Hardware

Honestly, it looks like Apple is pretty much conceding the upper end of the professional market. So a TR+High end NVIDIA GPU would likely obliterate a Mac Pro/Studio on those workloads, perhaps some very specific video encoding workflows may have an edge on AS.

I have a 3990X and a M3 Max (full chip), but I don’t have a M2 Ultra to compare.

The 3990X with a 4090 obliterate the M3 Max, but I’m not really sure there was any question there. Even a with a Titan RTX, it’s no competition. This being said, the MBP w/ that M3 is good enough for nearly anything, and far more efficient than an 3990X running full tilt. I would imagine that an M3 Ultra would be quite powerful, but I personally have no interest in a Mac desktop.

I don’t think I’ll be getting the 7000 series for work for three reasons.

1. I feel incredibly burned by AMD for investing heavily in the TR4 space. We were promised more, and purchased extra high end blocks early because of that.

2. The 3990X has been troublesome in ways that never approach RMA, or the cost of being down that system, but just enough to drive me insane, from month one through all the years to now.

3. Anything the full chip M3 Max MBP can’t run, the 3990X can still do, and anything that the 3990X is too unstable to do can get fed to a sidelined sapphire rapids build.

I do think I’ll be getting a 7955WX and a WRX90 to play with. There’s something super dumb niche things I want to try, that I wasn’t able to fully pull off with a W3435X.

I realize that MacOS users will stay with Mac for a long time, but I wonder how much of a leap in performance a TR+4090 rig is versus an Apple Silicon Mac Studio on M2 Max, power consumption be damned, on apps that are common to both MacOS and Windows.

Ampere Altra + 4090 already shits on the Mac Pro for price to performance.

I believe the M2 Max gpu is at the level of a 4070ti at best, but the larger issue is not many tools support metal for compute. On the other hand, all memory is shared on the mac so you (theoretically) get up to 192gigs of video memory, along with the neural engine for basic inferencing and matrix extensions on the CPU.

Essentially, the max is simultaneously excellent and falling behind in different industries, but you won't know until you optimize and test your software for the specific usecase, and after that you're beholden to whatever hardware puts out

Cuda is well supported and nvidia/amd scale well for different applications, unless apple picks up their software I don't think the hardware matters much

This isn't quite what you're asking for, but my wife just got a new M3 Pro MBP with 18GB RAM (5 performance/6 efficiency cores) and it's about 2/3 the all core speed of my 5950X in CPU rendering and about 1/4 the speed of my 3090 in GPU rendering.

It's (irritatingly) quite a bit faster in single thread rendering though - it's got about a 50% edge there.

It depends on the workload, but we're comparing apples and oranges. No amount of apple magic or apple consumer money can change the wild performance differences between high end desktop and "ultra portable", generally speaking.

I realize that MacOS users will stay with Mac for a long time, but I wonder how much of a leap in performance a TR+4090 rig is versus an Apple Silicon Mac Studio on M2 Max, power consumption be damned, on apps that are common to both MacOS and Windows.

While there is a certain performance difference now between two such systems, when you go out and upgrade your PC to a 5090 in a couple of years and a 6090 in 4 years, the difference will be laughable.

If you want your Mac Studio to stay on the cutting edge of GPU power, the costs of constantly upgrading a whole Mac Studio vs. just the PC GPU is much worse than the initial cost of the first system of either type.

The Mac Studio just cannot function long term as a GPU powerhouse. You can gloat about it for 6-12 months and that's it. It's a machine that can work solidly for you for 10 years, if you don't demand cutting edge GPU performance, but it will be relegated to "servicable performance" in 5-7 years.