I wonder how accurate it is to compare the Mac Studio’s GPU power to the Nvidia cards. They may be comparable in terms of raw operations per second, but to leverage that power on the Mac you’re presumably going to need something that’s written against Apple’s Metal framework (just as you’d need something coded to use CUDA for the Nvidia cards). Presumably someone could also write code that would access either device at a lower level, but that’s rather more work. I assume that there are probably more apps out there that can take full advantage of the power of, say, an RTX 3090 than of the power of the M1 Ultra. So it’s not that easy to make an apples-to-Apples comparison (excuse me).
Personally, I’d buy one of those suckers tomorrow if I could do Iray renders on it at full speed. But Iray is tied very closely to Nvidia’s GPUs, and since Apple and Nvidia had a little falling out, Apple hardware will never ever work in any way shape or form with Nvidia hardware ever again. You can do Iray renders in CPU, of course, but the CPU rendering code is written for Intel. That means that on an Apple Silicon Mac it’ll have to run under Rosetta 2, which eats up another giant chunk of performance.
The result is that Iray rendering on the Mac Studio might be appreciably faster than on my current Intel Mac, but it’s probably also many times slower than on any of Nvidia’s recent GPUs.
Speaking of performance killers, how will the M1 Ultra do at crypto-mining? Are we going to find that we can’t buy any Mac Studio devices because every last one has been bought and shipped to China, I mean Texas, to be installed in a Bitcoin mining farm?
