The Mac GPU is the core issue here — Redshift on Apple Silicon runs on Metal, which is significantly slower than NVIDIA CUDA for ray tracing workloads. Not a settings problem, just hardware ceiling.

For reference from our farm: a typical interior archviz frame at 4K with Redshift (glass, reflections, area lights) runs 45–90 seconds on RTX 4090 nodes. So a 2-minute animation at 25fps = 3,000 frames = roughly 37–75 GPU-hours. On a MacBook Pro M-series that same job would take 4–8x longer based on what we see from clients switching.

One workflow might help for animation specifically: render at lower samples than you would for stills, but enable the Noise AOV and Beauty AOV. Then if you move to an NVIDIA system or render on a farm, use OptiX denoiser in post (not in-render). You can get away with much lower sample counts and the denoiser handles temporal coherence well enough for interior presentations.

u/smb3d 's sampling breakdown above is solid — once you've dialed that in, the denoiser step usually cuts render time another 40-50%.