For some reason I just remembered an all-hands meeting at 10 Duke in MontrĆ©al with Carol Bartz from Autodesk, sometime in the early 2000s, where she was asked about developing Mac products. She declared the Mac āirrelevant.ā
Anyway, congratulations to my friends in MontrƩal for what sounds like an extremely snappy flame update.
Iām absolutely loving flame on my Apple Mac book pro M1 max. Super nippy. Really usable.
Autodesk doesnāt recommend Intel chips over Apple Silicon. The note regarding āIntel Core i7 or higherā on the System Requirements page only pertains to the Intel CPUs. We will remove this line to avoid any confusion going forward. Both Apple Silicon and Intel CPUs are supported and recommended by Autodesk.
Thanks! Thatās great news!!!
So, the performance must ve phenomenal, no? Are there any benchmarks yet?
Thanks!
JORGE CALVO
Autodesk wonāt be publishing any benchmarks (at least not in the short term), but a lot of artists have already started publishing some numbers. Our beta testers were quite impressed with the overall performance of these new macs.
Add benchmarks hereā¦
Great, thanks a lot!
I guess you canār comment on when will it run native, right?
Thatās right, we canāt make any comments regarding native Arm64 support at this time.
Gotcha, thanks!
It is a great news. Hats off to Autodesk to response quickly to the technology advances. Although, Iām not going to any Macs unless Iām stripped off my Z8 
During last two years working from home Iāve used iMac Pro, and honestly I was surprised how well it was handling it. Of course tweaks had to be made to the pipeline protocols etcā¦ but indeed it was delivering. Now when I got my new Z8 with Linux I feel like home
Iām not good at geeking, so no benchmarks from my side. But I can say this: even under emulation (whatever that Rosetta Stone thing is doing), Flame runs on my MP Max as fast or even faster as my seven years old Z840 with an upgraded two years old Quadro card that cost back then roughly the same as the Apple laptop. But the best thing: its energy consumption is preposterously low. Anyone not in climate denial should hop, hop, buy that brilliant thing (and you can hook it up to your old Eizos, Wacom, sound).
yea its pretty insane I have been pushing the laptop pretty hard and I rarely if ever hear the fan kick on its kind of insane for a laptop.
Itās a beast and the best update of the MacBookPro line ever. Iāve been through a few since around 2008 and I was just about to give up on them with the 2017 which I hated and was falling apart (keyboard buttons out, big line down display, fans on all the time, battery hardly lasting). Love everything about this laptop, and Flame is a pa-leasure to use. Again, cannot imagine what a native Flame is going to be like on future MacPro. Can keep Flame open in the background on a battery and not be frightened about the āDā sign for discrete flaming battery draining and not Discreet Flaming relaxation with power!
As soon as I got it and installed Flame on it I was reminded of running Smoke 2012 on a 2011 MacBookPro with 5400RPM and Core-2-Duo, I think. At the time, it was silly to use for Smoke as the framestore was only uncompressed and it felt like it took Smoke 9 hours just to get to the desktop. This makes our 2013 MacPro feel the equivalent in distance in terms of slowness from this MacBookPro M1ProMax. Add a 4TB external Sandisk and itās faster than the Promise RAID on that computer with only a bit less space. Digital nomadismā¦
Sound and monitor is amazing on the 16-inch. It defo does not feel like itās going through layers of emulation any CPU-conning.
Cheers
Tony
it makes me wonder when flame will be native from what I read it makes a difference of about 15-20% speed increase so hopefully they get it recompiled for the larger computers when apple releases them. I am also curious how apple is going to deal with graphics in the larger configurations since its a soc architecture and the graphics and the processor are essentially combined into the motherboard but I guess time will tell.
Can I ask what specs did you get your MB Pro at? Did you max out everything?
Mine is the 32GB, 1TB SSD version. I was going to go for the highest 64GB but it added a 4-6 weeks to the wait, so thatās my only regret as itās shared memory between CPU+GPU. Would never buy the upper SSD, even though itās super fast, but also super-duper-expensive. More than happy to use the USB-C bus to catch a ride to storageā¦
Cheers
Tony
Oh wow - so it runs just fine with 32GB RAM?
Yup runs very nicely and doesnāt have to page to disc unless things get complicated and then itās not bogged down. Iām not sure how memory is apportioned but itās still going to be miles better than the MacBookClassic with discrete RAM as that never got above 8GB, and so this would be almost like having a 24GB RAM, kind of? Yeah would have loved the 64GB. but Iāve seen some nice tests that show that the 34GB is hardly a joke in comparison. Am feeling at home with my inner impatience in not waiting for the 64GB, but thereās no turning back.
Relatedly, thereās concern about the GPU being hardwired into the same space as the CPU and so both we wedded and welded together, as per Wiliamās point. Itās the price or cost of doing such great business? You get super fast connections between RAM+CPU+GPU+Encoders/Decoders and whatever else the āwedā into that space to cohabit in super cosy proximity: No bus catching.
The 2013MacPro was anger inducing in calling it āProā but not giving you very much access to any innards and the connection to outside world hardly being super-adept, but I kind of donāt feel the same about some M.* incarnation as the time has come with this knocking of walls into unified spaces of super fast comms. Iāve seen signals of them wafering together to create super fast communicating multiple-SOCs but maybe thereāll be swapping out from the motherboard and you swap out everything, and not just the CPU component? Maybe something like that will make the Pro, or simply an inner-tower block of sh*tloads of larger SOCās with more cooling than you could house in the MacBookPro? In any event, things look great for the upcoming MacBookPros when things looked rather depressing not too far backā¦
Cheers
Tony
m1max at 64 gb , what I notice between this and my linux box is that its faster in some regards, slower in other but still amazing for a laptop
Curious to know what the slower things are/
