Because of my digital comms job and huge reliance on video rendering, my work has recently bought me an Apple M1 laptop ~ so I thought I'd share my findings.
I'm comparing non-native Poser 11 on a new Apple M1 laptop, vs Poser 11 on a huge 32-core HP Xeon workstation; I thought I'd share my findings as (1) lots of people will be wondering about Apple Silicon, or at least GPU vs CPU, and (2) I am procrastinating from my actual work!!! Anyway, here's what I've found:
- First off, video (tested in Final Cut Pro, 4K source) renders at least 20x faster on M1 GPU than it does on Xeon workstation, and 50x faster than a 2016 Macbook Air, it's unbelievable;
- Poser Pro 11 works fine through Rosetta, I haven't noticed any bugs yet; which is a bit of a surprise because my old Adobe (eg Photoshop CS6) and Microsoft apps (eg Office 2011 for Mac) are all borked on the M1, you can't even force it to run them - which is understandable but annoying;
- CPU-based Poser renders are taking almost exactly the same amount of time on the M1 that they take on my Windows Xeon Workstation;
- That Workstation has two E5-2670 CPUs, meaning 32 virtual cores @ up to 3.3GHz each; the fact that the Apple M1 (macbook pro) CPU keeps up with that for Poser renders, is kind of amazing: we haven't even fired up the GPU yet, need to wait for Poser 12 for Mac;
- the M1 doesn't have fans, so doing GPU video rendering for my work with a tiny silent machine that processes video literally >20x faster than a massive noisy workstation is pretty cool;
- Rendering complex multi-character scenes in Poser takes about 20 minutes (11 samples in Superfly), and that's purely on CPU ... so I'm excited to make the move to Poser 12 when possible, and see how the GPU handles renders!
- Regarding Adobe Apps, although I use them professionally, I basically refuse to move to Adobe Cloud because I just hate the monthly subs system and refuse to support any business doing it - so I'm moving to Affinity Pro instead of Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere Pro. So I have a lot of learning to do in the next few weeks!
I hardly ever update my Poser gallery, but if you're interested in my occasional CG work - I did this video a few years back: Youtube link (that's all Firefly, for the cartoony look)
