Relative newbie needs some advice about buying the right iMac 2017

jong789_a72f831f52

Hi,

I want to make a new start with playing with DAZ3D and DAZ Studio. I used it in on my 5 years old MacBookPro, but got frustrated by the slow rendering process.

I tried to digest some discussions about hardware and rendering, but to be frank, it is too much on a specialists level for me. I want to understand the technicalities, but where do I find a step-by-step introduction?

For me it is a condition to work with Apple. The iMacPro (starting at $5000) is one level to expensive for me, but I am prepared to spend up to $4000. Where does that take me with the rendering speed compared to my old MacBookPro and compared to a comparable Windows machine?

For the experts this may sound as a vague question, but this is where I am today.

Thanks for any useful advice that educates me.

Eric de Jong 

GolaM

Well, the first question would be: Do you want to use IRAY or 3Delight?

Iray produces more realistic results but only works on CPU and NVIDIA GPU. From what I gather Apple will support external graphics with High Sierra, so you could then get a proper GPU and plug that in via thunderbolt 3. So you´d want an imac that has that. I seem to remember that the new iMacs will have that. For iray a reasonable CPU is good enough comnbined with a 1070 or 1080 you'll get pretty good rendering speeds.

Inkubo

Ditto what GolaM says. I'm a total Machead. I picked up this hobby at the start of the year and studied the Apple lineup intensely trying to find an affordable Macbook Pro (haha!) or desktop Mac for use as a rendering workstation, and what I discovered was Apple had absolutely nothing for me. I ended up buying a Windows workstation so I could use a modern NVIDIA GPU. Now that I've exhausted my new-computer budget, suddenly Apple's talking about supporting external GPUs. My advice would be to wait until that support is fully baked and you can get a Mac and the exernal GPU box with an NVIDIA GTX 1070 or 1080. When that happens, any Mac that supports the external box should do--you won't have to spend a fortune. Just make sure the graphics card you buy is loaded the most onboard video RAM you can afford. If a scene's geometry exceeds the card's VRAM, DAZ can't use the GPU at all for rendering, and you're back to CPU snailsville.

escrandall

I use my Mac for many other things and spend enough time setting up a scene that I'm ok with it taking some time.  I've got a farily high end iMac on order now and will report on how it does.  

The problem with the external GPU boxes, assuming there's stable support - that goes beyond what Apple announced - is bandwidth over even the best Thunderbold connections is slow compared with the intetrnal bus of a desktop - at least a factor of four.  That's ok if everything sits on the GPU with littie communicaiton with the main computer.  

The iMac Pro, even in it's lowend $5k version, is much faster and more capable than a $4k iMac.  Nice GPU specs, but not Nvidia. And they're working on a Mac Pro that will probably be very expensive, but at least they claim they've learned their lesson and it may have an internal choice of GPUs - some of their market makes heavy use of Nvidia.  But that's way off in the future and $$$.

If you're getting a new Mac see if your company gets a discount ,.. many allow employees to purchase machines for personal use at the company price.

uezi

I had started on a Mac pro 1,1 with 8 cores and enough memory but with no nvidia GPU, the experience was pretty poor for iray and as Apples OpenCL implementation (Reality/LuxRender... is this still an issue?) was poor as well rendering was a frustrating experience. The new iMacs will perform slightly better but without nvidia gpu you will never see a satisfying experience. (Ultimately, as there was no powerful Mac, I got myself a windows workstation and an nvidia gpu)...

if you want/need a Mac, I'd recommend waiting for Modular-Pro somewhat next year or wait until first experiences are made with eGPUs (but these are AFAIK dev-kits only). If I recall correctly, there's a egpu thread at the octane rendering forum. Good thing is, nvidia released drivers for pascal generation for OSX, so not all hope is lost.