Apple announced its new M1 chip during its livestream earlier this week. You can see some of the CG applications that support the new Mac processors from 17:30 in the video above, and read a full list below.
CG software developers have begun to announce support for Apple’s M1 chip, the first of the firm’s Apple Silicon processors, due to ship next week in its new MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac mini systems.
Animation, post-production and design applications already compatible with the M1 chips include Maxon’s Cinema 4D, Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, and Serif’s Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher.
In this video i will show you how Blender performs on Mac Mini M1 base model. Thank you for watching!Consider subscribing as it helps the channel and don't f. Blender for macOS are distributed on disk images (dmg-files). To mount the disk image double-click on the dmg-file. Then drag Blender.app into the Applications folder. The NEW M1 Macs 8GB vs 16GB - Watch This Before You Buy! BLENDER Running on the NEW M1 Macs (CPU & RAM Usage, Thermals, Rendering, Performance) Last Updated April 13, 2021. #M1MacbookAir #M1Chip #BlenderI showcase Blender performance on the M1 Macbook Air!Best Place To Learn Swift Or Any Other Programing Language!CodeCademy: htt. With the extremely high single core scores of the M1 chip paired with the mostly single core task in Blender, and married with the smaller instruction set of the ARM architecture, animating in Blender with a Mac Mini has become really powerful.
An M1-compatible version of Otoy’s Octane X renderer will be available “in tandem” with the new Macs, and Apple announced that Adobe will support the M1 in Lightroom next month, and Photoshop next year.
The first Apple Silicon chip promises the ‘world’s fastest integrated graphics’
The M1 is the first of the new Apple Silicon processors: the new ARM-based SoCs that will replace Intel processors in the firm’s laptops and desktop Macs.
It features both an eight-core CPU and integrated graphics, and will become available in Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro, new MacBook Air and Mac mini, all due to ship “from next week”.
Apple claims that it offers the “world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer” and the “world’s best CPU performance per Watt”.
Unity Mac M1
There are some caveats about how that will translate to serious CG work, which we’ll address at the end of this story, but first: which CG applications are actually supporting the M1 chip at launch?
Stable builds
Apple
Unsurprisingly, Apple is supporting the M1 in its own software, including editing tool Final Cut Pro, noting on its website that “every app that comes with Mac, and every app made by Apple, is optimised for M1”.
Maxon
Maxon has been quick out of the gate, touting Cinema 4D as the “first professional 3D animation tool available for the new Macs”. Cinema 4D R23 SP1 is available now, and is a free update for existing users.
Maxon also supports the M1 in version 23 of Cinebench, its free CPU benchmarking tool.
Serif
Serif supports the M1 chip in version 1.8.6 of its Affinity tools: image editing app Affinity Photo, vector design software Affinity Designer and desktop publishing system Affinity Publisher.
All three updates are available now and again, are free to existing users.
Beta builds
Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design has also released an M1-compatible version of DaVinci Resolve, its colour grading and editing software, in beta. The base edition is free.
Updated 10 March 2021: Blackmagic has now shipped DaVinci Resolve 17.1 and compositing application Fusion Studio 17.1, both of which natively support M1 processors.
Otoy
Otoy has announced in a tweet that it will have an M1-compatible version of Octane X, the new Metal-native version of OctaneRender, its GPU renderer.
Updated 10 March 2021: Otoy has released Octane X PR 8, which includes native M1 support.
Unity
Unity Technologies is also supporting the M1 GPU in its Unity game engine.
Blender On Mac M1
Once again, the relevant release, Unity 2020.2, is still in beta, and Unity has confirmed that the M1 is currently only supported by the Unity player, not the Unity Editor itself.
Coming later
Adobe
Adobe will support the M1 in at least some of its software, but not at launch.
Apple announced during its livestream that the new version of Lightroom capable of running on Apple Silicon hardware will ship “next month”, with a compatible version of Photoshop to follow “early next year”.
Updated 22 December 2020: M1-native versions of Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition are now available as beta builds. Stable builds will follow in the “first half of 2021”.
Work on supporting M1 processors in After Effects and Character Animator will also begin in 2021.
Updated 10 March 2021: The March 2021 stable build of Photoshop features native M1 support.
Autodesk
Although Adobe also featured Autodesk software in its livestreams – Fusion 360 this week and Maya in its original Apple Silicon announcement – it wasn’t for its native M1 support.
