Hi all, I’m planning to buy a Mac Studio and I’m looking for some advice.
Should I get one with better CPU and GPU or with more RAM?
Here are my options:
option 1 :
Apple M4 Max chip with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
128GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
option 2 :
Apple M3 Ultra chip with 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine
96GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
Many thanks
Both systems looks strong to me, so the best advice I can give-you is to flip a coin and see.
P.S: I am using Rhino in a 16GB workstation with quite BIG models and runs flawlessly.
Thanks for your advice. I have a 16GB imac and it works well but I’m working on some very big and complicated and it’s struggling.
so fare i lived quite good with the strategy to never buy the weakest apple model - and never buy the most powerful / most expensive one.
I am in a similar boat. Not all for Rhino per se. Curious what you end up with and the performance.
An M4 Ultra would be a good machine.
I’m happily running Rhino 8 on a MacMini M4 Pro with 64GB Ram. The place where I notice the biggest difference from the Intel i9 iMac I replaced is Ray Tracing. It was pretty much crap on the Intel iMac, which was also running Rhino v7. I sometimes find myself adjusting the framing on a view without getting out of raytrace mode, which was unthinkable on the intel box.
Which begs the question, are you moving from an Intel iMac or a M1 version? If you are moving from an Intel box you would be shocked by the performance of an M1 Mac.
That said, let’s look at your two options.
Your option 1 is now $3,329
Your option 2 is now $3,599 (delta $270)
Looking at your two options I don’t think you’ll see any difference on Neural Engines with Rhino. The believe the jump from 40 to 60 GPUs is only going to matter if you are doing a lot of raytracing. My M4 Pro has 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, and a 20 core GPU that raytraces to beat the band. The cost with 64 GB and 1 TB SSD is “just” $2,199.
Given you are working with 16GB ram now the upgrade to even 64 GB is going to be huge, and if you are going from an Intel box to Apple Silicon, brace yourself…
Back to your options - In your shoes I’d pick the M3 Ultra. 96GB of Ram is plenty of space unless you want to start running LLMs. 
I’d be paying for the extra cores and GPUs to speed up the calculations and rendering.
One question I’d be asking McNeel - is there anything about the M3 Ultra that Rhino doesn’t like. If that is not a problem, Ultra land here I come.
Either way, prepare to be blown away.