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Why I bought and modified an old Mac for rendering with Daz

ggrancharovggrancharov Posts: 39
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

I am pretty sure that everyone that works with Daz on a modern Mac know the frustrations we have to go through. Especially after Apple dumped intel graphics cards which means that there is only limited support for CUDA accleration. 
Even if you were lucky to have an iMac with an intel graphics card, there was still no option to replace it with a better card. In my case, I had an iMac late 2013 with a 2GB Nvidia Card - rendering took ages. 

I needed to buy a new machine, however Apple disappointed yet again with offering no new iMacs or even Mac Pro's that support let's say a Titan or 1080's. It seemed that I had to switch to windows, which to be honest if I had to choose, I'd rather switch back to my ex-wife, and she was a monster. With windows out of the question there was one option that only a few people considered wothwhile - buy an old Mac Pro, replace all the old parts with new parts, and make it almost as fast as the current mac pro - for a quarter of the price and with full CUDA support for any nvidia card. Well, it worked. 

Here is a list of steps I did - feel free to write in the thread if you have any questions or need help. 

1) i got an old Mac Pro 4,1 (one cpu, not dual) for roughly $200 - the configuration didn't matter, as I would change the parts anyway
2) I first replaced the CPU with the fastest [for that motherboard] 3.46 6-Core Intel Xeon - about $120
3) I got 48 GB (4x12) 1333 MHz DDR3 Ram - used for roughly $50 
4) That being done I flashed the Firmware of the Mac to 5,1 so it can use the configuration to it's fullest
5) I added a 512GB SAMSUNG MZVKW512HMJP-000 NVMe SSD in order to achive 5GB/s speeds - paid roughly $240
6) Last but not least I've found a second hand Geforce Titan-X 12GB for roughly $380 

The whole setup didn't cost me even $1000 in total, but the increase in speed is just enourmous. Not just that, but I can freely add hard drives or SSD's, 
I could even install a second Titan-X for more rendering power. The only drawback for some users would be that you can use everything up to High Sierra - there
is (at least curently) no support for Mojave or Catalina. However, having my system stable is much more important to me. 

So if you're looking for a budged solution to render, definatly keep an eye out for this option. Just google "upgrading old mac pro" and you'll see a lot of information. When 
you come to the point of fixing power drain from the video card send me a message, there are very easy solutions. 

Cheers,

George

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,790

    Unfortunately I fear old mac drivers may not be compatible anymore with new iray versions coming up .. Switching to windows seems the only option for iray rendering right now. Unless you also want to stick with 4.11 or below, but you'll miss rtx support this way.

  • wolf359wolf359 Posts: 3,837
    Padone said:

    Unfortunately I fear old mac drivers may not be compatible anymore with new iray versions coming up .. Switching to windows seems the only option for iray rendering right now. Unless you also want to stick with 4.11 or below, but you'll miss rtx support this way.

    This^

  • ggrancharovggrancharov Posts: 39
    edited October 2019
    Padone said:

    Unfortunately I fear old mac drivers may not be compatible anymore with new iray versions coming up .. Switching to windows seems the only option for iray rendering right now. Unless you also want to stick with 4.11 or below, but you'll miss rtx support this way.

    You're wrong about the Iray rendernig - Nvidia is still releasing updated drivers for OSX, the latest being a couple of weeks ago - its slow but there is progress. Az long az new Daz updates support HS there won't be a problem. And sure, if you have the cash for RTX cards that thread is not meant for you, but they are supported :) 

    What you're right about that this setup might be usable for a couple of years until it's just too slow or outdated compared to modern systems. However currently, in terms of price/quality this setup is unbeatable from a financial pov. 

    One drawback is of course that as of now I can only use 4.10 or 4.11 to some extend becaue of the nvidia drivers, however I don't think I am missing out much. 

     

     

    Post edited by ggrancharov on
  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    For that sort of money and effort you could just as easily built a hackintosh from more or less modern parts.

    You are stuck if you have to stick to Mac's though. Any os version og High Sierra or newer cannot have any Nvidia driver installed. This situation does not seem likely to change any time soon. There is some dispute between Apple and Nvidia neither side seems interested in resolving.

