Attention: Metal, Big Sur and Apple Silicon

Hi Martin,

I use a 1 year old MBP 16 Zoll 64 GB ram Octacore. I will use that MBP next years
many Users will buy a M1 Chip Mac but in my Eyes that's the same bad error than
using an iPhone (totally Closed Source and user is a pice of must not have they are enough others there)

If you change now hole Cheetah to M1 Chip it Tools maybe 1 or 2 years and apple will stop selling Apps
outside the Store than you must gibve Apple round about 30 % and believe me that day coms.
I buy me that Big MBP than I can change to Linux OS with that good Hardware.

It looks for me that you have no other Chance than going the Apple way otherwise you must change Cheetah
from Mac to PC
If that way will be a way where Apple go with respect and fairness to the developers that must than use Appstore
is a bad way Apple will leave the developers no other way if they want produce Mac Software.

That's now way for make better security or new fast hardware , is a way to Slave all , Users Developers and so far
to earn much Money they can.

Steve Jobs will be rotate with 200 MPs in his Coffin.

I See you can go no other way the slaving Process is not stoppable but at one Time you will Loose
half or more of your users nobody will pay for a Version 8 if the only Feature for Intel users was can run on M1
Same with M1 Users they will not pay for Intel features.

For me self my Way is absolute clear at the day when Apple only use Appstore for installing Apps on Mac is the
Day I leave that Platform. I be Security admin since 28 years now and in that Time Windows and Linux are good
Alternatives to a Mac.

For me my Way is I not be Slave from my Hardware Producer ;-)

I hope you stay a wile with Both Technique's

best

Andre
 
For me my Way is I not be Slave from my Hardware Producer ;-)

I hope you stay a wile with Both Technique's

best

Andre
Just quoting a part of your writing. You have wrote a lot to think about and about the enslavement-factor of Apple's "new" way i agree, some sort of diametric false direction by disrespecting users and developers... and design wise the wrongest language they could pick (for my taste), just a plate full of colorful clay... (ger. ein Teller bunte Knete)

I guess you are some older grade/age (like me) with a lot of experience in computers and OSes. So hopefully i can give some hint / advice. Clued chips and dies, tied hardly to the "holy" security features - even if those systems are very fast - are for the youth! I as an older one have my experiences, my feelings (very important!) and knowings (also important!) about how much a hardware producer should intrude in our private sphere / zone. On my side i have dropped the support the newer / newest hardware (just a waste of money if each year a new system comes out). ... AND very important i need the technical breaks while things need their time, to think about what i'm doing, a lot of ideas were born in this time while the system was busy!!

For C3D i as a baby-cheetah can say it opens me an alternative way and output on my older systems (which i will keep), and my safety grid is and will be blender (mostly for the modelling part) - for my projects theme i need i.e. svertschok (addon) animation-nodes (for modelling different states/shapes), micro-displacement, tissue (addon) SVG-to-object and many more, while i'm using blender upto 2.80 beta (around summer 2019) on OSX, and surprsingly i use even blender ver 2.49 (BootCamp) for my ingame content, very old very worthful, and a well established workflow - which alows me a lot of experimenting.

We here in (east-germany) have a proverb "Schuster bleib bei deinen Leisten!" engl. translation "Cobbler stick to your lasts!"(?)

The questions that are most important here: What do you / we as user want? Which questions and ideas do you / we have? ...and which is the best environment for you / us to work with? + have the most ideas + have the best results with it. Is our tech inspiring us or not? Think about your tech like a good old well known crafters tool, which you / we can handle masterful by your / our experience.

Or let me say it in other words, i'm much faster with my ideas on my older systems, which i already know, then on those hyped (and in my eyes ugly) and superfast things and oses! This speed is senseless if i have and/or got no or less ideas!

best wishes,

Ca Rei.
 
The new M1 Ultra can be ordered now in the new Mac Studio. According to the first Benchmarks and apple's claims it's faster than the Mac pro with the 28 core and single 6900 at less than a third of the price ($6,199 for the Max Studio with M1 Ultra 64 core GPU, 128GB RAM, 1 TB SSD vs. $19,599 for the Mac Pro with 28 core xeon, 6900, 96+32 GB RAM/VRAM).

Especially the 20 core CPU, I think The Cheetah 3D renderer would absolutely fly on this. I can't wait for the native apple silicon/metal support.

Only very complex scenes that exceed the 128GB RAM limitation would make the Mac Pro feasible still (Mac Pro user here but I'm at 96 GB of RAM which is sufficient for me).

And then Apple said they even have a replacement for the Mac Pro coming. Good times.
 
Hello,

The Mac Studio would seem to be a very impressive little box, especially equipped with the M1 Ultra. I wonder just how quiet it is when it is asked to be 50% faster than the 16 core 2019 Mac Pro at "some tasks". My past couple of Mac Pros have been silent, as least nowhere near the ambient sound levels in my studio, at full throttle.

