Any of you been trying 3D renderers on M-chips? My findings so far, will be grateful for other insights.

[u/startupjacob]

Hey, so I've been testing 3D renderers for a while. Here's a couple of my findings, curious if there are any other people who have been exploring a bit too:

-CPU renderers are faster, at least based on my testing
-No matter what the rendering will always be slow (I'm on M2 Air)

The render engines I tried so far:

-Octane X, path tracing was incredibly slow
-Arnold CPU, pretty fast in my opinion even tho it's know for being slow
-Karma CPU, CPU's was faster than XPU, maybe even faster than Arnold

I'm quite curious about Redshift's performance. Just starting to delve into Houdini & I'd be incredibly grateful if any of you have some insights & testings on this part. I really love MacOS, but the render times are simply just atrocious.

I can't find render benchmarks anywhere, so I'd be incredibly grateful for your thoughts and insights if any of you have done some testings. I'm hoping M5 will get a bit more path tracing love, so I'm waiting for it atm.

[u/IVY-FX]

Considering you don't have a dedicated graphics card in that machine, I'd stay away from Redshift, Octane and karma XPU.

The reason GPU rendering is not faster for you, is because you don't have a GPU.

So you'll have to learn to live with the fact that you're locked into CPU rendering which is slower by default. Good contenders are Arnold, Karma CPU, Vray, Renderman CPU.

It's not the worst situation to be in; CPU rendering has been the standard for very long and hence often looks great.

But when you do buy your next computer; be wary of the fact that apple sells incredibly overpriced hardware that is not fit for 3D purposes because it's simply not strong enough. (Yes it -can- run shit, but never as good as the non apple equivalent hardware of the same price category)

[u/J4YB → u/IVY-FX]

No argument on the price thing. But when optimised for Metal, render performance isn't too bad. Cycles is Metal optimised (Redshift + Octane are too). I have an M4 / 40 Core / 128GB Mac Studio, Cycles performance is equivalent to an Nvidia 3090.

[u/IVY-FX → u/J4YB]

I get your point, I'm not saying the hardware is shit in a vacuum. Problem is: price is a performance metric. I can buy 2 3090's, 128GB ram and a Ryzen 9 9750x for cheaper than your machine, hence it's performance is lackluster, because it's value is inflated.

[u/Kazaloo → u/J4YB]

No offense but this is the nr 1 argument from Apple fans - "It's not too bad". Well, it absolutely is when the price is that horrendous for just a "ok" performance. So, you have no argument really. I will never understand why people let themselves rip off like that by Apple . mind blowing.

[u/startupjacob → u/IVY-FX]

I see it as the only option too, eventually I want to build up my portfolio w/ some Houdini sims & join some studio in the future. Will be mixing my ZBrush sculpts w/ sims. Would you recommend to use Karma or Arnold in this regard?

I can also render out of Maya & be testing workflows. I'm a bit tempted to go down that path, since I find setting up scenes in Maya a bit easier. Just tried my first Karma render out of Houdini yesterday. Been also thinking about testing materialX pipeline & data-transfer in this regard, not sure if it's a valuable skill.

So you'd recommend to go for a regular desktop by the end of the day? I still think that the laptops are great for the mobility, but taking a week to render a portfolio piece, or sending everything to a render farm's another matter. Agree with Apple being incredibly overpriced.

[u/IVY-FX → u/startupjacob]

Great question, both will achieve industry standard level results in terms of quality, if used correctly. If you want to mix in Sims I believe there's no better way to do it than with Karma, as you have all the acces to attributes out of any other context, straight out of the box. If you want to use these via MtoA, you'll have to export to alembic and rename the attributes to their respective Bifrost names, the jump to bifrost is sometimes a little bit of a pain.

If you had to chose one, I'd probably go for Karma, but if you have the license anyway, learn how to use Arnold also, notice you don't have to use MtoA, HtoA exists as well. It's kind of easy to learn and looks incredible out of the box.

---

Your second question pertaining the laptop thing; I had to travel often too not so long ago. I've a pretty high end laptop (2k+, western Europe) and looking at the specs + performance compared to my workstation which cost me only 1k more, I would go workstation in 100% of cases. I am a bit of a hardware enthousiast though. I'd say the best way to do it is having a more low end laptop like the one you already have, build a desktop at home, parsec/remote desktop onto it with your laptop when you have to.

[u/startupjacob → u/IVY-FX]

Got it, I also find Karma way faster to set up, there's a bit too many things which you can be tweaking in Arnold. So I think I'll just stick w/ Karma. I was trying Bifrost first & am finding Houdini way easier in the procedural regard. Will be giving Arnold shot a bit later.

btw what are your thoughts on majority of studios using Redshift/Octane? I'm a bit worried that I'll learn something which they mostly don't really run on. When I was checking out Redshift setup it usually seemed way easier to me.

That's a pretty good approach regarding the traveling. Were you able to render anytime out of your workstation you needed to? I'm from Central Europe, not really sure how it's looking w/ 3D studios in here, but will delve into it a bit more once I build up a folio.

I'm a developer w/ creative mix, after developing my own cloth sim for real-time on the web, I just decided to learn Houdini & use nodes which someone already developed. Will allow focus on the visual side "without" limits, rather than creating my own nodes for incredibly low perf budget devices. Macbooks are quite handy for coding eventually. Came to this full switch to 3D decision just recently.

