Any advice on a new Mac for Daz Studio?
mavante
Posts: 734
I'll start off by asking politely to keep "get a PC/Windows machine" advice, in any version, out of this thread. For a massive list of reasons, I am heavily invested in Mac for absolutely necessary collaboration compatibility, and client compatibility, in a variety of professional pursuits not Daz-centric, including print, audio, and video production. With that said:
Apple's war with nVidia, and Daz's dedication to it, has really thrown major roadblocks across any upgrade path for my wheezing Mac, in terms specifically of doing animation using Daz Studio. I'm to the point where I am pretty well forced to make the jump to a newer Mac, including upgrading to a Mac OS that no longer supports nVidia/Cuda stuff.
I've seen it said a number of times that iRay rendering doesn't require nVidia hardware; it can be done strictly with CPU rather than GPU. In fact, I think most of what I've done so far in Daz has been CPU-based, because of the extremely small amount of (non-upgradable) memory on the nVidia card inside my late 2012 iMac.
So: If there are any Mac mavens out there who really know what realistically can be done in terms of CPU processing power available in Macs for Daz rendring, I would really value your wisdom, experience, and input regarding what I should look for, what I should avoid, and what I might expect in Daz using CPU only for rendering.
CAVEAT: I completely realize that this could be interpreted as a "how long is a string" question, and I realize that price is a large determining factor. I can't justify or reach, without major hurdles, the price point of the new Mac Pros. I think I could push it up to maybe about $2,500 as an investment, but the $5,000-plus for a tricked-out Mac Pro is out of my reach.
Am I out of hope?
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Comments
If you want to animate on a Mac with Daz, you'll have to do everything in layers. You can get one character with denoiser on with nothing else in the frame for probably about 2 -5 minutes each frame with iray, then repeat for everything else in the scene. It's definitely doable as long as you keep everything seperate and comp it together in after effects or davinci resolve afterwards.
What you could do is animate in Daz, get the diffeomorphic plugin for Blender and send everything over. I've been doing that recently and I can work on my iMac again. So I've got my PC doing something and my iMac doing something, and with Eevee, even on a Mac, I'm getting shots with the characters and scenes in it at like 20-45 seconds a frame. It's taken me like three weeks now to get the hang of it, I'm literally right now trying to figure out how to animate cloth and hair, but once I get that, it's so quick to animate in Daz, send over and render. So that is definitely an option if you want to animate with Daz on a Mac without an nvidia graphics card.
Short version
Get a powerful iMac, consider using a third-party rendering service for final images.
Long version
A Mac is perfectly workable for using DAZ Studio, provided you're prepared to wait for your renders. My main computer for the past few years has always been a MacBook Pro. Today, it's a 2019 model with an i9 processor, but before that I was using a 2014 MBP with an i7. I did a lot of DAZ Studio stuff on the 2014 model, and my workflow generally consisted of setting the scene up and doing some low-resolution test renders, then leaving it to run overnight to turn out the final 'high-resolution' image (typically 3200x2400).
This didn't work for everything. Some scenes I made were complex enough that they would take days rather than multiple hours to render, and I couldn't really afford to leave my machine tied up for that long. The new machine is very much faster than its predecessor, so much so that I can get a low-resolution preview in what seems to me like a surprisingly short time ("surprisingly short" by my standards; anyone who's used to a GPU-equipped Windows PC would be horrified). However, I still have to do the big renders overnight and accept that there are some scenes that will never render in an acceptable time.
I don't know if I'd recommend a laptop for this, though. If mobility isn't a requirement for you, a desktop will probably give you more raw power for your money. And if you can't afford a Mac Pro, there are some pretty beefy iMacs out there. A 21.5" iMac with a 3.2GHz core i7 and 32GB of memory would probably come in around your $2500 budget; you could drop the memory to 16GB if it turns out to be too expensive, and spend the leftover cash on a bigger external display. The GeekBench scores for that machine are comparable to the scores for my rather more expensive laptop (I told you you'll get more bang for your buck buying a desktop).
Another option open to you is to use an external rendering service. You'd do your initial work on your Mac, then export the scene elsewhere for hi-res rendering. For example, you could try Jack Tomalin's rendering service, which costs about $50/month. I have not tried this, so I don't know exactly how the workflow goes or how long you should expect to wait for your images, but I do know that Jack is (a) wholly trustworthy, and (b) very familiar with the needs of DAZ users, so I'd have no hesitation in giving it a try.
