[dagmx]

That’s only if you consider FP32 specifically. On average the M5 Max will pull ahead for tasks like GPU raytracing (it’s currently the fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering) and token generation and other things that benefit from the higher memory bandwidth.

I’d also mention that you’re comparing peaks which the RTX Spark won’t be hitting. The top TDP is less than that of the DGX Spark.

I just think anyone calling this a beast and a game changer are conflating/extrapolating from different form factors and constraints

[well_ackshually]

> fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering

cool story, but nobody cares about mobile GPUs for blender. A 4080 eats an M5 Max alive for breakfast. The 5080 in my machine that cost me 1500€ runs circles around an M5 Max that would cost me over 6000€. And when in 5 years the 5080 isn't enough, I can upgrade it to a 7080 or whatever, which will remain compatible.

If you're a professional, soldered products like the RTX Spark or Apple's offering are a dead end. They are literally never worth it.

[dagmx]

As a professional in the space, a ton of people DO care about mobile performance. If you’d go to SIGGRAPH in the last few years you’d see how the landscape has really changed.

It’s not going to be the primary place of creation but there’s a lot of usefulness in having a portable workstation or that entire segment of the laptop workspace wouldn’t exist.

In either case, it’s besides the point because the point is talking about the compute levels of a GPU in the same form factor.

[Foobar8568]

And nobody cares about 5080.

[well_ackshually]

Exactly. A 5080 is just an enthusiast gamer card. If you're part of a large company that requires you to run Blender/3DSMax/etc (read: disney/pixar sized), you're going to have an A6000 in there, or even just a render farm.

Game dev & asset work is probably happy with a 5080 and that's what most rendering/dev machines would have.

The addressable market of "i have 6000 to blow and i need meh performance on anything related to 3D rendering" is small, and benchmarks make it look bigger than it really is.

[dagmx]

Ironically the two studios you mentioned don’t actively render on GPUs and it’s an area which shows that even these small SoCs can punch way above their weight if you look at their pure compute power.

Disney’s Hyperion is CPU based and RenderMan XPU is just exiting beta after over a decade.

But while they do stack their workstations with higher end GPUs for artist throughput in viewports it’s mostly just for the higher memory to fit unoptimized scenes in. None of the studios or major films I’ve worked on have had their on desk artists be raster rate gated but just memory gated.

But again, besides the point, because it’s still valuable as a metric to compare with when comparing perf between similar chipsets.

There are already more creatives using their consumer grade hardware to make stuff. And even the studios you mentioned do actually use laptops on the go for parts of their creation pipelines for various things like virtual production scouting etc.