If you're wondering how blender performs
on the new M1 Pro MacBooks.
Well, this video is for you,
I'll be testing some Eevee and cycles material
and rendered views.
We're doing some rendering and some animations,
some thermal testing, and also testing the CPU,
GPU and RAM usage while using blender.
Now this is a base model, 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro,
we just have the 10 core CPU and the 16 core GPU,
quick note as well guys,
I am using the M1 native version of blender,
so this is the optimized one.
Okay, so getting straight into the video,
I have a couple of benchmark tests here as well,
and guys, I'm not an expert at blender,
so if you guys want to see any other testing
or different test projects, let me know.
Let's start with the first one,
which is the Mr. Elephant project,
and this is going to be a very Eevee heavy project,
so we're going to see how this performs,
okay?
So we have the mouse and his cheese here,
let's just switch to the wire frame view,
and that works pretty well,
there's no lag or anything like that,
I mean it is wire frame, so you would expect that,
let's go to solid,
and then we're going to switch to material view,
so that is very, very smooth.
Moving to material view,
you're going to see a little bit more lag here,
but it definitely is,
you can still move it around,
and sort of zoom in and out a little bit easier,
than what you would expect,
because this is a relatively demanding scene,
and now moving to the rendered view,
let me just double check that we are in fact using Eevee,
yes we are,
and then moving around in this view,
still definitely possible
and it's quite smooth as well,
it's definitely not something
you'd probably want to work in,
but for previewing something before you're about to render,
that really does not work too badly.
Okay, so let's now render out an image,
so we're going to start a timer
and we're going to start rendering.
Okay, so it has finished,
you can see I was a little bit fat fingered
on the timer here that says 28,
when in reality it actually took only 26 seconds,
but pretty impressive performance,
especially using Eevee engine.
So let's move on to the next test file,
and this next one is the barbershop interior test file,
this is going to be heavily relying on cycles
instead of Eevee,
as you guys already know,
cycles is generally a lot tougher to preview and rendering,
so we'll have a look at how it performs,
so if we switched to the wire frame down here,
there shouldn't be any issues as we can see,
that works perfectly well,
switching to material view now.
That works just as well,
and then material preview,
and then the rendered view,
we'll have a look at what we get.
Okay, so we're getting the spinning beach ball here,
which isn't really surprising,
we are using cycles as the render engine
as you can see there.
Okay,
so we're still getting the spinning beach ball.
Okay, so you can see we can still preview things,
but it's going to take a really long time,
just sort of get that initial render now.
Okay, so we can see it's a little bit more usable now,
so we'll switch to rendered view
and we'll probably just going to,
okay, so it is working now.
All right,
let's try and move around a bit.
Okay.
Definitely not as smooth
as some of the other test files out there,
so let's bring up the CPU tab,
we can see that only 1% of the CPU is idle,
so, obviously the cycle's render engine
is really smashing the 10 core CPU,
and as you can see,
also guys, I am using the apple version of blender,
as you can confirm there,
not the Intel version.
Moving into the memory,
so this does have 16 gigabytes of RAM
again, just the base model,
we're sitting at 12.4 gigabytes total usage,
with blender using almost 11 gigabytes,
and interestingly enough zero gigabytes of swap memory.
Okay, so these are some geometry modes,
depending on what kind of configuration you have,
can sometimes be a little bit difficult to get,
it can playback smoothly,
at least that's what I found on other computers,
so don't just open up the navigate view port,
move around.
Okay,
so, wire frame working totally fine,
so is this.
Okay,
getting some spinning beach ball,
on the material preview,
but you can see they're still somewhat responsive,
once we sort of get over that initial speed bump,
we can still move around relatively easily,
moving to the rendered view,
and we are using cycles at the moment,
that's actually working, not too bad at all,
you can see that once we're moving around,
the actual tree starts rendering straight away,
you know, I can sort of navigate around the tree,
not super, super smooth but somewhat well.
And if we switch this to Eevee just to,
have a look at the difference in performance,
we see it's much better in Eevee,
but obviously don't get the same kind of quality
as you do with these cycles engine.
Okay, moving on to party tug,
now this is one of the most requested ones from you guys,
it is possibly one of the most difficult ones to run
that I've found so far,
but as you can see here,
and if I just add the view port back,
we can still navigate relatively well,
and if we switched to rendered view,
and we are using Eevee for this render cycle,
render engine I should say,
so definitely not super pleasant to use,
but it is still possible which is pretty impressive.
Okay.
Now that this is just kind of sitting here
and not rendering or doing anything,
let's check out the activity monitor,
so we can see here that we're using almost all of the CPU,
and if I also bring up the GPU history chart,
we'll have a look at that in the corner,
terms of memory, you can see the memory pressure
is not very high at all here so that's nice and good,
we've only got about four gigabytes in use with blender,
with almost half the available memory free,
so it doesn't seem like that is super taxing.
Now onto the next splash screen
which is the spring demo file,
again, a really highly requested one from you guys,
you want to see how this performs, how it renders
and how easy it is to actually use it within blender.
So here it is,
let's make this view port a little bit bigger,
wire frame is going to work totally fine,
now you can see it's nice and smooth, no issues,
solid material view, just as good, almost exactly the same,
material preview,
we'll just give it a second to buffer everything.
There we go, so we can now move around,
that is actually quite smooth as well,
obviously not quite as smooth as wire frame,
but you can very easily get a good idea
of what your render is going to look like using this view.
And finally moving to rendered view,
now we are using cycles in this
and that is working actually quite well,
you can see, you can move around quite easily
and sort of get a good idea
of where you want to stop the camera.
