Hi guys
I’m hope for some advice/help on a replacement Mac Pro…to improve render times. I use Apple for lots of other Creative work so don’t really want to go down the PC route
Current spec
2019 Mac Pro 2.7 GHz 24 core Intel Xeon W
AMD Radeon Pro Vegas II 32 GB
224 GB 2933 MHz DDR4
New spec
Apple M2 Ultra with 24-core CPU,
76-core GPU,
32‑core Neural Engine
192GB unified memory
4TB SSD storage
Does anyone have any view on the speed increase with the new spec?
Thanks
Marcus
You will see a decent improvement in speed on the new machine with the M2 Ultra CPU. Those are very good specs. Obviously you will get much faster render times on the GPU, but that feature only works on the NVIDIA RTX family of graphics cards which Apple does not support.
We have seen users that prefer to work on Mac but want the GPU performance use network rendering to send their jobs from their Mac to their manager on a PC to offload the rendering from their local machines to separate PC with an RTX card as their workhorse. I understand their are cost restrictions as well.
Hope this helps a little bit.
Thanks Arlene
Yes, that clarifies the CPU/GPU question…As I thought …Apple…
M
I can imagine you want to stick with Apple but Apple didn’t really stick with creatives for that matter.
But what Arlene mentions is also what you can do locally. Buy a bit cheaper Apple configuration, and looking at the 192GB of memory it can be a lot cheaper even. And buy a ok-ish looking PC case and if your models permit GPU renders (VRAM is the limit) you don’t need the most expensive motherboard or a huge amount of RAM. Just a nice graphics card (or 2). And if you see 2 identical 3090(ti) you can use NVLink so you have 48GB of VRAM (not supported anymore on 40xx series).
If you look at the benchmark topic you’ll see exactly why Mac ain’t a real choice if you want to render things. They never should have made a little war with Nvidia imho, not sure who started it 
The difference between CPU/GPU is just to big to cover. It’s not exactly 5x faster but more like 50-100x faster. Or with my PC config 200x as fast than my CPU.
I’m not sure if KeyShot allows you to be logged in on two machines on same network at the same time else you could just log out on your mac and log in into your PC. And that PC can be tucked far away in a dungeon out of sight, just use some remote desktop tool to get it’s screen and start the render jobs.
Hi Oscar
Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated.
The key thing for me is the render of complicated stills and more generally, not so complicated frame sequences for video. @ 3840x2160 rez 6 seconds (180 frames), takes 5 hours 
. And this is a pretty quick Mac.
All other design/creative software is absolutely fine.
The whole PC route fills me with dread…Never actually used a PC, but I’m going to run your reply past my IT guy and go from there.
Thanks again for the reply
Marcus
I don’t think you’re the only one running into this. I’m on some 3D related forums and while there are still people using a Mac it’s getting a lot less.
The problem is not the CPU, I think Apple does a great job with their new M3. There is just so much software which currently is accelerated by GPU. Not only 3D renders but video encoding or running AI Stable Diffusion locally to create AI images etc a Nvidia GPU is basically the only choice.
Personally I don’t really care what the OS is. I worked around 15 years with Macs but the software itself is not really different anymore. It’s mainly how files are organised etc that needs a bit of getting used to.
If you like I can render the animation on my PC and show you the result. I render quite some time using GPU and I’m always happy with better/faster GPUs since the time you save is huge but even more important, it gets so much more fun to experiment with animation and test things. So I get also better in animation faster as a result.
If you want me to render it you can share it using wetransfer.com (maybe via a private message).
Hey,
I just want to chime in here,
You mentioned Animation rendering with 180 frames with 6 seconds per frame.
In those cases often the render time is not neccessarily the bigget issue, especially when talking about render times of 6 seconds per frame
In those cases handling, reading and writing the result data can quickly becom a noticable part of the render time.
My recomendation would be to, where possible, reduce the file sizes, e.g. use smaler textures, disable render passes and layers that are not needed.
Network rendering might also not give the speed boost that would be expected for that kind of renderings, since rendering is a only a small part of the time required, and you add a small additional overhead for the data transfer per frame.
You would still gain the benefit that you offload the rendering to an other machine, allowing you to keep working on you laptop and the option to do multiple rendering in paralell.(depending on your setup)
For large Complicated still renderings with over 5 min render time, it is a different story, for those you will almost always benefit from Network rendering.
Hi Niko
That’s not quite right.
The total video play time / duration is 6 seconds
180 frames in total
Each frame took about 2 minutes
Total render time about 5 hours
Still images aren’t really an issue…7680 × 4800 dimensions only take about 2-3 mins
Thanks
Marcus