Incidentally, as someone in the same position as you -- a Mac user who's unwilling to switch away -- I've made the decision that I'll stick with Mac, but build a Windows box for rendering. I looked into using an external GPU, but even with all the information and software available at eGPU.io, it just looked too kludgy to me: too many questionable hacks, too many limitations. So I'm very slowly buying up the components I need as they come on sale, and sometime in the next few months I'll put everything together.
Are you upgrading your Mac anyway? If not then getting a fairly basic Windows machine with a good nVidia GPU for rendering, and doing all your regular work (including scene set-up - the Mac's AMD GPU would be able to run dForce simulations) on the Mac may be an option. It depends on your workflow, and space, and on how your budget goes.
One option would be to use something like migenius to handle Iray rendering tasks. That would be an expense whenever you use Iray, but you'd only pay for the time you're connected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKZu-mBtX60&t=
It starts at USD 1.10 an hour last time I checked.
a option you might look into is using a external GPU. its a cheap upgrade to your old mac laptop or all-in-one deck top that way you can keep what your use to working with and have the added power of a NVIDIA GPU, thats the way others have been working around that NVIDIA vs Intel APPLE love/hate relationship , Its just a suggestion.
https://bizon-tech.com/egpu
There's a very good source of information (and software) about eGPU's at eGPU.io. You should definitely read their forums before going that route. One thing to be aware of, however, is that you're pretty much stuck at High Sierra if you want to use an Nvidia eGPU; even with the software available from eGPU.io, you still need the Nvidia drivers, and none are available for Mojave or Catalina (because Apple is mad at Nvidia, and won't sign them).
I have a vague memory that the newest versions of DAZ Studio may want a newer OS than High Sierra which, if true, would put you in something of a difficult position. However, I haven't been able to find anything in the release notes to confirm that, so I may have imagined it.
I don't know if this information is useful for you, but you don't have to get a new Mac if you're willing to consider customizing an older one. It is a bit more work (and the expense involved probably depends on where you get your parts and whether you build it yourself of have it done for you). You can get pretty good stuff into the older towers and still run it with a modern system. I'm using a mid-2010 Mac Pro tower running High Sierra with an Nividia GPU:
It's probably not the absolute fastest setup possbile, but it's a huge improvement over the iMac that I used to use. I use the latest version of Daz Studio without any problems other than dForce being quite slow (which has been normal since dForce came out - I can still use it, but simple simulations take 15-60 minutes most of the time). My OS isn't the newest version, but for my purposes I don't actually need that. (Actually, I'm staying away from Catalina and anything higher because almost all the other programs that I use for work are known to have issues on anything past High Sierra anyway, and as bytescapes, said, Nvidia drivers and anything beyond High Seirra aren't compatible.) When I do decide it's time to upgrade, because of that, I know I'll be building a Windows machine, but the setup I have now is so much faster than the 2012 iMac that I had before, and while dForce is still super slow, renders are pretty fast.
Just a thought. I hope it helps.
Well, not really. With some complex sets, I've done that, but I recently worked on and did a lot of the setup for a music video, with the animation done almost entirely in Daz, and most of it was rendered directly out of Daz as png sequences.
We found we could get away render times between three and six minutes per frame for most of the scenes. We would then batch process the pngs in Photoshop, running Despeckle. That zapped most fireflies, and a lot of the "noise." Then once we converted those to movies using QT, and brought them into Final Cut, they were fine for animation, the motion covering up remaining sins.
Yeah, I know about Bootcamp. It might be a shuddering last resort.
Ummmmmmmm, happy? Um, no. I'm not one bit happy about any of it, including Apple's schoolyard slugfest with nVidia. Or, for that matter, Daz's seeming indifference to Mac's Metal. In any case, I need to replace this current computer, which is 100 years old in dog and technology years, so I will figure something out. Thanks for your suggestions.
Short version
Third-party render farms are too much for my clients' needs and resources, and I'm not going to eat the cost out of the fees for my time, which are already pared right down to the bone. Maybe down to the marrow. Maybe sawn clean through.
On Metal, do bear in mind that - unless you are yourself a developer - we have no real nformation about what is involved, or how much support Apple is giving to developers.
I have an older Mac Pro with an NVIDIA card in it. It is not the most powerful but it is sort of an option. You might not be able to get all of the pieces to work together though. I upgraded DS and that broke the GPU card capability, so I had to revert since i had another machine with an older version on it. It is limited. External GPU is something I am interested in but I don't have a good machine for it right now.