Changing this to Eevee,
just to have the look at the comparison between the two,
much smoother,
but again, obviously with Eevee
not going to be quite as good quality.
Okay, so I've now moved the render cycle back to cycles
as you can see there,
we're going to come up here
and we're going to render out an image
and we're just going to see how long it takes.
Okay, so we've been rendering for about seven minutes
at this point,
so let's have a look at the activity monitor.
Now, because this is obviously
using the cycles render engine from the very CPU dependent,
as you can see there, 0% of the CPU is idle,
you also see down here with the CPU pressure graph,
all of these CPU's are at 100%,
so all 10 cores,
obviously GPU is not being utilized that much,
'cause again,
cause of this type of render.
Moving onto the memory tab to look at the RAM,
you can see blender is using about 13 gigabytes of RAM,
so it's essentially maxing out the available RAM,
we're using 200 megabytes of swap which is not much,
any memory pressure that isn't too bad at all,
so it seems like 16 gigabytes is enough
for this particular render,
and if we now have a look at the temperatures
of the CPU cores,
we can see here that the efficiency cores
at 80 degrees Celsius,
but all of the performance cores,
which is performance core one to performance core eight,
they are sitting at around 88, 89 degrees,
and now we've been going for almost 10 minutes,
slamming all 10 cores of the CPU
and the fans are barely audible,
if you put your face really close to it you can,
but sitting back here,
I can only just hear them just very, very barely.
Okay, and coincidentally,
we have just finished the render
so we can see a total time of 10 minutes and eight seconds
for the spring render.
Now, moving on to splash Fox,
and this is an interesting one guys,
because I have done a couple of benchmarks on splash Fox,
so, in my video yesterday I did the 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook
versus the 16 inch M1 Pro MacBook,
I'll link that up in the top right-hand corner
if you want to check it out,
it's basically a comparison between the 14 inch base model
and the 16 inch base model.
Spoiler, there wasn't any difference,
even though this has two
additional CPU high-performance cores
and also two additional GPU cores.
I also did a video comparing the 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook
versus the previous 2020 M1 MacBook Pro,
and it's safe to say that the 14 inch
destroyed the M1 MacBook Pro,
but again, I'll link that video so you can check it out.
So moving on to if this is usable or not,
obviously with the wire frame works totally fine,
solid, not having any issues there at all either,
a little bit of dropped frames,
but we are getting a consistent 24 and 25 FPS playback.
Moving to material preview,
now this one should be much more taxing
as you can see there,
we're really kind of struggling to get some playback here,
but it is still playing at around two FPS,
better than nothing.
So let's just make sure what we're on
and we are on Eevee,
okay, that's good,
and let's just switch to the rendered view
just to see if that's even going to be possible or not,
and it is okay.
So we're getting about 1.9 FPS in the rendered view,
if I try to move around,
yeah, we're getting,
yeah, still the same about 1.8 FPS,
so, definitely not usable
for an animation like this with moving parts
and editing it on the go,
but if you want to get a brief idea
of what it's going to look like,
this is definitely not bad at all,
I really can't complain.
And as you can see here the GPU is at 100%,
it's being pretty slammed,
we are obviously using the Eevee render engine.
Okay, so just to have a quick look at the CPU memory
and thermal performance while using the GPU,
'cause obviously with the previous tests,
we're looking mainly at the CPU,
we can see here that,
again, CPU is not being used that much,
this is mainly a GPU test
and we switched to the memory tab.
Blender is using about the same as before,
so about 13 gigabytes,
still using the exact same amount of swap
and not really that much memory pressure there,
I'd say that's pretty average,
you can see the GPU history over here,
we're using almost 100% of the GPU
and looking at the temperatures of the GPU cores,
they're actually staying nice and cool
about 70 degrees Celsius,
I mean that is pretty hot,
but in terms of GPU's that's really not that bad at all.
For reference my RTX 30, 80 while gaming
gets up to around 85, 86 degrees
and that's in a full desktop PC,
so these seem to be performing very, very efficiently.
And quick note on fans,
we are again, barely seeing any fan noise here at all,
probably even less than the previous CPU test,
and guys, if you've seen my previous videos on this channel,
this makes almost zero fan noise,
unless you're smashing the CPU and the GPU at the same time,
say for example, like a gaming benchmark,
with blender obviously you tend to go either mostly CPU
for specific renders or mostly GPU for other renders,
so you're not really smashing both of them at the same time,
which means that it's going to stay nice and cool,
and more importantly, nice and quiet.
Now, moving on to the hi, my name is Amy animation,
so wire frame totally fine, material totally fine,
we are getting not 100% of the FPS about 16,
if we go up to the next level, we're getting about 10 FPS,
still playing back relatively well,
you can see the GPU is doing most of this work
because I believe this is an Eevee,
yeah, this is an Eevee render engine,
and moving up to rendered view,
we can see again, another slight FPS drop to around eight,
but once again guys,
it's playing back and it's working fairly well.
Now guys, there are some other tests I can do
like the BMW render and all that kind of stuff,
so if you do want me to do any kind of additional testing,
let me know.
I just wanted to make this video relatively brief
to give you a good understanding
of just how the M1 Pro chip,
specifically the 16 inch base model performs on blender,
and as you've hopefully seen,
it does perform quite well,
so if you are looking at upgrading to this machine
from maybe an older machine,
I really don't think you will regret it.
Anyway guys, any questions or comments,
let me know down below,
but apart from that,
I'll catch you in the next one.