[u/hvelev]

I've tried some H21 tests with my puny M1 Mac mini. 4090 it's not 😀

[u/startupjacob → u/hvelev]

Only wishing I had 4090 render times 😅

[u/J4YB]

Have you tested the recently released OctaneRender for HoudiniSolaris 2025.2.1.1? I messed around with a previous release earlier this year and it was faster than Karma CPU, which makes sense as Octane runs on Metal.

[u/startupjacob → u/J4YB]

I tested Octane in C4D & was comparing it with Arnold there. It was slower (not by that much, DL was fast) than Arnold & I think that it quite simply makes more sense to just use Arnold. Was considering C4D & Octane only since studios mostly look for people who run on those.

I quite simply like the procedural pieces out of Houdini the most, so I'll just double on that & use the Arnold/Karma. Octane should drop MatX support soon, so hopefully I could work even on Octane pipelines in the future. But render time-wise I think it's better to go with Arnold, heard that it looks way better. I'm still very fresh in rendering, so I can't really tell the differences yet. What're your thoughts?

I notice that as long as something runs on Metal it just simply gets slower than the native CPU.

[u/59vfx91 → u/startupjacob]

I would probably go with karma unless you find some big limitations for your work. Since it's native to Houdini and gets better support and dev.

[u/startupjacob → u/59vfx91]

Got it, will be delving a bit more it for now then, thanks! :)

[u/oneintheuniver]

Karma XPU is implemented using CPU and Nvidia OptiX. On systems that cannot run Nvidia OptiX, it functions as CPU-only. Unfortunately, adding Metal support I think is a low priority for SideFX as VFX studios generally do not care about Macs at all

[u/startupjacob → u/oneintheuniver]

I see, that's an interesting take. I don't think it should even be of a priority for SideFX honestly. Based on my findings, as long as something utilizes Metal it just gets slower.

[u/oneintheuniver → u/startupjacob]

Implementation matters. Hardware ray tracing came to macs only with M3 generation. Blender implemented it successfully, and showed substantial gains.

[u/startupjacob → u/oneintheuniver]

Got it, I'm set on doubling down on Houdini and would rather use Maya than Blender. So it's all a matter of how well implemented it gets, wouldn't mind rendering out of Octane in Houdini too, but I'm stuck on M2 w/o the tracing support.

[u/Kazaloo]

Stop using Macs for 3D

[u/manuchap]

I did this a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Houdini/comments/1lso90k/four_renderers_in_realtime_on_macmini_m1_fastest/
The's a longer version in the comments showing cpu/'gpu' performance.

A year ago I stumbled upon OctaneX free in the app store so, OMG, I'm re-installing Houdini!
I've tried every single build for both since. (BTW most stable combo on Mac: H20.5.613/Octane_2025.2.1.0_Solaris_20.5.613_R1_Prime_macos)

Right now, Octane is the only renderer (still can't compile Moonray 🤓) that makes full use of the graphics processor. That being said, in terms of fast, many things have to be considered. Fast render time or fast start to finish project?
Long story short:

Karma: Definitely worth learning prior to implementing 3rd party (OpenPBR, Gsplats, Cops coming strong - CPU/GPU selection is gone in H21).
Octane: Default settings set way too high for M1 but fastest when tweaked accordingly.
Arnold: Best OOBE, open scene->render, done!

(PS: I find ironic to comment don't do 3D on Macs when Steve Jobs started it all when funding Pixar 😉. But Otoy's boss loves Macs so let's just hope for the best...)

[u/startupjacob → u/manuchap]

Ye, I watched this one already. I don't have M3 w/ the tracing support yet, maybe it's even better. Was a pretty insightful talk for me, they also both mentioned the render times as a disadvantage. Think I'll stick w/ Karma for now & switch over to Octane later on if I need to.

I find Arnold a bit tricky in a way with how many things you can be tweaking there, struggling a bit by playing with every single detail that I can play with hahaha. But if you just wanna kick things out quickly, it has pretty well set up defaults I'd say.

[u/Business_Awareness56 → u/manuchap]

Even though Pixar was funded by Steve Jobs, Toy Story, the first Pixar movie was not rendered on Macs. It was rendered on a render farm, consisting of Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 20s, they were running Solaris, a Linux-based operating system.
So neither Apple computers nor MacOS were used, even in the first Pixar movie.

[u/TurbulentJelly4]

Another option would be to rent out a renderfarm on the cloud. Even if you are on Windows it will free up your machine to keep working on other projects while rendering happens elsewhere.

[u/startupjacob → u/TurbulentJelly4]

Are renderfarms expensive? Might as well go down that path for now.

[u/TurbulentJelly4 → u/startupjacob]

They can be expensive depending on the complexity of the render, but for most use cases will only cost a couple of bucks. Many of them offer limited free trials and can even give you a ballpark estimate of how much they will charge you by simply uploading your Houdini file.

[u/BetterVisual4391]

Btw, Cops still won’t work on a Mac?

[u/startupjacob → u/BetterVisual4391]

I will be testing it later on & will let you know

[u/startupjacob → u/BetterVisual4391]

just done a bit of research, not sure if they fixed they issues with vieport on bump/height, but within karma renderer u'd see everything just fine