During the Apple Studio and M1 Ultra unveiling back in March, Apple featured a selection
of professional applications to demonstrate just how far the new SoC is.
One app from the keynote that caught my eye was Clo3D.
It's a 3D clothing simulator that fashion designers can use to prototype their designs
without ever cutting a piece of fabric. It's the perfect app to try.
Every fashion industry has always loved the Mac, and a 3D workflow like this will push
all those 64 new GPU cores hard, right?
Well, to find out, I lent a Mac Studio to a fashion designer who, if you can believe
it, switched to PC. Let's see if we can win him back.
This is Matthew Liu. He's a fashion designer here at the Creator Warehouse, actually, designing many of the
clothes and accessories found on LTTstore.com.
Right now, though, he's planning on submitting an entry to the 3D Creative Design Competition,
which is being hosted by Clo3D. So every year, Clo3D does this 3D design contest.
Yeah, I always wanted to sign up for this contest every year, but I always forget about
it, and I miss the deadline. But luckily, this year I remembered, and I was able to register for that.
So, by laying you all when it comes to computers, he has switched to using his PC full-time.
So you got a pretty powerful computer.
What specs do you got? So here I have the Ryzen 93950X 6-in-core processor with a 16GB RAM and RTX 3060Ti.
I do love how you have an Apple logo.
Yeah, because, you know, still Apple by heart.
Look what I have. Your computer might be small, but this is even smaller.
Price-wise, it costs about the same as a base M1 Max Max Studio at around $2,000.
Um, but I switched to PC mostly because I wanted to use Clo3D more, but it runs very slow on macOS.
I've always had a gaming PC that I used for gaming, but then I upgraded that just so I could use Clo when I was in school.
Well, we can't have that. So what we're going to do is give him a Mac Studio with all the bells and whistles to see if it's good enough with Clo3D to switch him back to Mac.
This is the dream. Excited?
Yeah, I'm excited. I'm really excited to see how this goes for you.
So I guess we'll report back in a little bit. Yeah. All right.
Best of luck, my friend.
So when they announced this year's theme, a new definition of craftsmanship, for us, I need to figure out what.
What that means. So I end up going towards the idea of kind of more abstract weave design.
To summarize, it's very difficult.
I never expected to see fashion designers using 3D software to design their clothing.
It's pretty neat, but how useful is it? Basically, it's a fabric simulator.
You can quickly simulate your clothing on an avatar and then make changes based on that.
Filling a project would usually take hours, days, being able to use the software to adjust your designs,
make sure it works, where you actually start producing the real one.
But it cuts out issues and troubles down in line so that you can kind of build ideas quicker.
So my first day, I set up a computer, I installed all the software that I need.
I start with kind of like a template of how I want the fit to kind of look like.
I do all that, I simulate it, it looks good, then that's when I start adding the actual weaving detail.
That's where it starts getting a little tricky on the Mac Studio,
because things start to slow down and it was very hard to kind of weave pieces together without frame rates dropping too low.
So I tried it on my PC and then it ran like so much faster.
Like the FPS increased like dramatically, so you can simulate with CPU or GPU.
And on the PC being able to simulate with the GPU makes certain processes kind of like more efficient that I couldn't do on the Mac.
So it turns out that despite natively supporting Apple Silicon,
Cloth 3D hasn't yet implemented GPU acceleration on the Mac.
Hey! Hello. How's it going?
It's going. Well, what's that doing over there?
Well, I switch back to PC and...
Oh man. This is a surprise.
It's important for fashion designers like Matthew because they need the software to be responsive while it renders their developing designs.
Matthew tells me that GPU acceleration is less accurate at simulating collisions,
but that the speed it brings helps with quickly drafting up his complex ideas.
Well, I zoom in a lot.
I'm like, I'm like scrolling here and it's like...
So this would be faster on a PC? Oh yeah.
For sure. Which is why he switched. Did you feel bad switching back to PC?
Not really. What? It definitely was very...
Not the same as using on the PC, so it definitely would slow me down.
I probably would have needed another week or two to work on this project.
I assume that when Apple was promoting this program in their presentation,
it was already ready to go and running smoothly on Apple Silicon.
Fabric simulation is faster now.
Oh yeah, that I was like, no way.
