Hi all, my studio is looking to upgrade our systems and I was wondering if anyone had any insight with Flame’s compatibility with the M4 chip, and if that cost is currently worth it. For reference we’re currently running on the M2, and unfortunately (for me) our setup won’t allow a Linux solution.
Thank you for the advise!
@amalfi.amanda - I’m curious what the barrier is to deploying a linux workstation?
we’re a small studio and have to share machines across multiple departments so the Linux setup doesn’t work well. But believe me I truly miss the Z8 I had in the States!
I’m looking at upgrading from M2 studios.
The M3 Ultra is ‘better’ than the M4 Max on the spec sheet. But I just priced out the two systems. M3 Ultra is stupid expensive
M3 Ultra / 256GB / 2TB - $7500
M4 Max / 128GB / 2TB - $4000
M4’s maximum ram is 128GB which is ok but not great. If you’re doing heavy shot work that might be good for you.
Yes, but you only get half the CPU/GPU cores and a negligible clock rate boost. We compared all the specs the other day on Discord.
I’d be careful about the is tradeoff.
@allklier thank you for the response! I checked out the discord and see the spec comparisons, but I’m wondering if there’s any info on how much flame is optimized to use the additional resources? I didn’t see anything in discord for this, sorry if I just missed it!
@bryanb thank you for this!
I don’t think we have a good list of which Flame function are multi-threaded. We’ll have to collect one.
One I remember is motion vectors.
Yes Jan - My thinking was that faster clock speed is always better for flame because it doesn’t multi-thread very many things.
For instance, the last official word I remember about action was that it is single thread. If this changed I’d like to think I would have heard about it. And because action is single-thread I assume Image and Gmask Tracer are as well. And the majority of my work is Action, Image, Gmask Tracer on many segments in a sequence.
It would be nice to have a definitive list.
Definitely the right approach if you think multi-threading isn’t going to benefit you. Hard to tell without more answers from ADSK.
But assuming that to be true, actually the one to consider would be the new Mini Pro. If you are only in single-threaded loads, 64GB might be tighter but workable.
MiniPro M4Pro 14/20/16 - 64GB - 1TB - 4.51GHz clock speed - $2,399
Studio M4Max 14/32/16 - 128GB - 1TB - 4GHz clock speed - $2,599
Studio M3Ultra 28/60/32 - 96GB - 1TB - 4.05GHz clocks speed - $3,999
Studio M3Ultra 32/80/32 - 256GB - 2TB - 4.05GHz clock speed - $7,499
On the studio, some of the price comes from the extra RAM and maxing out CPU cores. May not need all of that.
All feature TB5 (various counts).
Yea I feel like the MiniPro would be good for light conform work but the max ram of 64 doesn’t sound fun for big shot work.
And they do love their ram… the M3 Ultra upgrade from 256 to 512 is $4000.
Also remember that a portion of the 64GB will be used by the GPU.
I personally think 128GB could be considered the minimum RAM on Apple Silicon for Flame but also know of people successfully using the 64GB Mac Mini. Not on large comps though.
I’ve done large comps on an M1 Max with 64 gigs, but everyone works differently; my idea of large may be someone else’s idea of not large.
For safety’s sake I’d go with 128gigs plus of ram if I got a machine today nonetheless.
dont dicount the GPU specs tho, we all know flame loooves gpu performance and afaik it scales very similarly to gaming performance as its all vulkan based gpu pixel pushing right?
In my mind flame was always more like a game engine.
Take that with a grain of salt… but M3 Ultra GPU should be a bit faster than the M4max.
if that is true you want to bascially see your GPU at 100% usesge while your cpu has some leftover overhead for other things, usually games are very single core dependant as well . that would make a well balanced system, apple is usually allright wirh balancing this.
my Mac Studio m3 ultra arrives next week. ill let you know how it goes. I opted for 256 ram as the 512 was too pricey. thunderbolt 5 is a game changer too. and with the m3 ultra you get 6 thunderbolt 5 ports
I don’t disagree at all on 128GB RAM being better, and the other factors.
Back when I bought my Mac Studio (M1 Ultra) I maxed it out, like most of use here would. And if I would buy another primary Flame Mac, I would most likely find a way to budget for the M3 Ultra for the same reasons.
But the thread went in the direction of ‘if you are on a budget, which lesser Mac might be a good compromise of specs’. Say you only have $3K or $4K. That’s where these other models come into play. And you somewhat have to take a gamble, because we don’t have hard and fast facts of which of these CPU/GPU/memory specs has the biggest influence on speed and stability of Flame.
And as Andy put it well, someones ‘big batch’ is someone else’s ‘little batch’. And some folks do just lots of gMasks and comp nodes, but others rely heavy on motion vectors for their work, others yet may paint a lot or stabilize a lot. Some are just in TL-FX with Image. Some of this loves GPU, some of it doesn’t care. Some of it is RAM heavy, some of it isn’t.
There’s no easy apples-apples here. But when you compare the specs, just make sure you look at all the numbers: CPU, GPU, Neural, clock speed, RAM, TB4/5, 10GbE.
what are you using TB5 for? How is it a gamechanger? I run our framestore off a single 10Gbit ethernet connection to a 5x NVME NAS with like 5 flames at once and we are yet to have any playback issues even at 4K DCI ?
As long as you can pull data off the framestore faster than you need for playback there would be no advantage to having more speed really.
Im using two thunderbolt 5 drives one for the rushes and one for the flame cache. 6000 mbits a second. Never falls over. Super quiet - super low temp. So it’s a game changer for me! We dont all work in big companies.
yea its nice and all but i still wonder how you would feel a difference vs the slower tb3/4 ?
we used to have our storage on external drives here too and switching to centralized servers has really not impacted performance.
its true tho if you run raw material that might be above the 1GB/s line but I doubt itll be above the TB4 limits? (unless you run multitrack 6K Arriraw or something )
There just has been this thing around where people say they feel the performance so much in flame with faster storage and i think we kinda reached a point with that allready where it really … doesnt that much. i think latency is the thing to look out for .
I think it really comes into play with things like the Mac mini where you only have a few T5 ports so the bandwidth thing comes into hand so you can have multiple monitors and the drives all on one daisy changed T5. that makes a huge difference. in my old Mac Studio T4 setup that would occasionally cause problems. so it just seems to handle all of that in a cleaner way. im talking low end stuff here. not proper networks and multiple flame setups. just one machine - 4 or 5 drives, two monitors and a broadcast.