New Mac
cclesue
Posts: 420
in The Commons
I'm considering buying a new (used) Mac (post 2013) 3.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5. It comes with a Dual AMD FirePro D700-6GB VRAM. I'm wondering if anybody has any experience with this machine and graphics card? How does it handle IRay rendering.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
AMD means no Nvidia iray acceleration...
Not sure that means much since it doesn't appear I've never been able to us my nVidia graphics card for rendering.
Ah, first, what Nvidia card do you have? As to the mac above, since it doesn't have the right card and drivers, the graphics card is unimportant since it won't be used.
My current card is a GeForce GTX 680 and was upgraded to the latest soft ware and the proper CUDAs. Switching to this card works for one or two renders but eventually starts to introduced noise in the final render. I eventually gave up using it since I have a pretty fast cpu and an SSD.
Its my understanding that the GPU is available even though lacking Iray accel.
You are probably right.... I wouldn't give up on the Nvidia card; use the web drivers which are quite a bit more up to date....
I'm looking at the newer Mac for more reasons than just the graphics card. My current Mac is a bit long in the tooth and cannot up grade to the newest OS plus the cpu is almost twice as fast. There maybe some other problems I'm unaware of thus the plea for information.
cclesue, is that a Mac Pro you're considering? I liked the looks of them. I wonder if the power of the computer itself is enough to offset any performance lost from not having an nVidia card?
I can't speak to that, but I need a Mac for other things and have an iMac Pro with 64GB of DRAM . Apple doesn't use Nvidia GPUs anymore, but support eGPUs and some people have luck running Nvidia cards in them with Nvidia drivers... The comment I make on my iMac is I can render very complex scenes. Not superfast, but everything fits If you're style doesn't demand very fast turn around it's fine. It fits my style, but most people would probably want something with Nvidia acceleration.
The funny thing is the A12 chip in iPhones smokes i7 laptops and is much fater on GPU taskss. Of course this is running iOS and on a phone, but they'd be great in laptops and desktops if you had the applicaiton software for them. Apple dropped broad hints they're going to abandon Intel and move in this direction in the coming years.
Last October I bought a new iMac, top of the line everything you could for editing (this was before I started learning 3D animation and using Daz) and had I known I would get into Daz 3D a mere two months later, I would have just bought a PC and switched to premiere to edit. I got the iMac because I like FCX. For months I tried to make the iMac work and it takes sometimes 40 hours to render an image. In June I said forget it and bought a gaming computer from Digital Storm with a GTX 1080ti and now that same frame that took 40 hours I can render in like 5-20 minutes. As soon as I'm done editing this current feature I'm working on, I plan on selling my iMac and using that money to buy a second PC to have two computers rendering shots for animation. I can still work on Daz in the iMac and set up shots to render, then I save it to Dropbox, load the scene on the PC and render it there, but it would be nice to have two shots rendering at a time when I'm at work instead of one.
Just my two cents as well from a guy who was a Mac supporter for 15 years who won't buy one anymore since I really love creating 3D animation.
Yeah, I've been effectively a apple evangelist since about the time they started using intel processors, but I'm pretty sure my 2014 iMac will be retired next year for a windows PC. I'm holding off making a purchase just in case apple surprises me that they actually do have something for people who want a truly powerful computer (and nVidia), but I really don't expect to be sticking with apple for much longer.
...I first thought about Octane4 because Otoy has been working on compatibility with AMD through the new Vulkan API for the 2019 release, however those D700s are apparently too old to have made the list, so they would be useless for rendering. If indeed it is the full size tower MacPro you could always swap the AMD cards out for Nvida ones.
I was rendering on my MacBook until my SSD crapped out. Then got myself a 2009 Mac Pro and upgraded the CPU to 3.33MHz Xeon 12 cores dual CPU. Rendering on CPU is pretty fast already. Going to put in a GTX 1060 and download the latest Nvidia web drivers for the Mac and see how that goes.
I would not get an iMac for 3D rendering. I think 3D rendering might kill the SSD quick.
I have an ancient iMac that is still running OK and an old case with new card as a render machine but I hate shipping things over there