Both were cited as examples of how applications can run on the new Macs via Rosetta, Apple’s new translation environment. At the time of writing, there is no news about native versions.
A note of caution
It’s also worth noting that, as a processor being rolled out in laptops and consumer desktops, the M1 isn’t necessarily the Apple Silicon chip that will lend itself best to hardcore CG work.
Firstly, according to the big tech news sites, RAM is limited to 16GB, shared between CPU and graphics.
Secondly, the M1’s integrated graphics are the only GPU compute capability available in the new Macs, and since they don’t support eGPUs, there’s no way to extend that.
The footnotes to Apple’s announcement that the M1 has the “world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer” are also pretty vague.
They note that the claim is based on “selected industry-standard benchmarks” and compares the M1 to “high-performing CPUs”, but provide no further details.
So far, the only independent tests we’ve seen use general computing benchmarks like GeekBench, so it will be interesting to see how that translates to CG apps when the new machines ship next week.
Read Apple’s official announcement of the its new M1 chip
Have we missed any applications? Let us know in the comments and we’ll add them to the list.
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Tags: 3d, Adobe, Affinity Designer, Affinity Designer 1.8.6, Affinity Photo, Affinity Photo 1.8.6, Affinity Publisher, Affinity Publisher 1.8.6, After Effects, animation, Apple, Apple Silicon, Audition, autodesk, Blackmagic Design, cg, CG software, CG software supporting Apple M1 CPU, Character Animator, CineBench, Cinebench R23, Cinema 4D, Cinema 4D R23 SP1, color grading, compositing, CPU, CPU benchmarking, DaVinci Resolve, DaVinci Resolve 17.1, desktop publishing, editing, eGPU, Final Cut Pro, free update, Fusion 360, Fusion Studio 17.1, Game Engine, GPU, GPU rendering, graphic design, graphics software, image editing, integrated graphics, Lightroom, M1, Mac mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Maxon, Maya, Octane Render, Octane X, Octane X PR8, Otoy, page layout, Photoshop, Photoshop 22.3, post-production, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, release date, rendering, Rosetta, Serif, Unity 2020.2, Unity Technologies, vector design, video editing
I’m old enough to remember when Mac used propriety chips in their computers. They were called “PowerPC” or PPC. Proprietary chips mean proprietary code to run them. . Such as it was with the old OS X operating systems. Right around 2005 Apple announced it would transition to Intel chips which most of the rest of the world was running on already. It opened up a new world of software and hardware to the Mac.
People found they could run OS X on Intel PC’s (aka Hackintosh).
Now here we are again 16 years later and Mac has gone their own route and selected another proprietary chip, the M1 which is ARM based and not X86. When you think ARM, think Raspberry Pi.
The advantages to doing this are MANY. Apple controls the hardware build and can write tight code for that specific hardware. The chips are FAST.
THE DOWNSIDE HERE IS THAT YOU LOSE LEGACY COMPATIBILITY. That old hardware you have connected to USB may not work anymore. That old hunk of software you love may not work anymore. Or the software you love may have to run on top of something called “Rosetta 2” which allows Intel apps to run on ARM OS’s. So there could be hiccups with that as well.
Blender 2.9 Mac M1
So lets get to my experience:
I built a man cave hobby room that has 3D printers, a vinyl sign cutter and a laser cutter. Most everything in the room was controlled by a Mac mini (Late 2012) which no longer has support for the latest operating system. It has reached the end of its life. Realistically it will still be supported for 2 years or so but old John won’t be. Old John is retiring and has to buy this crap while he still has a check. So I got me a shiny new M1 Mac mini.
So I unbox it and hook it up to my HP monitor which is fairly old and has a DVI input (which I have a DVI to HDMI adapter on).
Boot and then……..nada. Nothing. A couple of flashes and my heart sinks. I think my new Mac mini must have taken a jolt in shipping or something. A quick internet search reveals about 42,612 very angry people that their DVI monitors don’t work.
Blender Mac M1 Price
So just for fun I go grab a new 32″ TV I have and hook it to the HDMI and it boots right up and the display is great. Basically Dr. Google says that you need a USB-C to DVI adapter and things will work fine. Just for fun I actually have a
HDMI Adapter
Okay, I want you to visualize something. The back of the Mac mini has an HDMI port. When I hook an HDMI cable from the Mac to the adapter on the back of the TV…….. IT DOES NOT WORK.
When I plug this adapter into a USB-C port on the back of the Mac and hook an HDMI cable to the adapter and the other end to the TV………..IT WORKS!
