Mac studio. Bloody hell. Amazing

[friendlyape]

I don’t think the PCI4 speeds are a difference maker, at least for the GPU. A gen4 framestore is amazing and finally lets me have smooth playback on 10-bit 8K x 8K stereo footage. The PCI link speed, along with bus width, determine the overall rate at which the GPU will have access to resources. AFAIK, this is only really relevant in the most memory intensive applications. Applications that operate very quickly on huge sets of data. It has to be both of these things for the link speed to be a bottleneck. In any other case the link speed barely makes a difference between gen3 and gen4.

Keep in mind, the bandwidth is doubled between the two gens.

Fortunately, this is an easy claim to test: One can force the link speed of a particular PCIe slot to be gen3 or gen4 in bios. After confirming in nvidia-settings that I was running my 3090 in gen3 mode, I ran the Flame 4K benchmark again and found it be 2 seconds slower (4:52 vs 4:54). That’s margin of error.

This would probably yield a bigger difference if one were to use a gen4 card @ gen3 with a lot less VRAM (like 6 - 8GB) when working on 4K or higher plates…but that limits the possible cards down to a 3050-- a card you should definitely not be using for Flame unless you really have to.

[Raphael]

Side note, it’s definitely worth maxing out the storage on the Studio and MBP along with everything else. The speed you get from the internal storage can’t be beat currently. the blackmagic speed test uses arm coding so I assume it’s somewhat accurate on the M1s. still it’s strange the write is faster than the read.

above is from an Studio maxed out but with 4tb of storage instead of 8tb.

[Jason_Kalinoski]

Thanks for sharing…if you’re running tests, curious how it does with ML, motion vectors etc.

[Collict]

No doubt the storage is fast, but it seems apple have made some engineering trade-offs - Speed over data integrity.

This thread sums it up nicely:

Hector Martin on Twitter: “Well, this is unfortunate. It turns out Apple’s custom NVMe drives are amazingly fast - if you don’t care about data integrity. If you do, they drop down to HDD performance. Thread.” / Twitter

Take away for me is, if you’re putting your framestore on the Studio’s internal drive, run a battery back up.

[friendlyape]

That’s horrific

[Raphael]

that’s sad news. But I’m not surprised as in real life usage there’s still some spinning beachballs and some micro freezes that I was contributing to just coding translation, or some permissions issue on the stone and wire.

[BenV]

Hey so I had originally wrote a super long reply but I think better to be short and sweet and to the point.

1 This is originally from Twitter…
2 The last post on the twitter or forum thread is 2 months ago
3 They’re all Guessing how not only the current Apple drives work in relation to what the guy noted but also how other drives work in relation to this…
4 When you critically read through it, well yeah…
5 When I replace my Mac Pro with the Apple silicon version in the future I’m mos def Not
trying to run Linux on it…
6 I don’t use Garage Band and randomly quit it and try to “simulate”(not even pull the plug on a Mac mini?) a power failure…

7 I’m not running large datasets for Market analytics(isn’t that more done in the cloud now with AI and machine learning anyways?), or weather predictions, etc etc etc, nor am I day-trading Coins with a hardware wallet sitting alongside my framstore.

8 Our frame and sometimes movie file based workflow and Flame’s framestore database for sure does not equate to the above mentioned.

9 Like everyone I know very little about anything and everything…

[Collict]

Not really sure what your point is.
Obviously the workloads in the thread don’t apply to what we do.
But maybe I shouldn’t have quoted a tweet.

I was trying to highlight a problem with how Apple maybe using their NVMEs - Specifically, disabling write-cache buffer flushing.

Disabling write-cache buffer flushing is well known to improve performance… but also to totally corrupt drives. Looks like Apple have may chosen to disable it by default.

In contrast, Windows allows you to choose and displays a disclaimer -

“To prevent data loss, do not select this checkbox unless the device has a separate power supply that allows the device to flush its buffer in case of power failure.”

I’m all for super fast drives… but I’d like to choose the risk level when using them.

But hey, I could be wrong and it might not be an issue at all, I’m no expert. But probably still worth being on peoples radar just incase.

[BenV]

I hear you and for sure you know more about this then me.
For me it was that I just that I had read the Tweet thread and then some of the forum thread and was left very/totally unimpressed with the conclusion in the initial Tweet.
I’m someone who knows very little about this stuff and was just disappointed in what I read.

So I think my point though would be that doesn’t look like the guy or people in the thread(or the deeper forum thread), are really sure if that is what’s going on and or if it’s an issue at all and the methodology used seems to be wanting to say the least.
Also this probably is a moot point for our line of work and that let’s not overreact to scant info and testing that was not followed up on and that may or may not be applicable.

To add a basic thought question he or someone in the threads could have asked/wondered about is. - So if this is how MacOS is treating the drives on the Apple Silicone does it even matter ie; do the drives need nearly as much time to flush that buffer? Or maybe are these sort of buffers being handled in a completely different way?

Anyways for sure I agree worth being on peoples radars but some big caveats:)

[GPM]

These days with Lenovos being super fast and super cheap, isn’t it just easier to go with Linux and not have to wrestle with the ghost of Steve Jobs?

[GPM]

Just seems there’s always a lot of fretting about what Apple might do, or might have done, or maybe they’ll just stop making pro products. Alll of this strife, just in order for us to do our work. Is it worth maybe a couple or few thousand dollars? Amortized over the years, I’m not sure the stress and uncertainty is worth it?