But it turns out that at the time of the announcement, Cloth 3D was still running on Rosetta and it wasn't updated until May.
And as we've seen, still isn't taking advantage of the whole chip.
So then, what about the other apps? During that short clip, Apple also featured Ableton Live, Adobe After Effects, Vectorworks,
Cinema 4D and Redshift, and Boris FX Sapphire.
It appears that Adobe After Effects was the only other app that wasn't running natively yet,
with Ableton just squeaking their 11.1 release out a month before.
And like Clough, you can't expect everything to work.
There are numerous plugins in Ableton that still run on Rosetta.
It's crazy how long this Silicon tech has been out,
and yet how far behind some of these plugin developers actually are.
Meaning much of the performance the M1 Ultra offers might still be left on the table.
Something that Anthony discovered in his tests of the computer on LTT.
So the final kind of moments of getting the design done, what was that like?
Very stressful because I changed my ideas a few times again.
I ended up staying up until like 4am to like finish it and submit it early
so there's not any problems the next day in case there was any problems.
After all this time, I mean there's gotta be something the Mac does better than the PC, right?
Interactive render, so like live render, did perform better on the macOS.
So that's way faster, yeah. So when it was 2 in the morning, and you had finished on that computer,
you actually came to this computer to... Oh no, I still wasn't on that one.
I was on a time crunch, so I didn't want to... But this would have helped you, no?
I didn't know that before. I didn't want to risk it because you know from my experience using the simulation before.
So here's why it's submitted. So this would be like your concept image.
So this is my concept. How do you feel about the final design?
It was like I'm happy with it. Like I don't think I would have submitted...
If I was unhappy with it, I don't think I would have submitted it.
Here's the top, and then the back.
Oh no, I just noticed this!
Oh no, I shouldn't have stayed up till 4 am.
I should have submitted it the next day, so that way I'm not like...
Like this morning? Yeah. So what's happened there?
I think I just didn't simulate that part to go over the underlayer.
It's okay, what's done is done. I can't go back and change it.
So this is where the simulation kind of make or break your...
Well, because this is done with GPU simulation.
Well, sometimes on GPU simulation, the fabric goes through itself,
versus CPU simulation where it kind of can like...
It knows when there's a fabric on top. So that means the Mac would have helped here.
Now, to be fair to Clo, they have never supported GPU acceleration on macOS
because they use NVIDIA's CUDA API.
So, if in a future release they do bring metal GPU acceleration to the Mac,
that would be a big boon for Mac-loving fashion designers
who use the platform, bringing it to feature parity.
Thanks for doing the test for us.
Yeah, thanks for giving me this opportunity.
It sounds like a job interview.
Yeah, I mean... Well, yeah... You had the opportunity to learn that it was worse.
Yeah, you saved me the trouble from buying one and trying it myself.
Were you wanting to do that? No. Okay, well...
Now I know, for sure it won't. So, like, would you get an M1 Max Mac Studio if Clo 3D had GPU acceleration?
I would rather have this in a laptop form.
Like, I wouldn't buy a desktop Mac.
I hear the results are in. Yes.
How do you feel? I don't know, I don't know what to expect really,
because I haven't seen all the people's work, so I'm not too sure what to expect.
I'm nervous for you. Oh, yeah, same here.
I didn't want to. No! I didn't want anything.
You don't have to whisper it.
Also, how do you feel about the contest? Like, knowing the results, I don't think I will have changed anything.
Like, and what I submitted, I was happy with.
So, it turns out we both lose. It's been over two years since Apple announced their transition to ARM,
and in that time, we've got very compelling and efficient computers
that are fantastic for day-to-day use. But things haven't been going quickly.
I mean, Microsoft only just announced their Apple Silicon-Native version of the Teams app,
which they're still going to be rolling out slowly somehow.
If you're a professional that doesn't edit a video
and you're thinking about upgrading to an Apple Silicon Mac, check the system requirements of your app of choice to see if it's ready,
because otherwise, you might still want to wait. Thanks for disappointing this Mac Address.
If you are not a professional and still interested in an Apple Silicon Mac,
give this video a like. And if you are a professional, you might as well subscribe,
because we'll find out when it's ready. Now, in the comments, I'm curious.
Have you found a piece of software that's still giving you trouble in this transition?
And what is it?