Certainly one of the features that helps the Apple Silicon Macs achieve the impressive performance is also one of the features that is "unfortunate". That being they are fixed resources boxes. No adding RAM. Or replacing an internal drive with a larger one.

On the other hand clearly it is, for many, a very reasonable tradeoff given the resulting performance gains from having all available RAM shared by all of the various computing cores. There is never any time wasted by moving data from "CPU RAM" to "GPU RAM" or "Neural Engine RAM". The data is just there at an address.

My current Mac is a 2019 Mac Pro with 160GB of RAM and a PCI 4TB SSD RAID. My previous Mac only had 128GB of RAM and my work flow regularly had it running low on RAM. It has been a joy not to have RAM paging in and out these past couple of years. That said, with the SOC setup, and adequate SSD space, paging RAM in and out to "disk" is likely not as painful to performance.

With the speed of the SOC SSD, I think I can be happy without the PCI SSD RAID, so I don't really have the need for the huge box with all the PCI space as long as I have lots of RAM.

I look forward to seeing what Apple does to get past 64GB per 10 CPU cores. Hopefully they do. Or maybe they have figured out that 6.4GB per CPU core is optimum and that we will see many more, more affordable, cores per SOC to get us on the way to 256GB. Just hoping that, when the time comes, we will not have to make a choice between a huge box with 256GB of RAM or a smaller box but only 128GB max.

I also look forward to seeing someone get a Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra and then pass along a C3D speed report.

Cheers,
gsb
 
it will be interesting to see if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has upgradeable RAM but I suspect not. Thing is the rate at which RAM gets cheaper seems to have plateaued. 16GB has been the standard for serious laptops for ten years. (Today, my laptops have 32GB but by comparison I went from 5MB of RAM to 80MB of RAM (in high end Macs) from 1990 to 2000.)

i expect the M1 Ultra to be very quiet under load because it is 75% fan inside, and the reason for having such a big fan is so you can run it relatively slowly.
 
it will be interesting to see if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has upgradeable RAM but I suspect not. Thing is the rate at which RAM gets cheaper seems to have plateaued. 16GB has been the standard for serious laptops for ten years. (Today, my laptops have 32GB but by comparison I went from 5MB of RAM to 80MB of RAM (in high end Macs) from 1990 to 2000.)

i expect the M1 Ultra to be very quiet under load because it is 75% fan inside, and the reason for having such a big fan is so you can run it relatively slowly.
Given the better-performance premise of unified RAM, it would seem that upgradable RAM is highly unlikely even if it would, in other ways, be a welcome feature.

And I suspect that you are correct… With all that fan, and supposedly copper rather than aluminum heat sinks with the M1 Ultra, that the Mac Studio will be at least as quiet as the 2019 MacPro.

Cheers,
gsb
 
I got my Mac Studio M1 Max a couple of weeks ago, and Cheetah performance on the Studio is generally similar to the late-2015 iMac it replaced. I don't really do much rendering, mostly building models for use in Unity, so I don't know how rendering speed compares. However, I do notice sluggish performance when I have 4 views showing while doing UV mapping. Dragging the UV map around is jerky and lags, making it difficult to position the map that way. I've had to enter UV coordinates to get the map positioned precisely, which I rarely did on my iMac, where dragging was always very smooth.

Any word on when an Apple Silicon version of Cheetah will be coming out? This is the only app I use daily that is not yet available for Apple Silicon. I've read through much of this thread, and didn't see any specifics, last progress update was October, 2021.
 
I've also noticed some sluggish performance when rotating my very large files. Hopefully, this will be a temporary issue.
 
I've also noticed some sluggish performance when rotating my very large files. Hopefully, this will be a temporary issue.

You probably have to wait for the full metal (jacket) and apple silicon version. Up to then it will be running on rosetta with all the downsides.
 
You probably have to wait for the full metal (jacket) and apple silicon version. Up to then it will be running on rosetta with all the downsides.
Sure, that's to be expected. However, there aren't as many downsides to Rosetta as I expected. Other than running slower, it does pretty well.
 
Other than running slower, it does pretty well.

That's THE problem. I got a really FAST new computer, and one of my most-used programs runs slower. Slower than on the 7-year old computer I'd been using. That's kind of a bummer. Not what I was expecting.

Does anybody know how rendering speed compares on Intel versus Rosetta? I'm tempted to turn my iMac back on and do some comparisons.
 
I’m not disagreeing, I also use Cheetah 3D daily so speed is a big issue. Hopefully, we’ll see an M1 version soon.
 
That's THE problem. I got a really FAST new computer, and one of my most-used programs runs slower. Slower than on the 7-year old computer I'd been using. That's kind of a bummer. Not what I was expecting.

