Anyone else notice in the Apple Keynote regarding the new M3 processor the callout to sketchup working faster? What are people’s thoughts on? Is the single core performance going to drastically increase. I think this is the only way that Sketchup will be markedly faster. (IMO it’s already fast).
I watched it, I´m sure that the single core performance is going to increase, it always does, but this time it’s going to be bigger the performance increase than the one from M1 to M2 cause the M2 was basically an overclocked M1, now it’s a new architecture and the most important factor is the lithography, the M3 is the first and only, so far, computer chip with transistors of 3nm, that lets them increase the efficiency and number of transistors. The best of the new chip for me isn’t the CPU, it’s the gpu, it has hardware dedicated for mesh shading and ray tracing, that combined with the optimization hardware/software that macs have always had its going to be a game changer in the industry. Plus, I loved the new black color.
I´m very happy with my M1 max MacBook, I´m not planning to upgrade yet, maybe with the M4 or M5, but today´s apple event was great news, looking forward to see how the chips perform in real life. Apple haters aren’t going to be able to say that macs are good just for video and photo edition, cause even the lowest end chip that is going to be on the 24" iMac, MacBook air and 14" base model MacBook pro, is going to have gpus with ray tracing capabilities, no other windows laptop could achieve putting hardware that powerful in a small factor laptop like the MacBook air which doesn’t even have a fan.
PD. I also have a PC and I love it as well i actually think that a Desktop with windows and a MacBook are the best combination between raw power and portability, at least until now, I´m not married with any brand, but MacBooks are my weakness.
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Thanks for the great reply. Do you think VRAY will optimise for the new ray tracing and mesh rendering capabilities?That would be awesome.
Hard to know, that depends on Chaos, I think they should do it, Enscape already runs on Macs with apple silicon, and it’s a gpu rendering engine unlike vray that uses only the CPU on mac, both softwares belong to the same company now. Apple and blender also work together so if you use blender like I do, expect improvements using cycles, I´m 90% sure that theyre already working on the Metal API so it takes advantage of the raytracing hardware of the newest apple gpus, I dont expect it to be at the level of nvidia yet, but in just three years the apple chips have already taken the advantage in performance and performance per watt in the CPU side, probably in two or three years the Gpu on the M5 Ultra is going to compete head to head with the nvidia high end chip, maybe RTX 5080 or 5090.
Twinmotion didn’t implemented their path tracer tech on macOS because they said that it needs dedicated ray tracing hardware acceleration and the ball was on apples side, they will probably add that feature to MacOs as well.
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yes, but no. M1 was 3.2 - M2 was 3.5 Ghz. Sure, it can and will increase, but not THAT much.
indeed.
Apple is a master of communication and advertising. for years they’ve told us the mac is soooo great for gaming because of the powerful chipsets. Sure. but if studios don’t make games optimised, then it’s moot. I mean, Myst ? really ? Still beating that dead horse ?
Will sketchup be faster ? well sure, all softwares become a bit faster when upgrading your gear. but not as transcendantal as what they say in the advertising keynote
I mean, as you say, it’s already pretty fast (M1 mini here), most of the performance block I get is from my limited RAM
no. probably not
For years, since the Metal and M1 architecture, people have asked this question, and Chaos doesn’t seem inclined to. I mean, they are not interested in being optimized with anything but Nvidia. and AMD has been here longer than M series.
Sure, the M3 is now capable of raytracing, but chaos has two choices when it comes to use it : either adapt the existing solution, with a quality degradation in the process, or rewriting everything for metal.
will they do either ? the future will tell. but I wouldn’t bet on it. Until they announce and release it, I’ll consider PC’s are more optimised for rendering with out softwares.
Think of it as a car engine. you can add horsepower on top of horsepower, and make a bugatti chiron faster than a bugatti veyron.
But then, if the roads remain limited to 130, 50 in the cities, no matter how quick your car is.
…
My 2010 renault modus will still catch up with it. 
That being said, I’m glad we’re moving to M3.
my mac mini M1 will be 3 years old this spring, time to sell it second hand and upgrade to a mac mini M3.
I think Chaos had previously said that Metal didn’t suit what they needed to do.
As it stands, over in PC world the majority of the software technology that enables this type of processing is provided by Nvidia or Microsoft.
If there is dedicated hardware, Apple needs to back it up with the software and tools to make it work or make it straightforward to implement.
For example - Chaos V-Ray has 3 core renderers - 2 of those utilize 2 entire software stacks from Nvidia, one that was launched in 2007 (CUDA) and its replacement (Optix) , designed for ray-tracing which launched in 2009.
Chaos Enscape uses Nvidia’s RTX software’s for AI and temporal upscaling, delivering ray-traced shadows and providing colored shadows as well as several denoisers for GI and the overall image… You can use another card with hardware ray-tracing there and you lose access to all of those.
Twinmotion uses Microsoft’s DXR to facilitate Path tracing.
Apple have not announced or launched an equivalent to that , nor did they announce any denoisers, nor they they announce any other software/OS components designed to help developers who have spent 15 years using Nvidia’s tech.
Infact Apple has denied support for more APIs that it has replaced
Over in PC land where you can also get very powerful intel or AMD GPUs with hardware accelerated Ray-Tracing, but the software/api/middleware to support developers are years behind what Nvidia are offering.
It either performs worse, looks worse or features are outright missing.
The reality is - the types of processors that GPUs use for Raytracing are also the same type of processor that they use for AI.
This is the real reason the iPhone and Macs have these chips.
Related : It’s also the reason that the US has demanded that Nvidia halt shipments of GPUs to China. AI and Machine learning fears.
US orders immediate halt to some AI chip exports to China, says Nvidia | Technology sector | The Guardian
This is just the start of the journey for Apple machines 
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