How in the tap dancing hell does that make sense?
That adapter costs $70 new and I use it for a lot of other stuff. I need it elsewhere. Not only that it ties up one of those fast Thunderbolt (USB-C) ports that I think I’m going to need.
But, lets not lose sight of the fact that my ancient monitor DOES INDEED work now. At any rate, with a new Mac mini with an M1 chip you’re probably going to have to factor in that you need a newer hardware monitor than I have or you will need an adapter. You can find really cheap HDMI to DVI adapters BUT NOT ALL OF THEM WORK. It’s a mess. And it seems to be an OS software mess. Not a hardware problem.
Next issue I stumbled into is that as much as I hate to admit it…………I run Windows in Virtualbox on my Mac mini. That is until I got an M1 because Virtualbox doesn’t work on an M1. Currently the only way to run Windows is by using a Tech Preview of Parallels and a beta version of Windows 10 for ARM processors.
If you think Windows is an unstable OS try running it on a beta Parallels with a beta non Intel version. It WILL NOT install legacy x86 drivers. I have a Roland GX-24 vinyl sign cutter and it works under software which has its own drivers such as CoCut Pro or EasyCut Studio but the Roland Windows 10 drivers WILL NOT INSTALL. Fortunately for me EasyCut Studio Mac version works fine on the M1 and I can do 99% of what I want to do on it. My heavy lifting software, CoCut 2017 (Windows only) does in fact install on bastardized Windows 10 ARM and it does work so I’m set.
My laser etcher uses a program called LaserGRBL which is Windows only and it also installs. I do find that when I run the program in Parallels it’s a little goofy getting the USB connected laser machine accessible to the virtualized Windows and I even found I might have to reboot MacOS to get it back visible to Mac. 99.9% to 100% of what I do with the laser machine can be done in a Mac program called “Lightburn” which works fine on the M1.
My 3D printer software (PrusaSlicer) works fine under MacOS on the M1.
Finally I have a Police Scanner in the other room which has 3rd party, Windows only software called ProScan which allows me to listen to the scanner on my local network. It took me quite some time to get it working and the issues were with Parallels and the Windows sound devices. Right at this moment I’m not sure what I did right but it is working right now. I’m scared to reboot the Windows session!
Make no mistake though, Parallels Tech Preview running Windows 10 ARM is a turd of epic proportions. It crashes FREQUENTLY and almost never connects to the internet first time causing me to have to run the troubleshooter. Running the troubleshooter resets the ethernet adapter which connects it to the internet but I’m running on Wifi through Parallels and not using ethernet so who knows what the hell is going on?
PROS AND CONS
PROS
- Probably the biggest advantage is that the chip architecture between the iPhone and iPad and these new M1 chips is very similar. You can run iPhone and iPad apps on your M1 app. That may or may not seem useful at the moment but what it means is that the Mac ecosystem can get way tighter and way better. Stand by for great things from the ecosystem.
- Mac M1 is lightning fast. Even lightning says “Phew” when it sees the Mac M1 operate.
- Specific Code tied to specific hardware is always best. When you have something like an Intel platform and 4 million people make devices and drivers for it there are going to be problems.
- Not as expensive as most Macs
- Rosetta 2 seems to run all of my Intel Mac programs that I use and I’m pretty damn diverse. I have a lot of junk.
- Lots of ports and 3rd party vendors make external hard drive adapters that have lots more ports. It is best to buy the cheap 256 GB Mac and get a hard drive caddy with extra ports. It will save a ton of money over buying a Mac with a 1 TB drive. A. Lot. Of. Money.
CONS
- Big issues with legacy hardware with x86 drivers
- Big issues with running virtualization software
- Big issues with HDMI to DVI
- Using an adapter to hook up a DVI monitor makes you lose one of your high speed Thunderbolt ports.
- Lots of users claim horrific Bluetooth issues (no problems for me).
Conclusions
If you are a Mac only dude living in a lonely world (sorry that song was just on the radio) then an M1 is your Huckleberry. It’s super fast and will run your Mac ecosystem with aplomb. (Sorry, I just wanted to say aplomb somewhere).
If you have a roomful of old USB devices that you need Windows software and legacy x86 drivers to operate then maybe you better just get a Windows computer.
If you need to run other OS’s in virtualization software get another laptop and slap Ubuntu Linux on it because you ain’t gonna virtualize on this Mac M1, at least not yet.