a maxed out mac pro from 2010 (5.1) at home > 12c, 3.46ghz, 128gb ram.
but as apple released a new version of the mac studio and finally the new mac pro, i’m suggesting to buy a new apple computer. rather a mac studio than a mac pro.

it would be nice to get some real world benchmarks in this thread. does anybody already have the mac studio m2 ultra on his/her desk and can share some infos about working in the viewport, maybe some render times and other important facts?

@corona-team: i guess corona benchmark v2 (optimized for apple silicon) is just around the corner?

thanks for your inputs and thoughts. i’m curious what y’all have to share in the near future. :o)

I’d like to see this as well. One of the tests I like to run since every C4D user already has the scene, is to open the Grapes scene in the Asset Browser and just hit Render to Picture Viewer. Not a Corona test, but a raw CPU power test. I have several render times from over the years and I believe a thread here somewhere where others tried it with newer Macs. The benchmarks are nice, but it’s difficult to apply that knowledge to real-world projects.

A smart decision not to get that “new” Mac Pro. Only peeps that have a need for specific PCI cards could possible justify the extra $3,000 USD for that box. Hoping they’re fixing the sudden bottleneck with scaling these new chips. Started off so promising.

The native benchmark is up - would be great to see some Ultra scores up there :slight_smile:

I’ve put my M1Max and Threadripper up there:

Oh cool. Just for fun I ran it on my M2max MBP (5,761,541). And my old Threadripper 2950x (5,678,105).
Quite suprised that the MBP edged it!

I stupidly updated to 13.4.1 after publishing that benchmark and it dropped me by 1619013 rays/sec. Why Apple?

happen to me…before 4.000.000 Ray on my MacBook Pro M1 Max and 3.000.000 after the upgrade…I tried tomorrow and results has changed…very strange…

cool, thx for the first impressions and benchmarks.
can somebody run the new benchmark with a mac studio ultra m1 and m2, please?

In the screenshot masterzone posted the 3,8M r/s score for I9-10910 caught my eye.
It’s running macOS 13.4… In comparison my I9-10850K running Mac OS X 10.15.7 comes in consistently in the 5,2M r/s range. Not sure what to make of this, since both CPU’s should be performing in the same range.
It’s been a while since we heard that a OS update boosted hardware performance, but I never heard of an update throttling performance.

@Phil
Is the benchmark running M chips “optimized”? I couldn’t find any Chaos statement about this and I wonder how this actually works. There is only one Mac installer. Does it have code to run “native” Intel AND “native” Apple Silicon?

@ Chaos
There was some discussion about M1 thermal throttling kicking in after 5 min or so.
Why is the benchmark restricted to 1 min tests? Would be great if this would be more flexible (set your own test time) to evaluate performance over time/ thermal stability.

Yep the new Benchmark is a Universal binary so as optimised as the renderer itself, I guess!

Thanks Phil, forgot about the universal binary… had gpt explain to me how that works :wink:

I agree…as Cinebench do…it has 10 minutes benchmark…

Hello

I am super interested in this discussion. Seeing that an Apple update that should boost power dramatically reduces the output, not only on M machines but on Intel Macs as well, is a nightmare !

I did a test with my Apple Intel i9-10910 running on macOS Monterey 12.6.5. It scores 4536424 which seems fine so far.

This means problems seem to occur with macOS 13 only ?

Also regarding the thermo-throttling – This was only true for the MacBooks ? Is there more Info ?

Would be great to see a Mac M2 Ultra performance.

Yep as far as I understand the CPU variability is “cleverness” due to being a laptop. The Studio is ok as far as I know (don’t own one).

Well, so far there is only one benchmark for this cpu/ os combo and we don’t know if this was run on a idle system…
I ran a bench on I9 /Monterey - score as expected. Corona 10 Benchmark
I don’t have any Ventura nodes to test.

@Phil & masterzone
How long after updating did you run the bench? could some background indexing be the problem?

Possibly - I did consider the housekeeping it does after an update. I’ll try it again at some point once I can take a breath :slight_smile:

Intersting question…I hit the corona bench again but I don’t know how the first time I got 4 ml/ray and then 3ml/ray…:man_facepalming:t2:

Very changeable!

I noticed that these higher results happened when fans were at 0rpm and high 95°C CPU. Once the CPU temp is lower due to fans at about 1500rpm then the scores aren’t as good. So definitely related to some kind of throttling curve.

@davetwo
does your m2 max benchmark-result mean that a mac studio m2 ultra will give a score around 11’4M r/s?

I would say its pretty linear so yes 2x