Loading...
> >

M1 Mac owners: how has 8GB or 16GB RAM worked for you?

aaráribel caađoaaráribel caađo Posts: 686
in Daz Studio Discussion

I talked myself out of getting 32 GB of RAM when I ordered my new 16" MBP (I'm a student, so that was a splurge). Am I going to regret that? Or have you been able to do what you want with less memory thanks to the unified RAM?

Comments

  • TBorNotTBorNot Posts: 370

    I have a Mac mini M1 with 16GB of RAM, and I can do just about everything until I go really crazy.  You can be twice as crazy.  :-)   I have my fingers crossed the Mac mini will get the PRO and MAX treatment too!

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167

    aaráribel caađo said:

    I talked myself out of getting 32 GB of RAM when I ordered my new 16" MBP (I'm a student, so that was a splurge). Am I going to regret that? Or have you been able to do what you want with less memory thanks to the unified RAM?

    I have an m iMac with 8GB, I have not run DS on it but it handles RAM very differently from the Intel mac's. Everything I've read so far shows unless you're doing video editing on the M mac that 8GB is going to handle things 8GB on an Intel mac could not. The unified RAM on the M1 and M1 pro for the GPU are far superior to discrete RAM from an Intel CPU, the RAM bandwidth is very impressive so the numbers don't really apply to Intel/AMD devices, but M chips don't support eGPU (or TPM so Windows 11 in bootcamp is going to go away) Wait for the benchmarks if you want close comparisons but Apple was 100% correct to dump Intel, the potential they opened doing so was the smartest thing they've done in ages; I'm saying that as someone who just built a box with an 18500k and for windows; it's just an absolute beast. Apple will be dropping support for intel macs after OS 12 Monterey and Monterey is in gold master, expect a release very soon, not just Daz soon, you'll need to wait for them to test DS on OS 11. 

  • aaráribel caađoaaráribel caađo Posts: 686

    Thanks, folks. That's reassuring!

  • leemoon_c43b45a114leemoon_c43b45a114 Posts: 866

    I have an M1 MacBook Air / 16 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD / M1 8-core CPU & GPU that handles DAZ Studio just fine.

    I posted render times comparing a simple figure portrait scene across an Intel i5 Mac mini, the M1 MacBook Air, and Intel i9 MacBook Pro.  I don't recall which forum threads I posted that info in, but can find out and link them here if interested.

    In essence, the i5 Mac mini was the slowest by quite a lot, the M1 MacBook Air was about 30-ish percent slower than the i9 MacBook Pro.

    It's impressive that the M1 MacBook Air is the slowest Apple Silicon laptop (no fans so it slows down as it renders) and my 16" i9 MacBook Pro is the fastest Intel-based Mac laptop, yet the M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM is not all that much slower than my 32 GB RAM 16" MacBook Pro i9.

    The new M1 Max and M1 Pro systems will likely leap ahead for faster renders over the i9 MacBook Pro.  

    Lee

     

  • aaráribel caađoaaráribel caađo Posts: 686

    I'll post a comparison between my current i7 MPB and the new M1Pro MPB next week. Both have 16 GB RAM. I get by with 16GB, but big scenes can render really slowly, like there's a lot of swap memory useage. The faster SSD might be important.

  • leemoon_c43b45a114leemoon_c43b45a114 Posts: 866
    edited October 2021

    aaráribel caađo said:

    I'll post a comparison between my current i7 MPB and the new M1Pro MPB next week. Both have 16 GB RAM. I get by with 16GB, but big scenes can render really slowly, like there's a lot of swap memory useage. The faster SSD might be important.

    Awesome! I'd really love to see your comparison results! :)  Thank you in advance for doing that, if you have time.

    Here's a snippet of a post I made in early September with a comparison of the same scene rendered on my 3 Macs:

         I just finished an Iray render test on the 3 Macs with another sample (same scene on all 3 Macs).

         This time the scene had: Custom-dialed G8M at SubD level 3, fiber hair and brows, Elven-style pants and boots, HDRI, 2 ghost lights, floor plane, custom render settings, 967 W x 1251 H render image size producing these results:

         Intel i5 Mac Mini (8GB RAM / 1TB HDD / High Sierra / DAZ Studio 4.15.0.2): 10 minutes 9.88 seconds

         M1 MacBook Air (16GB RAM / 1TB SSD / 8 core CPU and 8 core GPU / Big Sur / DAZ Studio 4.15.0.30): 2 minutes 33.66 seconds

         Intel i9 MacBook Pro (32GB RAM / 2TB SSD / 8 core CPU and AMD 5500M 8GB GPU / Catalina / DAZ Studio 4.12.0.86): 1 minute 58.36 seconds

     Lee

    Post edited by leemoon_c43b45a114 on
  • TBorNotTBorNot Posts: 370

    I also noticed that the memory tends to grow slowly, even after a "new".  I exit and restart the program after running big scenes to force cleanup.

     

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167

    TBorNot said:

    I also noticed that the memory tends to grow slowly, even after a "new".  I exit and restart the program after running big scenes to force cleanup.

     

    or restart and the program does not launch and you have to wait a few seconds. I've given up on that, after about 3/4 "new" I just reboot. the app can get wonky otherwise.

  • aaráribel caađoaaráribel caađo Posts: 686

    I finished my test: with the same scene the new M1Pro MacBook Pro was 80% faster than the 2017 i7 MacBookPro, both with 16 GB RAM. Both Mac were running the same version of Daz Studio. For both renders, my content was stored on the same external SSD, but that doesn't appear to have mattered. 

    Interestingly, the M1Pro machine was dead quiet the entire time. 

  • kalliasxkalliasx Posts: 1

    Did I miss something here, I thought Daz doesn't run on M1? Or has this been fixed?

    As for memory I can confirm a M1 Mac Mini with 8Gb, at least in Photohsop, can do things faster than my 5,1 Mac Pro with 96Gb of RAM... it's night and day in terms of reactivity, number of layers and resolution pushed until the Mac starts to coiugh up a lung... I don't know what sorcery that unified memory is, but hot damn... I just wish Adobe would do something about the total incompatibility between M1 and Samba shares... I've lost weeks trying to work on the network (synologies but tried other NAS software), no dice, toshop will randomly refuse to open and save files... move them locally and all works well, this never happens on Intel nor in a VM (like proxmox with gpu passthrough)... so frustrating! If that could be fixed, I'd just drop using anything but M1, well outside of a Winblows box cause Daz and other apps just scream on RTX and thanks to Apple puny war with Nvidia, we Mac users are paying the price for 3rd grade war between giant companies. But I digress.

    I'm amazed what a 8gb machine can do, but I'll admit my M1 Air with 16Gb is in anohter league for someone like me who opens tons of app and tabs at the same time, on 8Gb, I can feel the "swap" more often than on the 16Gb machine.

     

Sign In or Register to comment.