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Mac Studio GPU question


Maarten Vis

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Hi friends,
I just purchased a Mac Studio that was mistakenly delivered with the 48 core GPU version instead of the 64 one. (long story)
Testing it out I notice I still have the same hangups that I had with the 10‑core CPU 24‑core GPU Mac studio I've owned for a couple of months now.
But looking at the activity monitor I notice that it is always the CPU that is maxed out at the time of the freezes and the GPU is hardly 'challenged'. Which leads me to my question:

 

Is there a lot of difference in performance between the 48 core and the 64 one?
 

Thanks,
Maarten

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It depends 100% on what you're doing. The slowest parts of any software will always be the single threaded cpu tasks, where the gpu is irrelevant and the extra cores on the cpu do nothing. Unfortunately there are plenty of such areas in c4d. If you can tell us what you're doing when its slow, or show a scene file then we can offer advice. Otherwise an educated guess is simply that what youre doing is either inherently slow, or you havent optimised the project very well.

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Thanks for the reply!

 

These are the scenarios where I experience trouble:

  1. I use a lot of complex models for fully realised store environments with lots and lots of fixtures. Over time they become slower and slower as they are more fleshed out. So moving around in them or editing becomes slower and slower.

  2. I design quite complex furniture objects, which use booles, clones, instances etc. In other words: stuff that slows C4D down. (I do know how to speed things up by making these editable, but that's for another discussion)

I bought the most basic Mac studio M1 max when it came out because the waiting times on the others was so long. I have worked reasonably well with it up until now. (relatively speaking) And now I got myself the 20 core 48gpu version with 128gb of ram. I thought I was getting the 64 gpu version, but that was a mistake by the retailer. (long story)

 

So now I have this machine to test and it still is quite slow in the situations I describe above. And looking at the activity monitor I see that it's always the cpu that's maxed out, not the gpu. So that made me wonder if it was worth returning it to get the 64gpu version.Or maybe even getting a refund if it keeps giving me trouble.

 

Thanks,

Maarten

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Your issue is optimisation, not cpu/gpu performances or ram. Cinema 4D slows down when there are too many generators and deformers in a scene, especially  boolean objects. It also struggles with large amount of objects.

 

Optimisation is the only way to improve performance.

 

-Merge whatever can be merged. Keep the amount of separate geometries to a minimum.

-Use intensively the Current State To Object tool to bake deformers and generators.

-Pass everything through the Polygon Reduction generator and/or the Remesh tool.

-Alternatively, if it doesn't cause issue with textures, a Volume Builder/Mesher is a great way to control mesh density (by adjusting the voxel size and the adaptive value).

 

 A strong optimisation can increase the FPS of your scene by 10, sometime even 100. 

 

If you keep your scenes as heavy as they are, a new MAC, with 64gpu instead of 48gpu, will not make a huge difference. I even doubt that you will notice a difference at all...

 

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A better GPU generally allows for the display of more polygons without slowing down, or more complex viewport shaders without slowing down. If it has more memory, then that allows for more textures at higher res to be displayed in the viewport.

But you'll only notice this IF you aren't being slowed down more by some single-threaded process, like generators, deformers, dynamics etc.

Edited by Decade (see edit history)
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Hi MAARTEN VIS,

If you can share scenes that show slow performance, please do so. DM is also fine if you don't want to post publicly. In 10 out of 9 cases it's a mograph "force update the whole scene" bug or a recursive setup.

A faster GPU will give you faster redraw in the viewport, but very often when an animation is played and something changes the scene evaluation is the slow part and not the draw. If the scene is slow while rotating the camera, it's either a bug, a recursive dependency, an intentional camera dependency or really a lot lot of polys.

Faster GPU will also give you faster simulations in >=R26 and faster redshift GPU speed.

 

Everything else in cinema runs on CPU. Maybe some plugins might be faster if they can run on metal. Most features that are used a lot and can be multi-threaded are already multi-threaded. Single threaded is not as bad as people are trying to make it sound. Single threaded is often faster than multi-threaded on high core count PCs and there is often code that when it was coded on a 4 core PC showed 20% faster performance and it was kept. On 16 cores it's then often slower than single threaded as multi-threading has some overhead. At the same time single-threaded uses much less power and thus helps with battery life or other things that run in the background. Nothing is more annoying than windows going to a crawl because you are using all resources available.

 

I have asked before for scenes when people have issues with performance and have received none yet. It really helps and makes a difference.

 

Regards

Fritz

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I can't share those scenes because of an NDA I have with my clients.

 

But this afternoon for instance I made a Boole of a cylinder with 1000 rotation segments and 500 height segments. I make that editable and then subtracts a slightly smaller editable cylinder with the same segments count.

 

I know that's a high poly count, but it completely freezes C4d. On a 6000 euro machine! I guess my expectations are way off.

 

cheers,

 

Maarten

 

 

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Well, to be fair, the Boole generator is pretty slow and your expectations are probably not too far off. Still, there are most likely ways to optimize what you are trying to achieve, like building the shape lower poly and subdivide with edge creases or using volume builder. If you could post a scene that freezes with Boole it would help. I did some very high poly counts and it takes a while, but never managed freezes.

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8 hours ago, Maarten Vis said:

I can't share those scenes because of an NDA I have with my clients.

 

But this afternoon for instance I made a Boole of a cylinder with 1000 rotation segments and 500 height segments. I make that editable and then subtracts a slightly smaller editable cylinder with the same segments count.

 

I know that's a high poly count, but it completely freezes C4d. On a 6000 euro machine! I guess my expectations are way off.

 

cheers,

 

Maarten

 

 

You might want to look into a dedicated construction programs like MOI or fusion 360 for tasks like that. You can tesselate and export it as you need it for c4d. it is such a difference - you will love it. 

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If you show us an example of the boole maybe we can advise a better way of building it. Also you dont mention which renderer you are using. Corona's or V-ray's geommetry slicer may do a better job. Or simply making a single panel properly then using multi instances to clone out the rest.  

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