MacBook Pro 16 config for AC with TwinMotion / Rhino?

[Anonymous]

We're moving back to AC after 4-5 years away from it, and at the same time our hardware is getting tired. So looking to upgrade software and hardware together *gulp*

We're a two person office and we travel a lot for work, so looking for a mobile solution. Could anyone help us out with a comment on the spec for a Macbook Pro 16 and where it's worth spending our money? We would be using Rhino and AC, either with VRay or Twinmotion, alongside Adobe suite. We would work on detailed small-medium projects (typically single houses to medium leisure/commercial buildings). From looking at the system requirements my feeling for the MP 16 was: CPU - worth the upgrade to 2.4GHz i9 / Memory - 16GB DDR4 is on the light side now, upgrade to 32GB, 64GB may be overkill / Graphics - 5500M with 4GB would be fine for AC, Twinmotion & VRay might benefit from 8GB / Storage - is going to be relative to need, probably 2TB for us.

[Anonymous]

I was wondering the same on the 32 vs 64 gb RAM, especially since it adds another £360. We'll be running the MB Pros docked to 27 inch monitors though, so I guess we might be more prone to some heavy multitasking.

UK apple stores run a two week grace period on all purchases, if it's one of the 'off the shelf' configs.

So we're looking at trialing their top off the shelf model next week and seeing how we get on - which is 2.4Ghz 8 core i9, 32Gb DDR4, AMD 5500M w/ 8Gb, and 2TB SSD.

[KyleMacht]

I have maxed it out my 16 GB with SketchUp, I haven't used AC enough yet to know. I probably won't be doing too many video renderings, since I don't do too many renderings currently. Sounds like 64 GB will be overkill, just not sure if it will be in 4 years.

Thanks,

[Karl Ottenstein]

Some more benchmarks for those looking at the new 16" MacBook Pro, both articles from BareFeats (a user-supported site):

This one is particularly interesting for estimating what the GPU-only TwinMotion performance might be like, where the GPU-only Blender app is about 3x faster with 8GB of memory on the 5500M vs 4GB.

https://barefeats.com/16-inch-macbook-pro-shootout.html

This second one uses the same machines (medium and high-end) and shows only modest improvement - but the summary is interesting (pending more tests) suggesting that increased memory gave a bigger performance boost than the processor speed alone should have given (16 GB RAM vs 32 GB RAM; 4G video memory vs 8 GB; 1TB SSD vs 2 TB):

https://barefeats.com/16-inch-macbook-pro-adobe.html

BareFeats: "This follow-up article features four Adobe apps and one game. The 2.4GHz model exhibited an advantage ranging from 6% to 14%. With only a 4% CPU core frequency gain (and 4% Turbo Boost gain) over the 2.3GHz model, the faster times could be coming from the increase in main memory and GPU video memory."

[Lingwisyer]

ie. If you are doing lots of GPU work, get as much VRAM as possible.