Iray Rendering on a Mac - Do I Need a PC?

outrider42

Personally, I think there are just too many hoops to jump through to make Iray on a Mac happen. Buying an OLDER Mac just to install a Nvidia GPU? Why should anyone have to buy an outdated machine? The other option of an external GPU enclosure is very expensive and wildly impractical. For the price of a good enclosure you could just about buy a PC. And has been mentioned, drivers for external GPUs are a whole different issue.

A 1070 would be a massive improvement, yes. I don't know what your scenes are like, but I would bet a 1070 can render that 15 hour scene of yours in well under an hour.

You can try the SY benchmark scene in my sig and compare your times to that of people who have 1070's and other cards. You can then just do some simple math to estimate how a 1070 would handle your scenes.

Artini

Since such threads appears from time to time, I was thinking, that Apple will finally release some drivers for Nvidia graph cards on Mac,

but it looks like, they do not care so much about iray rendering on Macs.

 

rav4

So I've always been a mac user. I'm considering a PC with a 1070 card. I suppose i have 2 options: build a PC myself, or buy a PC that includes a 1070 card. I know a prebuilt PC would be more expensive, but how much more expensive? anyway...

1. What's the best place to learn how to configure a PC that I would build? All the parts needed and where to buy, then how to put it together. How successful are first time PC builders the first time trying to build one!?

1b. What about after I buy parts, finding and paying a local person, or person on web, with experience to build it?

or

2. What's the best place to buy such a already built PC? Best brand(s) to consider. Like Dell or other. I dunno. I'm a mac person.

kenshaw011267

1a) ask here. There is a website called pcpartpicker that will let you configure an entire PC and do the compatibility checking for you. It even does price comparisons to the major online retailers of PC components. As to building a system for the first time, if you start with a reasonable system, avoid watercooling for instance, and watch a couple of videos or read some guides on the process you should do fine. The process is often compared to playing with Legos.

1b) you can certainly do that. Craigslist is a resource as is your local community newspaper.

2) avoid the brand's you've heard of like the plague. HP, Dell etc. are awful. If you have to buy prebuilt look at brands like ibuypower and cyberpowerpc.

outrider42

You'll find very little consensus on most of those questions here or anywhere for that matter, but this may be one of the only places around with as many people dedicated to Iray. Ultimately you will have to do a bit of research and decide what's best for you. If you can build it yourself, great, but I will not hold it against you if you don't (unless its a Walmart PC, then maybe , LOL). One thing to consider is if Iray is your main concern, you do not need to build a totally balanced machine. It might help, but ultimately the GPU is doing the rendering, so a 1080 in an old junk PC will render the same scene at the speed as a 1080 in a new fully pimped out PC. There is no substitute for GPU power, so this should always be the main focus of any PC built for Iray. If the scene doesn't fit the GPU, then things might get hairy, but we typically want to avoid that at all costs. Otherwise there is no point to having such a GPU.

A PC built for high end gaming can often meet the needs of Iray, but not always. And since most builders are only thinking of gaming, they probably wont understand what an Iray user may be looking for. For example, if you ask a builder to use an i5 CPU with a 1080ti they will suggest you use a i7 or better instead as the i5 might bottleneck a 1080ti in gaming. But if you aren't gaming, that is not a big concern. Obviously if can afford it, then sure, that's great because there are other perks, but if budget is a big concern, it is OK. Iray can also use multiple GPUs, while very few games do these days. Adding a second GPU at a later time is often the best bang for your buck upgrade should you decide to do so in a year or two.

The partpicker site mentioned is helpful, because it will check to make sure parts are compatible. If you pick out parts that do not work with the motherboard, it *should* warn you. Not always, but most of the time. ibuypower seems to be decent as a prebuilt, and in some cases might actually be cheaper than buying the parts yourself. One important thing with any prebuilt is that they list every part in the machine, and I mean every part. Many will not list all the parts inside, and that can be a red flag. However ibuypower lists every part so you know exactly what you are getting, and you can also customize the PC quite a bit.

kyoto kid

3djoji said:

My 2 cents about what people said about Mac and the fact that they assume that it is so difficult, impossible etc... I have several mac's at home. The main I use is a IMac (late 2013) and this one include a NVidia card 775M (2GB) which render fast and in real time all scene I make with DazStudio (so sorry JOdel, the renders I made with that internal card never took more that 20 minutes to be complete. If it tooks more, you switch in CPU mode due to textures size problems exceeding 2GB). The confort of running very big renders faster leads me to add a EGPU box to my Imac with a NVidia TitanX (16GB). For information to Esemwy, with the help of https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/wip-nvidia-egpu-support-for-high-sierra/ , the OS runs perfectly using this external box (fortunately, I can connect this one to any other computer to get its rendering power). IMO, the question is not at all MAC or PC but what you really prefer to be compatible with because solutions exist in both case.

Remember that any system renders a DS scene in GPU mode if the entire textures can be loaded in the GPU memory (there are parameters to compress your textures files in DS). If it is not the case, the render switch in CPU mode. At that time, the whole textures set is loaded in the main computer memory which must be large enough (sometimes, the system may become instable during a rendering because of the lack of dynamic memory). When using 2 GPU at the same time, the less memory is the one selected (for instance a GPU 16GB and a GPU 4GB, the final size is 4GB on both card). If you intend to buy a multiple GPU system, choice the same memory size for your GPU.

...hmm, I have a Titan X and it's 12 GB.