Slow rendering on M2 macbook pro

@Patrick Lankau I'm a designer and long-time beta tester for CS and CC design products. None of the pros I talk to and correspond with are suggesting Adobe's support for Mac has waned. Mac users are around half their customers, after all! I do see reports of problems created by new OS versions, like the infamous Helvetica Neue system font debacle in Big Sur that really messed up professional designers and typographers, but those are on Apple, not Adobe. OS-specific bugs are about evenly divided across the two platforms. Nothing suggests that "Adobe has gone downhill on the Apple platform."

In the 3D market, Apple has never been strong. Back in the day, when graphics hardware became powerful enough to tackle light CGI and graphical game development, Apple did nothing to attract 3D software and hardware developers, whereas Commodore, Atari, and Microsoft did.

Nvidia may or may not be more developer-friendly, but it's very suitable hardware for 3D. (On the current Unigine Superposition benchmark leaderboard, the top 221 are Nvidia.) Apple's refusal to support Nvidia GPUs meant that people (especially game developers) had that much less incentive to move to Mac. Some of the biggest apps in 3D and CAD software have never supported Mac and have no plans to do so; others offer only scaled-back versions for Mac.

Even so, Stager -- the only Substance 3D app, afaik, developed completely in-house by Adobe -- fully supported Mac OS until Apple, unilaterally and without warning, switched to new silicon.

Stager can't be ported to M1/M2. It will have to be built from the ground up as a completely new app. That means finding, hiring, onboarding, and managing a whole team of ARM- and 3D-experienced engineers as contractors or employees, to work in parallel with the existing team.

Would Apple be interested in financing such an effort? The vast majority of 3D creators aren't on Mac anyway, so why would Apple care?

For well under $2k, you can get a new high-performance Windows machine with a 40-series RTX GPU that will render a complex Stager scene 20 to >50 times faster than M1. If you're a pro, that is a no-brainer. And Windows is neither worse nor better than Mac OS. It's just different. Any "pure horror" is showmanship.

I can tell you the firstSteps_Skate, with Raytracing and the High Prest takes 30 min on the M1 Max.

Considering this, if you have a decent GPU probably 10x or more faster.

https://i0.wp.com/cdnssl.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/auto-reframe-substance-stager-rtx-benchmarks.jpg

The fact that the 3D industry runs on Windows and Linux may be an influencing factor. The world of CGI, character creation, and game development is entirely different from the 2D design industry that most of us are used to. Some of the biggest 3D authoring apps on the market have no Mac version at all, nor plans to build one. Others run on Mac, but with limited capabilities.

I know from interactions with the team that it's got nothing to do with lack of interest. A small team, with a limited budget, would have to devote almost all of its engineering time to a port, neglecting everything else, to do it in a short time-frame. Stager isn't Painter, which is a decade old industry leader with a considerably larger engineering team.