tinyhawkus
1) ...The last bit, those m1's are fantastic, but what type of simulations are you doing on a laptop where you are hitting walls that getting 20%+ speed improvement would be life or death?

I'm not sure I understand this question. What 20% speed improvement are you talking about? Are you asking why somebody would want an M1 MacBook Pro over an Intel MacBook Pro? Because the only comparison I know of representing a 20% increase is an M1 Mac running Intel code in Rosetta. But that assumes the only reason one is buying an M1 Mac is only for Houdini, which is a weird assumption to make. The vast majority of other apps that I use are Universal Binary which can be multiple times faster than running on Intel Macs.

Right now, running Houdini on my M1 Max MBP is fine but rendering with Karma is painful compared to anything on my PC. I haven't tried sims yet. Perhaps Redshift will be much faster if it is already optimized for Apple Silicon. Also, I've noticed some strange issue with any version of Houdini above 19.0.498 on my M1 Max MBP. After launching 19.0.531, it is speedy the first time I use it. If I quit the app and launch it again, there is a 5 second pause every time I perform any operation, such as creating a node - ANY node. Place a node, spinning lollipop for 5 seconds, Place another, pause 5 seconds, etc. It's weird. But until it is optimized for Apple Silicon and Metal it is always going to feel sluggish compared to my PC, even with only a GTX 1080ti.

And finally, I have absolute confirmation now (after reporting that bug) that Sidefx has definitely been working on a universal binary version of Houdini. The exact words include "...working closely with Apple on M1 support." I hope that's not betraying a private comment. I assume if it were meant to be kept quiet, I would have been cautioned to do so.

And like Mr. Jobs in the past, "just one more thing." I don't know about others on here who have been hoping for a universal binary of Houdini but I never once expected them to have it ready from day one. That's absurd. As I've mentioned, Adobe has been working on an After Effects universal binary, and probably since the M1 architecture was public knowledge (I'd wager even before). It still isn't ready yet well over a year later, though many of Adobe's "lesser" apps are. I'm guessing the same with Sidefx and Houdini. I'm patiently waiting. I am just happy to now know a universal binary will definitely be coming.

It means, what work are people currently doing on laptops, where squeezing that increase in performance is literally
the difference between them being able to work in houdini or not. Almost not a question, but an observation,
because that is the crux of it. No one said sidefx shouldn't support it, or that they weren't working on it,
but some users started to stomp feet almost demanding the updated binaries in a time frame that is out of whack
with reality.

That's where this whole, should have been 3 comments thread expanded to. That expecting an m1 binary in a short
time frame, in the face of percentages of users is not being reasonable at all. There was never any issue about
the benefits, purely that having a binary wasn't going to be done on day one, and that Adobe, etc user base
is much higher percentages of Mac, so comparing sidefx to them was not realistic either. Throw in the complexities
of houdini compared to those applications and it's no surprise it's not quite done yet.



L

at least no one is demanding an ipad version... yet

osong
at least no one is demanding an ipad version... yet

That's funny and yet...

Imagine a future where Apple is only using M1 chips in all of their products. An iPad Pro actually ships with one right now. And then imagine our brilliant SideFx engineers working out distributed rendering via WiFi so that as I'm kicking out a long, per-frame render, my iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop, Mac desktop, Apple TV 8K (someday?) - all of those M1 chips are throwing their processing power into the mix. Maybe all combined, I would get double the speed of just one beefy desktop device.

I'm sure that's intensely complex (though not impossible?), especially given low RAM limitations on some items but, you know...

This thread is now officially off the rails

Now with Houdini being officially gold for ASi, what is the current situation?
As far as I know (since I own licenses or have done so recently):
Octane: available
Redshift: available
Vray: exist as ASi native standalone but not as plugin for H
3Delight: rumored for version 3
Renderman:?
Arnold: exist as ASi native standalone but not as plugin for H

Anything else?

Vray 6 is now available for H. Yay!

Update: since a few days ago: 3delight have an apple silicon build! yay!

protozoan
Almost 60,000 artist workstations at the participating studios, 11% mac, that includes the old ones. That's a nice data point for VFX.

I guess in the C4D scene (which was mentioned by you, that's why I bring it up) the mac usage is MUCH higher. Could explain the priorities.

Those 11% of Macs probably are mainly used by C4D and After Effects artists, not visual effects nor Houdini, so in reality Houdini is an even smaller fraction of this already tiny amount of those machines/artists. I`d actually not count on Houdini getting a significant amount of development efforts there or maybe at all. Considering how things are moving right now in all kinds of media production I`d not be surprised if they slowed it down further or even stop at some point altogether. Happened with other software...

I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that Windows is the predominate platform for larger companies. ILM is heavy OSX and is featured heavily in several forward facing video's put out by Disney. Now, how many of them are actual M1+ users is outside of my knowledge. I'm pretty sure Pixar is in the same boat.

I know a lot of people will drop a windows VM just to run the tool. I have found this to be the case on several tools who refuse to support OSX. Solidworks floored me when they offered their software in a VM in AWS.

At least I know there is an issue and won't be able to migrate some workflows over.

WalterK
I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that Windows is the predominate platform for larger companies. ILM is heavy OSX and is featured heavily in several forward facing video's put out by Disney. Now, how many of them are actual M1+ users is outside of my knowledge. I'm pretty sure Pixar is in the same boat.

I know a lot of people will drop a windows VM just to run the tool. I have found this to be the case on several tools who refuse to support OSX. Solidworks floored me when they offered their software in a VM in AWS.

At least I know there is an issue and won't be able to migrate some workflows over.

Em sorry but when you check the job requirement for the IT department and pipeline developers they are on Linux and some windows. They don't even mention OSX in the requirements! For IT manager In some jobs they mention osx but just as a nice to have.

WalterK
I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that Windows is the predominate platform for larger companies. ILM is heavy OSX and is featured heavily in several forward facing video's put out by Disney. Now, how many of them are actual M1+ users is outside of my knowledge. I'm pretty sure Pixar is in the same boat.

Wow, this is utterly ridiculous and nonsense. Even though I`m personally 100% Windows, I`ve never heard that large VFX and animation studios predominantly use Windows but mostly Linux - which of course also includes ILM and Pixar.

Just for the question for a native M1 based render.

Karma CPU uses intel embree libs (oneAPI) and they added some ARM support. For getting more CPU/GPU support it is today far better then 2-3 years ago.