M1 Mac Mini - 8gb enough ram for photogrammetry?

Has anyone run into limitations with an 8gb RAM M1 Mac Mini? I'm expecting there are some compromises with only 8gb, but curious about real-world results.

It's impressive to see that the M1 Mac Mini is capable of running PhotogrammetrySession at all, unlike my 2020 Intel MBP. I'm planning to buy one just for this purpose.

The requirements in the slide from the presentation says that any M1 will work, whereas Intel chips need 16gb RAM and a 4gb AMD video card.

I'm inclined to get a Mac Mini with 16gb, but that config isn't available near me for pickup and delivery is more than a week out. If I knew that 8gb was enough to process 150 or so photos at high quality that's probably all I would need and could save $200 and get it immediately.

Side note: I've been doing photogrammetry on PCs for years and would run out of memory occasionally using Agisoft on a 64gb system, which I needed to upgrade to 128gb. Those were large datasets (500+ photos) covering several hundred square meters from a drone at high resolution. My object scanning needs won't be as demanding, however 8gb just doesn't seem like much to work with. But, I suppose that even Nvidia 3070 Ti's only have 8gb of video memory and the M1's unified memory architecture might make that a better comparison than thinking about traditional system memory...

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Mike_Festa
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  • I see that Apple has a 14 day return period, so I'm going to buy an 8gb one tomorrow and I'll report my results. If it doesn't fit my needs, at least it will be easy to return and upgrade to 16gb :-)

    —
    Mike_Festa

  • @Mike_Festa : I have the exact same problem as you do. Did the 8GB ram serve your purpose?

    —
    shashankK
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Yes, in most cases 8 GB RAM is enough for Photogrammetry, but some downsampling may be carried out. You should keep your dataset below 500 images on 8GB M1 Mac.

Posted by
Apple Staff
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I have been pleasantly surprised how well my M1 MacBook Air 8GB/256GB has performed with the new Photogrammetry tools in Monterey. I've hit memory pressure and swap lock ups as I ran out of disk space for other unrelated tasks, so personally I would give yourself some extra flexibility with 16GB, but so far 8GB has been just fine with 150-250 photos captured using the Photo Capture sample app on my 12 Pro Max.

Have fun! I am loving it.

Posted by
HeadOn
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PS Apple, how about letting us do the same magic on the M1 iPad Pros? It's killing me that I have all that power and I want to be doing the capture and processing all on one device. :)

Posted by
HeadOn
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  • Lots of developers have made this request 😁. I spoke to the object capture team about this a while ago. One reason the APIs are not available on iPad is because the image processing takes a long time, is power intensive, and better suited for running as a background task. All of these characteristics make the APIs not a great fit for mobile devices, where background processing is not allowed and we try to be as low power as possible. However, feel free to file a feature request on Feedback Assistant with your use case to help us with feature planning for the future.

    —
    Graphics and Games Engineer
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Hello Developers,

I have downloaded macOS Monterey Version 12.0 Beta (21A5304g) System I am using Mac mini (M1, 2020), Memory 8 GB with Xcode Version 13.0 beta 5 (13A5212g)

I am unable to use Photogrammetry for Object Capture API. Any help is much appreciated.

Posted by
Jayeshtejwani8055
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  • I think that is because the APIs are only available on macOS, and it looks like you are creating an iOS app.

    —
    Graphics and Games Engineer
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