MacBook Air or MacBook Pro?

Comments

• Richard Haseltine Posts: 110,097

  May 18

  Fow what? Daz Studio I guess, but what else? How about budget and any practical considerations?
• Lee Moon Posts: 928

  May 19

  I have an M4 MacBook Air that I will infrequently run DAZ Studio 4 on. Haven't tried the newer DS betas yet.

  The MBA can get quite warm on longer renders, so I prefer not to do any substantial DAZ rendering with it. 

  I think a MacBook Pro with active thermal management is what you'd need for the best results.

  I've been using an M4 iMac with satisfactory performance. Looking to get an M5 based Apple desktop system when those become available. Hopefully that will be soon. 

  Only reason I'm not using a MacBook Pro is I want one large screen without worrying about cluttering up my workspace with an external monitor and a laptop.  I'm 68 and my eyes get weary using a small screen for very long. :) 

  Hope my thoughts help.

  Lee

   
• bytescapes Posts: 1,920

  1:08AM

  Beyond doubt, a MacBook Pro. It's designed for tasks that demand more processing power, more memory and so forth. A MacBook Air is a delightful little machine -- I'm writing this on one -- but it is much less powerful than a MacBook Pro of the same generation (things are different if you compare different generations; a MacBook Air with an M5 chip might be better than an older MacBook Pro with an Intel processor; I don't know).

  You should be aware that neither are ideal for DAZ Studio. The Iray renderer that most people use for rendering in DAZ Studio is designed to work with Nvidia graphics cards. If you try to render on a machine that does not have that type of graphics card (which is to say either of the MacBooks), it will fall back to using the machine's own CPU, which is many times slower. Even though the M-series CPUs in the current models of MacBook are powerful, you will find them slow for Iray rendering. If you are committed to using one of those two machines, you may find that your best option is to set up your scene on the MacBook and then export it to a third-party rendering service for rendering.

  I used to use DAZ Studio on a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor. If I wanted to render locally, I'd often have to leave it overnight, or longer. I switched to using a third-party service for rendering, before finally building my own Windows PC with an Nvidia GPU. You could certainly use DAZ Studio on the MacBook Pro, but it wasn't the best experience. I haven't really tried it on a newer Apple Silicon machine, but I get the impression that a PC with an Nvidia GPU is still the way to go, at least for Iray renders.

  If you use Blender, things may be a bit different. Blender does have renderers that are optimized for Apple hardware, so you might find the newer MacBooks perform well with Blender.