Does anybody know how rendering speed compares on Intel versus Rosetta? I'm tempted to turn my iMac back on and do some comparisons.
MacBook Pro, M1 Max ( 10 / 32 cores ), 1TB, 32G memory
vs. my old laptop
MacBook Pro, 3.1GHz i7, Radeon Pro 560, 500GB, 16G memory

Most Cheetah3D renders are just under 3 times faster.

 
That's THE problem. I got a really FAST new computer, and one of my most-used programs runs slower. Slower than on the 7-year old computer I'd been using. That's kind of a bummer. Not what I was expecting.

Does anybody know how rendering speed compares on Intel versus Rosetta? I'm tempted to turn my iMac back on and do some comparisons.
Hi,

Since Rosetta only exists on M1 Macs, there's no way to do a direct comparison of Cheetah3D performance between Intel code running natively vs Intel code running through Rosetta - because no hardware can run both of those, so the comparison is skewed by the other differences between the test hardware. There are a lot of fundamental differences between M1 Macs and Intel Macs.

I'm not a Cheetah3D expert, but my recollection is that Cheetah3D is usually CPU bound instead of GPU bound. I would bet that an M1 would smoke any 7-year-old CPU in CPU-bound workloads, even with Rosetta overhead. If your 7 year old system has a very high-end discrete gpu, it could probably beat an M1 in certain very GPU-bound workloads. In my experience so far (M1 Max / 64 GB), the very fast CPU and extreme memory bandwidth are a great help to most workloads.

Cheers,
-dre
 
Hi

only the Effort I can have from a system like a Mac let me buy such a system.
if there is a closed system with no Chance running Windows VM with less Software
than a Android Tablet it was only a nice and expensive Design object.

If the M1 Chip will not sales to other hardware Vendors and stay only in Macs and Closed systems like Iphones
we have exactly where we come from. On step forward and free steps backward.

Look here our favorite 3d App Cheetah, nice it runs on M1 with an emulator but if Apple stops the Emulator
it stops running Cheetah for all M1 Users.
Cheetah is an App that Martin develop in Years not in Month or Days , what you all believe he need only compile that for M1
No way a complete Code review must be done many many sub Routines must be make new or change to other way.
At the other Site what you here think can Martin earn for such a Month long daily work ?
If Martin have a normal real Job where he earn Money he have not every day Hours of Time and Cheeta3d alone can't
give him the Money to live from it.

That is same than millions of other developers stand now, The Answer can be
1 give up
2 Make new Software from old Codebase
3 make Appstore Apps and earn Money Wirth that

Most of them will use 1. and give up and I can understand that in 100 % nobody will make such a way two times
And for all developers they do that in their free Time called Hobby Projects the Milestone is simple
If the App is small and simple there a only small Problems cross compile it
But for older bigger and complex Apps it looks not so nice if you are not a Company that earn Money with
such Apps you will see many of the work from last years are swimming now in the apple river away....

Andre
 
Just a reminder...

simply and short the retro wave grows each day, many users step away from "Bigtec" like Apple (which was once an inspiration) which are now only cashgrabbers... without visions... senseless and empty. (creative) users need so much more of the long forgotten "Think different" now extended to "Tinker different" ;-)

I have my "old" tec, solid, robust, repairable, upgradable... which i can maintain. I'm building the nearest future of my creative project around this "outdated" but very inspiring setup. Who needs speed which leeds only into nothingness.

If i can use my old tec to do my things, create new ideas with and keep them save, what do i need more?

My hope is that Cheetah3D will resist, stick to the users and not to the evil company Apple is now. There are so many possibilities / directions in which Cheetah3d could develop to, different render expressions, different and new construction types, modeller modules... so i am pretty sure that Cheetah3d find its own way and long lasting position/market.

I'm planning to buy 2 additional licences (for older Cheetah3D-Versions), if this is possible, to use Cheetah3d on older macs for the concepts/idea/scribble... time consuming tasks which dont need much renderpower, on less power-consuming older Macs, maybe on Lion or older OSX, this is actual the strategy i think about. The actual "Zeitgeist" is nuts, gagga, a wreck beyond repair - its dead Jim!

Resist, keep up the good work, and find your own way.
 
Just a reminder...

simply and short the retro wave grows each day, many users step away from "Bigtec" like Apple (which was once an inspiration) which are now only cashgrabbers... without visions... senseless and empty. (creative) users need so much more of the long forgotten "Think different" now extended to "Tinker different" ;-)

I have my "old" tec, solid, robust, repairable, upgradable... which i can maintain. I'm building the nearest future of my creative project around this "outdated" but very inspiring setup. Who needs speed which leeds only into nothingness.
Your favorite apps might not yet be Apple Silicon native, but plenty of them are. In my opinion, this architecture migration is far smoother than the one from PPC to intel, and from 68k to PPC, for two reasons, both related to compatibility: 1) the (temporary) Rosetta 2 seems a little better than the first incarnation of Rosetta that supported the Intel transition, and 2) performance improvements in the M1 (and now M2) systems are enough to compare quite well to native Intel-native software on previous-generation Macs.

