Planning to swap Macbook Pro M3 16gb

[rionias]

I Am Planning to swap Macbook Pro M3 16gb, will it be okay to run Blender, bunch of chrome tabs, krita or photoshop and SL Viewer at the same time?

[AmeliaJ08]

Sure. If you're set on a 16GB model then you can expect to be using all of that RAM and more running all those things at once but that is fine, you will just notice some performance degradation as your computer will have to utilize swap (virtual memory) since SL is a RAM hog, Chrome is a RAM hog, Photoshop is a RAM hog...

Using a lot of swap (virtual memory) these days isn't such a big deal as it once was since the SSD's are so fast now. It's not as fast as real RAM of course but the impact is far less obvious than it used to be.

If maximum performance at all times is very important though It's worth considering if you can afford a 32GB+ machine quite carefully with these Macbooks since they are not upgradeable, what you buy is all you will ever have but of course 32GB or more is expensive.

[filz Camino]

On 2/27/2024 at 5:05 PM, rionias said:

I Am Planning to swap Macbook Pro M3 16gb, will it be okay to run Blender, bunch of chrome tabs, krita or photoshop and SL Viewer at the same time?

Depends exactly what you are doing in SL and the other apps, but I think it could slow down quite badly trying to do all that with just 16Gb of total memory. Remember that on Apple computers, the unified memory is used as system RAM and as video RAM.

Running Firestorm and no other apps, my computer typically uses 10Gb of combined system and video memory and that's a minimum use case when I'm just sitting alone in my skybox. If I go to a busy sim, combined memory use often increases to well over 30Gb.

So if I was getting a new computer right now I would want more than 16Gb of memory. I think for combined system and video memory, around 32Gb is a comfortable minimum in 2024 that will cover most use cases and also future-proof for a reasonable length of time.

I understand that the extortionate prices that Apple charge for extra memory do make this a difficult choice, though.

If money is really tight, I guess you could get a 16Gb MacBook, test it carefully with your typical use case and return it if you are not happy?

 

Edited March 1 by filz Camino