Thanks, Ivy. Yes, that is one option, and one I've toyed with. But then I'm back to the problem of having to hover indefinitely at High Sierra 10.13.6. (Not that that's necessarily bad for the time being, given things I've read about later Mac OS issues. Meh.) Even at that, it seems the nVidia drivers for this operating system have their own issues. Ain't tech grand?
I guess for the moment I'm in a holding pattern, but gathering all the data I can to keep my options as open as possible, and see what the best one ultimately is. I really appreciate the input.
Thanks for the tip about the eGPU information. Yes, as I was saying to Ivy, I'm pretty much between a rock and a hard place right now. I'm going to have to decide something pretty soon. I definitely need and want a faster processor than I have now, and those are available in the new iMacs. I learned on the last project that I can do a lot of iRay rendering that is CPU only, with perfectly acceptable results.
I may get one of those newer iMacs, plus an eGPU, and stay at High Sierra until the log jam breaks. Dunno yet. Still in indecision.
I haven't looked very much at Metal, but from what I've seen, writing a renderer in Metal would be a substantial coding task. With Iray, DAZ were essentially handed a mostly-complete renderer, and their task was to massage data from Studio into the form that the renderer expected: not by any means a trivial task, but achievable (*). Metal is at a lower level -- it's more like a merger of OpenGL and OpenCL. So DAZ would need to build on top of that, and there'd be a lot of work to do. They'd need to not only build the rendering engine, but also come up with a layer to translate existing shaders (either Iray or 3DL) into the form Metal expects, and correct for all the inevitable small (and not-so-small) differences. And so on.
I don't know if DAZ has written a complete renderer 'in-house'. 3DL and Iray are both 3rd-party products. The renderers in Carrara and Bryce were substantially written before DAZ acquired the products.
So I'm not sure that 'indifference' is quite fair. I suspect that DAZ may have looked at the scale of the task and -- quite reasonably in my view -- decided that they wanted no part of it.
Apparently Octane Render may support AMD and Intel GPUs in future, which would open up some interesting possibilities. That doesn't help @mavante much in the short term, though, and in any case Octane is fairly expensive.
(*) I'm oversimplifying here, but I think this summary is close enough.
I feel for you I am in the same boat with my render rig which is older windows 7 machine. its a great system and still runs top notch. but support has been discontinued for w7. I run 2 - 1080ti's gpu's in a alienware external gpu box using a tomcats gpu server. to run it on my widows system connected hdmi . At first i had it connected USB .3.0 because I could not fit 2 of those huge gpus in my computer case was the reason why i went with the external unit.. But like you I know someday I will have to bit the bullet and buy new computer systems that is supported and be stuck with a OS that I totally despise.
Next to none. Apple is barely supporting the markets, like audio production, where they have a lot of market share. For games and CG they have functionally abandoned the market. The new Mac Pro was a fairly obvious attempt to extract as much money out of the remaining 3D animation outfits working on Macs. With TR and Epyc running any OS but Mac the pressure on those to shift is overwhelming.
The choice is now spend $50+K on a machine that is not as capable as a fully upgradeable with off the shelf components system that costs less than $10k or switch, save money and be more productive. Which is a choice how?
That's a lot of money to avoid buying a bigger case.
Mavante, I own both mac and pc's. I like my macs but some software and especially games, work only in pc. Consequently, I got into Hackintosh and have not looked back. If you are a tinkering sort and don't mind some hand tools modding a old obsolete aluminum mac case and fix it to hold a pc xeon workstation motherboard complete with a xeon 10 or 12 core and 128gb of ecc ram for cheap.This system will alow you to dual boot mac os and windows 10. I should warn you may have problems with sleep mode but I just disable this fuction and it works fine. Just a thought. Good luck
Thank you, Quixotry, for your comprehensive and informative post. I'm sorry to be so slow to reply; I'm having to chip away through the replies in this thread on a dancing-between-raindrops basis while my computer has other plans.
Right now I'm listing sort of heavily to one side, toward buying a refurbished recent-model iMac with the most powerful CPU I can afford, and adding an eGPU, sticking with High Sierra for the foreseeable future. A lot of decisions to juggle, every one of them having an impact on the future. I'm just taking it slow and gathering all the info I can, so every bit of this helps. Thanks again.