If i can use my old tec to do my things, create new ideas with and keep them save, what do i need more?
Nobody is arguing that you have to upgrade if you don't want to. You can keep running the current version of Cheetah 3D, which is supported on Macs made as far back as 2007. Whatever happens in the future with Cheetah 3D will not take from you what you already have.

My hope is that Cheetah3D will resist, stick to the users and not to the evil company Apple is now.
Resist what? Resist updating to take advantage of new Apple hardware? Who would be helped by doing that, and how? Any commercial product needs to ensure they're taking good care of existing users, but they also need to ensure there's a path to acquire new users. I fully recognize that Cheetah 3Ds users probably skew a bit legacy, and that's totally fine, but it's not reasonable to hope that Apple will start manufacturing old machines again so that everybody else can live on old hardware forever. Most Mac users do not have access to an unlimited supply of old Mac hardware, so they will buy a recent Mac when their current one stops filling their needs.

It's certainly true that newer Mac hardware is much less upgradable than it used to be, and that is unfortunate - but it's not all bad, because the integrated memory is roughly 100 times faster than upgradable memory. Fortunately for you, lack of hardware upgradability isn't much of a problem if you never upgrade your software (which I'm assuming you don't do because eventually that would make you upgrade your hardware).

There are so many possibilities / directions in which Cheetah3d could develop to, different render expressions, different and new construction types, modeller modules... so i am pretty sure that Cheetah3d find its own way and long lasting position/market.
IMO it's already there. Show me *any* other Mac app in this space where the same version runs on a computer *and operating system* from 2007 as well as a computer and operating system from 2022 - I'm pretty sure Cheetah 3D is the only one. This is a massive achievement, and the main purpose for this reply is to recognize that achievement. Kudos!

Cheers,
-Andre
 
to Xeen3d's comment:

No, the m1 doesn't have to be sold and used in other hardware, because ARM in itself isn't Apple's technology. As already mentioned, it comes from a small firm, Acorn, developed back in the 80ies, which produced then and in the early nineties some personal computers that war in many ways ahead of the competition. They weren't very successful (almost no software available than what came with it), but the tech has since been used for mobiles. And at the moment any major player (foremost nvidia (I'm not sure if they meanwhile could buy it) with the others getting licenses, among them amd and microsoft) is working on an own ARM based processor for pcs. So it is no wonder that you can already for a while have Windows for ARM which could be used on Apple's new silicon. Apple may be the first with its M1 but they will not stay alone.

And it may take a while till all the software is ready for the new silicon, it's on the way (there is a Blender version for example). That said, most firms that have (partly) ported their software already had a little help from Apple, while the smaller firms have to do it alone and for themselves. But it will come.

retro wave:

Visually yes, otherwise not so much. And you can't compare some cellphone to computers. It's up to anyone to use privately old hardware as long as it runs (of which I am well in favor. By all means, everyone should use those things as long as they can do with it what they have to. It's better for the environment, it's better for your bank account).

But to make a living, be that as someone self-employed or a big firm, you have to use halfway decent and reasonable software and hardware for security reasons alone. There may still be some Windows XP computers be up and running, but it's a bit dangerous to keep 'em around (and can be very, very costly in the end). You need something that's still updated, something that runs security software, something that runs newer versions of the software you use.

And the whole graphics industry needs some computer power. If you have to edit videos or so it does matter if that takes you hours or some minutes. A private person can take all the time he or she wants, a professional can't. And that's especially true for 3d (where the m1 doesn't shine so much at the moment compared to gpu rendering). The customer will not pay more so you can use old hardware.

Also, even your trusty old hardware will one day give up on you and it will be some day beyond repair. What then?

So, that you can use your old hardware doesn't mean that everybody else can or is willing to.

Actually, Martin has no choice. If he wants Cheetah to survive, he has to adapt to Metal and ARM.

At last, yes, I don't like big corporations myself that create their own rules (for example for paying taxes), which spy on our privacy in any conceivable way. The others are as bad as Apple, MS certainly more so (their customers are also their merchandise). I stay away from social media as much as possible for example and look rather carefully at what I buy (no nestlé products), but to get really away from all that, you must not use anything anymore with some computer chip in it, beginning with a cellphone. Do not use a credit card, no card from any supermarket that gets you benefits, no bank account, no use of public transport or any private vehicle other than a bicycle, avoid cities with their thousands of cameras and face recognition, no doctors, and on and on. No matter how you spend your money, at least part of it will end up in the possession of someone you can conceive as evil.
 
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