  • jpetersen1jpetersen1 Posts: 148
    edited October 2019

    My other machine is running High Sierra with NVidia Quadro K5000 (it's compatible with Mojave but I prefer to have two versions of the OS because then I can still use some of my old-but-good apps).. It cost me $400 in mint condition. It works perfectly fine with Daz Studio and the only reason I got another machine is because I wanted a backup computer and something faster.

     

    This machine is a fast 10-year-old 12-core Mac with 128 GBytes. It's running Mojave with NVidia Titan 6GB. I get test renders in a couple of minutes, a full render in 1/15th the time of my quad-core.

    Old Mac Pros are great machines, you just have to get one with good specs. I like Macs because they combine a great interface with full Unix.

    Post edited by jpetersen1 on
  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    How did you install an Nvidia driver on High Sierra?

  • mclaughmclaugh Posts: 221

    Nvidia has a CUDA driver for High Sierra. You need to have a cheese grater Mac Pro (or a late 2009-2011 xServe) to run recent NVIDIA cards, though.

  • rav4rav4 Posts: 96

    I'm running DS 4.10 on a Mac Pro with GTX 1080 and macOS Sierra. Recent set up, not used it much yet. Seems mostly fine, other than the occasional iray render where cancel button disappears and then the only way out is to force quit and restart DS. Contemplating High Sierra, but not in a rush to upgrade yet.

    I suppose it's easier for Daz to concentrate development of DS 4.12 to only work with latest Nvidia cuda driver and gpu driver (or whatever it's called), but considering the issues with mac users stuck as we are with Sierra or High Sierra on mac pros with nvidia gpu cards in them, would be nice if 4.12 and future DS versions could work with the latest Sierra drivers and High Sierra drivers. At least for a few more years, say five, ten!

    I know: wishful thinking.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805
    mclaugh said:

    Nvidia has a CUDA driver for High Sierra. You need to have a cheese grater Mac Pro (or a late 2009-2011 xServe) to run recent NVIDIA cards, though.

    The CUDA driver is not the full graphics driver, for Mac it has been called the Nvidia Web Driver. Maybe the CUDA driver will let GPU's work in CUDA applications but I thought you needed the basic driver as well.

  • jpetersen1jpetersen1 Posts: 148

    In addition to my two faster machines, I also have a very old quadcore Mac Pro running Daz 4.12 with a modest NVIDIA card and Maverick OS and it works fine as well. The renders are slow, about 4 hours for a 3k image, but since I have two other machines, It can do its thing while I'm working on the faster Macs.

    I don't know how many versions it will be before DS doesn't work on this old machine but it doesn't really matter. It runs the current version, the renders are good, and slowness is less of an issue when you're busy on another machine. It is also fine for modeling.

     

    New versions of software are not always faster. I've noticed Photoshop and InDesign CS5 on my fast machine aren't much dfferent speedwise from CS2 versions on my old machine. They add more bells and whistles (often ones that you don't need) and sometimes the code gets bloated and it slows down response time. Also, new versions are sometimes not optimized for new machines. And... sometimes new versions are slower.

  • ggrancharovggrancharov Posts: 39

    Glad I am not alone and there are other people with the same thinking. 

    @kenshaw011267
    https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/149652/

    Another reason why this is a good option are stability issues. Mojave and Catalina are very slow compared to Sierra - not just Daz, but applications such as Houdini, AI/PS, Maya etc run much smoother and quicker as @jpetersen already mentioned. I can do all my work with Daz 4.10, so it's okay to "freeze" your osx and have everything working as it should. Each time I update one of my other apple computers things get broken, slow down and I am just sick and tired of it. Sierra would actually be my preference in terms of stability, I just installed High Sierra because of the nVME drivers for the SSD. 

    This solution works best if yiu have another mac that you keep updated regulary and run Catalina now - I use them mostly for photo backups, watching videos, facebook, browsing - while doing work on the "old" mac. It works for me. 

    Cheers

     

     

  • Binaries TorturerBinaries Torturer Posts: 69

    I have a similar setup, except with dual 6-core cpus and High Sierra. The problem I'm having is every week or so I get a kernel panic in the Nvidia driver. This week's crash corrupted Daz's content management system, which I had to restore from a Time Machine backup.

    I'm thinking of getting a new Mac Pro when they come out, and converting my 2009 Mac Pro to a Windows box for rendering. Maybe that will be more stable.

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