Hi there, just a word of caution concerning getting an eGPU, as these can be rather tricky to get to work properly - on Mac and others as well. I own a smaller one (Amp Box Mini by Zotac) with Nvidia inside, and it's doing okay with my Windows laptop, at least as long as I use a second, external display for the box's output. Couldn't get it to redirect into the laptop's display yet, which wouldn't be such a smart move anyway when it comes to rendering 3D stuff because it would halve the throughput (having to use the same Thunderbolt connector and cable sending the graphics data forward as well as back into the machine). So be prepared that even if you get yourself a shiny iMac you will probably have to use (and store somewhere) a second display with the eGPU.
I also own a 2017 iMac on which I actually do most of my DAZ studio stuff, and this doesn't want to cooperate with the external box at all. It came with Sierra I believe but still didn't accept the eGPU with the Nvidia card inside at all, I could never get it to even reckognize the whole set up. Only recently I found that I would have needed a slightly different model of the box for macOS altogether. So even if it should be working in theory it just might not, and there's a lot of small print to consider. And again, if it does work you will most likely need a second display. Also also, I'm reading online that installing NVidia drivers on high Sierra can be quite nightmarish.
Actually I don't think CPU rendering on the iMac is really all that awfully bad and slow, and mind you, the 2017 set up I have is not very good. If you got yourself one of the bigger and still affordable 2017 iMac models - the ones which are actually upgradable in terms of hardware, I think it's the 27 inch model - and threw as much additional RAM in as possible plus an SSD, you could maybe postpone the eGPU question for a while at least and see if you're not doing okay without one really. Yes it does take longer, but it works nevertheless, and you can always let it do the bigger renders over night.
Hope that helps a little, I think it's rather neat that you're determined to stick with MacOS. Maybe if there's more of us, things will get better eventually.
Hey tsroemi, thank you very much for all the very relevant info. I read and absorbed every syllable, but wanted perticularly to respond to the above. I very much agree. Given the very small memory that the stock nVidia card in this iMac I currently use has, I believe that the vast majority of my renders have fallen back to CPU. In fact, it is imposssible for me to set both GPU and CPU in the DAZ render settings; instant crash.
CPU rendering seems to get a very bad rap, but I have been able to render animation frames of many scenes, allowing an average of only about six minutes per frame for a png sequence, then batch processing with Despeckle in Photoshop. Some scenes needed 10 minutes per frame, some as little as three minutes. Some of those scenes involved movement of characters and camera simultaneously. My CPU is a modest 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5.
The Scene Optimizer product has been a huge help, and sometimes a very necessary help (such as with Streets of Venice). I won't go on and on, but I wanted to affirm my agreement with you on CPU rendering not being the crazy uncle kept in the basement.
Oh, it helps enormously, especially your personal experience with eGPU on Mac. Definitely reading all the fine print.
[SOAPBOXMODE] You know, it amazes me how convoluted and complex some of the "experts" seem to make the reviews, reports, and articles about these things. I sometimes think that many of them don't really want to help, but rather want to show off their insider knowledge of arcane terminology, and make it as indecipherably complicated as possible in the process. It's like lawyers; stripped of all the gobbledegook, it usually really isn't as complicated as it's made out to be. [/SOAPBOXMODE]
Heya mavante, glad to hear it was useful! I really loved that 'old uncle in the basement', had me in giggling fits until I woke up the cat ;-) Also, thanks for the tip concerning Scene Optimizer, I shall definitely have a look at that.
One more thing, just HAD to comment on that too, especially since I'm working in law myself (university though): There IS a lot of complicated expert-speak involved in all those fields like law and tech and such, and while much of it is absolutely for showing-off, these are usually people who are trained to be exact in everything they say. Like SUPER exact, you know, to a level not usually experienced in normal everyday life ;-) So whenever you ask them to explain something in actually understandable language, they feel like they're being imprecise, not giving you the whole, accurate picture. And that again leads to overcomplicated language and page-long sentences. It's kind of hard really to find the right balance in explaining such matters. So go easy on the experts, most of them really do want to help, even if a little showing-off might be involved ...
Just put Scene Optimizer in my basket, by the way!
My job is IT manager for a company that runs datacenters. I evaluate server HW for a living. If I'm not exact that could influence purchasing decision for the company. When you're buying for example 5000U of rack mount hardware very minor difference in performance, that I fail to properly communicate, could cost a lot of money.
When I give advice here I try to keep it as simple as is reasonable. But again if I give incomplete info and someone spends a lot of money and doesn't get what they expected...