The company I used to be permalance at is looking to upgrade ye ole hp 840 that is very EOL. Since I am usually sitting (virtually) at it and a Mac Pro running Resolve, I suggested we could replace both of these with a Mac Studio to save some bucks.
Is there a real difference in a Mac Studio vs whatever reasonable Linux box with a beefy nvidia card OTHER than just pure horsepower? Like is this going to affect the workflow in anything other than a render que time sort of way? Don’t worry about admin stuff, these people think Mac is a bit more annoying than linux to work with, but they’re willing to deal with it.
I can’t speak to performance in the real world as I no longer drive the box creatively, but I haven’t heard any complaints on support calls about macOS performance in a long time. Everyone I’ve chatted with on a call seems to be pleased with their Mac Studio.
One thing to be aware of with macOS is potential issues with nanny programs and MDM setups in a corporate or managed environment. But once you get it dialed in, it’s smooth sailing.
You might want to search on the forum here. This topic comes up regularly and has been covered backwards and forward.
At the 10,000ft view there are relatively few differences these days, and performance can be comparable in general terms. But there are some specific areas, especially if you use ML tools where Mac is still not on par. The gap has closed significantly, but not the same.
But since you’re also doing non-Flame workflows, whatever differences there may be, may not outweight the simplicity of working on a single system rather than two.
I’ve been using Linux for years. And sometimes, I work on a Mac Studio Pro, and for me there’s no comparison performance-wise. The game is simple. No NVIDIA, no party. The only unexpected advantage of the Mac platform is that, because of its architecture, you can have amounts of VRAM that you just can’t get on a PC + NVIDIA setup
At the end of the day, it’s basically a choice between a slightly hostile environment (Linux+gnome) with way better performance, or a friendlier environment with, in my opinion, an average and nothing spectacular performance. And see the most of the AI stuff world from the outside.
For me, the first option wins every time. And, there are quite a few of tricks to tame GNOME on Rocky Linux.
I have Flame running on both a Mac Studio and P620. Outside of raw render speed, the Mac just doesn’t feel as snappy and responsive…it’s like there’s this inherent delay compared to Linux. Not sure if that would be obvious working remotely.
What you said about the “snappiness” and interface speed on Linux compared to Mac, is exactly why I cannot bear to use Flame on Mac.
Even if Mac reaches almost parity with graphics cards and render speeds — I can’t deal with the lagging feel of the interface. So we have a Mac Flame, but never use it.
On my Lenovo, it’s so snappy and responsive, sometimes it feels like it knew what I wanted to click.
Linux does have its dark side, of course — which showstopped me yesterday — I could not work, and it took all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, to put my Flame back together again.
But such things are infrequent enough that the equation for me still balances strongly to Linux.
I have noticed the “snappiness” difference between Mac Studio and Linux, it seems to get progressively worse as the project grows.
Main gripes would be:
a delay after copy/pasting an axis node with tracking data in.
Holding space bar and believing I’m about to move the batch schematic and slicing through multiple connections.
Having to hit escape key 3 or 4 times to toggle to the batch schematic back up.
(Also the defocus bug is still there when you have an animated defocus, but like most people I use the y_lens_blur now)
These things seem to be specific to Mac Studio and I can’t remember them being present on Linux.
I don’t know if these things can be fixed, they are hard to replicate and file a bug report.
I still do like the Mac Studio for being a good multipurpose machine.
With all that being said due to the memory supply problems, Apple have discontinued the high RAM options. So now (at least in New Zealand) you can only buy a M3 Ultra with 96GB of Ram, where you used to be able to get 512GB.
So that might be a consideration on whether to currently buy Mac Studio or Linux box.
Thanks for sharing. No doubt Mac Studio is a dependable solution, especially if you don’t want the cost and headaches that come with Linux. But as a user experience, it is very sub-par.
It feels like a lot of the snappiness issues are from the keyboard being locked out for a second, so you go to drag the schematic but it hasn’t registered the spacebar being pressed.
Another obvious one I recall is exiting out of the Neat Video interface and it takes a second to be able to register key presses again.
As a recent convert to Mac Flame (m4 mbp’s), I have to say it’s a LOT snappier than I remember it being in the trash can pro days. There are, however, an awful lot of spinning beach balls that pop up between interactions. This may be because I am asking a lot more of the computer - running a constantly syncing lucidlink client, all the various adobe crud, etc. There’s also a lot of hidden Apple tax stuff at the sysadmin level that I’m sure makes sense for the general public but has been hella annoying to deal with. Full disk access! Wacom double click assist defaults that make smooth painting or vert dragging impossible. Having to do /etc/ nonsense to be able to put a new folder in root and so on and so on. I’m honestly not sure it’s been any easier to admin than Linux so far, but it’s nice to be able to run Photoshop and Zoom on. At some point it will be massively easier to do a big os upgrade, I guess?
Since Flame has dual versions for macOS and Linux, we can use both platforms of Flame. It is evident that the Mac version of Flame is becoming increasingly powerful and has gradually caught up with Linux Flame in terms of functionality. Moreover, the hardware of the macOS platform is becoming increasingly powerful, which is definitely a good thing for the macOS version of Flame. Burn For Mac has also been launched, and I believe that in the future, the macOS version of Flame should not be a problem for small and medium-sized projects. Of course, Mac computer hardware is never as flexible as Linux hardware. Without considering power consumption, the performance of Mac computers cannot be compared to powerful Linux hardware infrastructure in terms of overall performance. The Linux platform can be used on powerful multi GPU servers, server matrices, and even large data centers. Unfortunately, Linux Flame’s support for multi GPU parallel computing is not yet sufficient. We hope that one day Flame can support 8GPUs server parallel computing like Davinci and Baselight.