C4DtoA and Apple Silicon (ARM)?

[shawn]

I know nothing about writing/developing software, so I'm wondering how hard it's going to be to create a version of C4DtoA that would run on the newly-announced Apple Silicon processors (assuming Autodesk decides to go down that road).

It looks like Maxon is working to make C4D run well these processors, but it sounds like a big hassle to have to support existing Intel Macs AND the new ARM architecture. Of course it will probably be several years (or more) before Apple makes anything comparable to the Xeons (assuming they ever do). There's also the whole Metal vs. Open GL thing which I only slightly understand.

I still do most of my work on a 2012 Mac Pro (2x6 cores), switching over to a newer HP z640 workstation that renders twice as fast as my Mac. In general I can live with with slower rendering to stay within the Mac ecosystem I greatly prefer (most of my final renders go to Pixel Plow).

Before the pandemic I was weighing whether to drop $11-$14K on a new Mac Pro, but I've put the brakes on that. Now I'm wondering whether it would even make sense to buy an Intel Mac. I was able to remap the Control and Windows keys on the PC, and it's made working on it more tolerable. I could limp along like I am, jumping between the Mac and PC for a few more years.

Any insight/advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[thiago.ize]

Great question, but it's too soon to say what kind of performance Arnold would have when running through their Rosetta conversion software or if it was ported to run natively on arm.

[shawn]

I doubt running Arnold through Rosetta 2 would be a viable option for professional use, so I'm mostly curious about what would be involved with reworking the software to run natively on Apple Silicon. As I wrote, I know very little about how software is developed. Is it just a matter of recompiling the existing code somehow? Or would it require many many hours of hands-on redesign?

[thiago.ize]

For some applications, it's just a matter of recompiling the code (so pretty easy). For others, especially if they make use of x86 specific instructions and the x86 strong memory model, then it would be more challenging.

[Eden_Soto2]

It’s really not Intel Apple should be looking to beat, its AMD, because even Intel can’t catch up to AMD with their Threadripper/Epyc lines... I put a 3990X in my workstation on a new PCI-e 4.0 board with multiple PCI-e 4.0 NVMe’s in RAID-0 and the performance demolishes the best Xeon you can get in the current Mac Pro that would cost you both arms and both legs... with 128 threads on a single chip for under $4K, I don’t see Apple being able to come close to that cost/performance ratio with their new ARM chips... heck, you could build two 3990X boxes for a whopping 256 threads for the price range you were willing to pay for a Mac Pro and the performance there wouldn’t even be worth comparing It would be so vastly on opposite sides of the spectrum

[shawn]

Thanks for the reply. I'd love being able to run Mac OS on one of the monster AMD processors you describe, but I can't, and at this point I can live with working on slower systems to continue working within an OS I greatly prefer. If I had to I could switch to Windows, and it might come to that, but I hope to stick with what I know and prefer for as long as possible.

[Eden_Soto2]

I can feel your pain... my first Mac was a PowerMac 6100/60... I had never owned a PC before that... used Macs exclusively until around the time I started noticing a shift in Apple’s primary focus being the casual user and less the creative professional. I think the Mac Pro trash can was the straw that broke the camels back and their refusal to offer official NVIDIA support for the GPU renderers still to this day means that you REALLY have to love macOS to the point you’d pay an exorbitant amount extra for slower hardware and limited GPU rendering support

[Rudi_Simon]

Shawn, It involves recompiling because its a different microprocessor. On top of that you have all the cores that the software will need to optimize. It will take a few years. Apple will no doubt provide the tool kits for the code writers.