[GPM]

I guess it’s more comfortable to check email and social, but beyond that, what is really the selling point of doing high capacity work on a Mac rather than a Linux? Easier to setup for sure. But past those couple of hours…

The price difference between Linux and Mac. The number of hours stressing out about whether or how Mac will be or won’t be viable, how to make it work well, etc. Might easily add up to those hours not being lost. Just a thought.

[BenV]

I’m personally not really concerned about what was posted in that Twitter thread. But if it does somehow end up being a real issue(I don’t really think it will), well then we’ll see. I never really fret over Apple and generally just keep my machine close to up to date OS wise even.

I put my Mac to sleep when not using it and at night where it optimizes itself and actually runs better then if you shut it down or always reboot. It mentioned I did this in the, do you shut down your computer, thread here. It really does make a difference.
I had a maxed out Trash Can Mac Pro(12core 64gig), for number of years and when I was staff would bring it in for a fee when we would get really busy. Just connect it to the SAN and you’re off and rollin’. While it could/would definitely slow down working on 4k plates or with heavy Actions, That thing was actually incredibly stable and freaked out or crashed far less then the Linux machines I’ve been on as staff or freelance. Also add any of the couple times I used a 5k iMac or iMac Pro even. Its was just very stable and I could stick it in my bag and ride my bike with it even, lol

I thought about going Linux last early last year when I replaced it, the main reason among others being I wanted to be able to use Background Reactor.
But the sometimes esoteric nature of dealing with Linux, the DKU stuff, the firmware stuff, ssh’ing into things, chmod’ing things, etc etc etc.

I also work on my photos and scans on my main machine.

But now the real deal issue for me is I have become addicted to the Pro Display XDR and which means I’ve been hooked into Apple… It’s just so much better then any graphics monitor I’ve ever used, as a freelancer I’ve used all the good and not so good ones. My trusty Eizo is currently just sitting on the floor till I can sell it to my friend. It’s also better then any HD or any of the budget 4k Broadcast monitors(only 2) I’ve used, IMHO.

I would also like Linux for using ML timeworp on the GPU. But if the shot isn’t too long and the plate not too large I don’t mind it now with the 28 core Mac and 240gigs of RAM. Since it basically runs in the background I can still work on other things.

So very looong story short I’m stuck with Apple for the time being at least… ehh err haha

[BenV]

“Also add any of the couple times I used a 5k iMac or iMac Pro even.”
fyi, by this I mean the Trash Can was better, more stable. Linux machines as well better and more stable then the times I’ve used iMacs.

[friendlyape]

I’ve been surprised to see how prevalent the sentiment is here, honestly (as well as the strange conspiratorial thinking, people claiming linux is for people in IT, apple is for artists etc).

I totally get the excitement/appeal of running an M1 laptop; I run the macbook air and its great. I love that its entirely solid-state. its an efficient architecture so the battery life is great and it remains cool. I also need a portable device to be a bit more flexible than what I can currently get out of linux. It does the job well.

But for a desktop machine that I’m doing heavy work on? the tool is simply inferior by almost every metric…and what’s the point of using an inferior tool? If I can iterate on shots 30% faster on a Linux box, that makes my work 30% better and makes the people I work with 30% happier.

To use the example of the mac studio nvme speed mentioned above…For the price to spec the mac studio with a 8TB drive you can setup 2x 8TB gen4 NVMe RAIDs and get ~22GB/s w/r (per raid) to use as a framestore + something else (or RAID both…??). This performance literally unlocks new workflows for me.

As an aside, maybe this wasn’t always the case but, macOS is currently SUCH a ball ache to manage. I rarely ever have problems with a linux box and if i do it usually has the curtesy of telling me the exact problem so I can easily do a google search to fix it.

I know there are likely to be a couple of particular workflows that benefit from being entirely mac based and, outside of political reasons, I don’t particularly care what one uses for their work. I just don’t understand being excited for a product that is, to be put it bluntly, functional DOA (worse than currently available options for a similar price)

I’ll be keeping an eye out for the new Mac Pro to see what it brings to the table but…assuming the socket is kept the same, I’m looking forward to simply dropping in a shiny new Zen3 Threadripper Pro CPU for a tasty ~19% IPC improvement. Oh and NVIDIA’s new lovelace GPUs…I reckon we can get the Flame 4K benchmark down to 2 mins by EOY

As an addendum: If people are wary about getting into the world of linux or understanding the terminal, I’m really happy to give people a walk through and share knowledge. I feel it’s the biggest barrier but its such a small one to overcome given the right guidance.

[GPM]

Yeah I personally can’t stand Linux terminal command line 1980’s War Games interface. But the experiential difference in Flame is worth it. Maybe once a year I have to do some non-Flame stuff in the OS, and I’ll often just have an IT guy handle it real fast.
I have a laptop for other fun Mac stuff, like email and other apps.

[andy_dill]

I don’t run up against CPU speeds all that often. I do some work on my laptop and some work on full spec machines and I rarely feel the difference. Even when I was working off my trashcan the difference wasn’t huge.

Conversely, I struggle with managing linux. a lot. The “mental hit” of having to do linux admin outclasses any lack of render speeds, so I go for those lovely looking Apple products every time.

Everybody’s gotta make their own call on this stuff. I’m beyond grateful that Flame runs on a computer that I’m capable of managing. Haha.

[GPM]

All true. Could be worse. Could be SGI.

[andy_dill]

Oh jeez. Yeah. I’d completely forgotten about the days when I dreamed of getting my hands on a second hand Octane 2.