To make it quick, my wife is using Vray Sketchup etc for interior design.
She is using mac before M1 models, i7 3.8 ghz, 32 or 48gb ram dont even remember and weak radeon pro 5500 8gb. I guess GPU is too weak so that that high ram is not that noticable. She is fine with it but when i look at it it seems insanely slow, i wouldnt be able to work on that myself.
I want to get here Macbook pro instead but here comes the question. Most likely i will go with 48GB Ram version but should i get here M4 PRO or M3MAX?
M4max seems a little bit too much, m3max is also more expensive than m4 pro but just want to make sure that for stuff she is doing i can pick best option.
Depends on the prices you find. I don’t think it make a lot of difference between the two, so look at price next. I bought an old-new stock M1 Max because it was on sale at a steep discount and a much better value than the actual current top of the line model.
For Vray, now that it supports gpu rendering on apple silicon, it’s better to have more gpu cores and more ram, the difference between m4 and M3 is mostly on the cpu, but I still the cpu performance of an M3 is among the best, just make sure to upgrade ram if your wife works with big projects, rendering uses a lot of ram. I have an M1 Max and even though it’s almost 4 years old, the performance is amazing, I don’t feel the need of upgrading yet, M series chips are the best thing that apple has made since the 1st iPhone.
I happen to have an M4 Pro Mac for work, and an M3 Pro Max of my own. I should be able to do some tests with VRay. Unfortunately, I also have the “No licenses available” problem with VRay. Trying to get past that now.
@francisquitof Thank You, but are you talking about M3 Max vs M4Pro? M3max has more core GPU than M4Pro.
@colin such comparison would be best. Basically all she is doing is Vray so i want to make her as comfortable as possible with macbook working as smooth as it can but also with some common sense. I think m4max can be overkill but really unsure about M3max vs M4pro especially as i might be able to find it in similar price levels. Still think m3max can be a bit more expensive but not that much and if difference can be really noticable in advance for it, i would be willing to pay the price.
But I would suggest switching the workflow. Do small low quality test renders locally and send finals to Chaos Cloud. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And this frees up your machine to keep working (billing). And you can follow progress of the render in the web interface - so if something is wrong you can stop the render and fix it, then send up to the cloud again.
You buy credits and pay for your renders with them. At the end of a project download a spreadsheet and bill the clients directly. Or include it in your wife’s rate.
This was a game changer for me. Keeps me modeling and designing while my renders cook on someone else’s hardware.
Benchmarks don’t really show how it’s going to be the performance in real life. My M1 Max with 10 cpu cores is faster than my i7 13700 K with 24 cores rendering the same scene with the exact same settings. A 4080 Nvidia gpu is going to be faster than an M4 obviously, but you’ll have to get all the hardware, and now there’s gpu shortage so the prices are crazy if you want to buy one.
My wife is used to apple products and even though it would be much better to go with Ryzen it has to be mac. From all the information i gathered right now, it seems that for Vray, M3Max should be a little bit better than M4Pro and most likely will go with it.
V-Ray GPU works only with C++/CPU devices under macOS.
Does it mean Vray is only using CPU for rendering, not GPU on mac? Meaning there is no point in going for M3max with more GPU cores just for Vray? And M4Pro will be better choice?
Depends on where you saw that and when the info was last updated. Vray never used the GPU on Intel Macs. The statement could be obsolete. That said, the Apple silicon GPU is not likely to match the performance of an Nvidia GPU because the latter have many many more GPU cores.