Another AMD GPU Frustration
jayjarrett
Posts: 27
Hello everyone, I have been lurking and learning for about three months. I have spent a lot of time in the software and I never thought I would be able to be this creative in 3d and get the results I am getting. I am still fumbling around and I just need to dedicate several nights to just watch youtube and see all the ins and the out.
Anyway, here is my issue. I am Mac through and through and have not used a PC in 20 years. I have a Mac 5,1 (yes old but decked out) with dual maxed out 6 core Xenons, 128 gigs of ram, Nvme for boot standard SSDs for working. I have a brand new Power Color 5700XT GPU and I LOVE it!! For every program but Daz it makes rendering fast and smooth. But I guess there is too much money thrown in by Nvidia they will not let an AMD GPU natively render.
I have tried the new octane for Daz, and it just crashes. I went as far as taking the mac down to high-sierra and bought a GTX 1080 ti so I could run it. I would rather sit on a land mine before ever doing that again. 90 percent of the programs I now use for work, don't work. Back to Catalina.
So I am stuck with CPU render which is not terrible with my setup, but the Fans are going WFO all the time and I can't think. A 4k render with one character dressed and morphed, basic background, and preset render settings are about 20 min. Am I just stuck with this? Or has anyone found a way to fully pose a scene, and then export to a good render engine? I have been tinkering with the Daz to blender thing, but not having the best of time doing so. I am seeing some renders fly out in some videos and I am wondering if that is just a pipe dream without committing to Nvidia.
Thanks for any help.
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Comments
I'd say AMD rendering is definitely possible. For me personally, I'm running Daz Studio in Linux using Wine and I export to Blender and render in Cycles. Currently I'm using an Nvidia card, but there's no reason I couldn't use AMD.
As far as exporting goes, the Daz 2 Blender bridge seems better for precision work on a single character, making morphs or sculpting, etc. For exporting entire scenes, the Diffeomorphic plugin is a better option.
Blender takes some learning, that's for sure. But it allows you to do a lot more like all the physics simulations, motion blur, UV mapping, video editing, motion tracking, etc.
A) use 3Delight instead of iRay; B) EGPU and 1) external High Sierra boot disck; or 2) Bootcamp
Options from best to worst
1) PC
2) PC
....
1,000,000,000,000,000) stay on Mac and use 3Delight or export to Blender.
getting an eGPU and Nvidia card is not really an option. If you do that you are locking yourself out of ever upgrading to any future Mac or MacOS as support for CUDA and Nvidia is simply gone in those.
Bootcamp and other emulators just delay the inevitable as well since ARM is coming and Apple intends to kill them when they switch. So the choice is really yours. That Mac 5.1 is not long for the world so you'll be getting something reasonably soon. You could stick with people who give you no choices at all or move to an environment where all you have are choices. Or you could stick to that brand because showing off the logo is important to you I guess?
Without Iray your choices are so limited in Daz IMO. Unfortunate reality but PC + Nvidia is the only real choice with Daz and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
As far as AMD options for Daz goes, you will probably be waiting for a while.
Outside of Daz, Redshift has just gone into closed beta for their Metal/AMD version of their renderer, which i believe is the first of the already-established GPU renderers to do so, other than ProRender which was obviously designed for AMD. Not that anyone uses it haha
I don't believe there is anything stopping anyone from authoring a new render plugin (that's what Iray is). AFAIK, the tools needed to make a new render plugin for DS are already available to everyone. Of course there will be the non-native materials issue as far as content is concerned, though.
Also, you may want to direct some of you're frustration at Apple for the extremely limiting decisions that they've made regarding both hardware and software. These decisions were not DAZ's fault.
- Greg
Getting a fairly basic PC with an adequate nVidia GPU and using it as a self-contained eGPU is probably a better bet, then you can continue to use the Mac for set-up in DS and for everything else. Do bear in mind that iray is developed by nVidia so there is no chnace of AMD support for that, but as algovincian says there is nothing to stop a third-party developer from creating a new render plug-in, such as one for AMD's Pro Render (and a matching material conversion tool).
I ended up just getting everything to build a stand-alone PC for rendering alone. Ryzen7 RTX 2070super 64 gigs of ram and an NVME drive. I will still use my mac for my Day to day graphic needs for Video editing and photo needs. Plus it's like home for me now. I am scared about this windows crap. I will let yall know.
As crazy as it seems, that is the best way to go. Whether Apple or Nvidia is at fault (and really, its kind of like both,) the fact is that customers are hurt by their actions.
Iray is not the only render engine effected, either. CUDA based renderers will not run on AMD. Nvidia CUDA has become one the biggest pipelines in the graphics industry.
It is both of their faults but in this space Nvidia is the 8 billion ton gorilla. Apple needs to make nice if they want any relevancy in anything having to do with GPU's whether that is video editing, 3d graphics, streaming, AI etc.
But Apple is intent on having no options in their hardware. When they go to ARM they won't even offer Radeons any more just some sort of iGPU on the ARM chips or at least that is what the last round of slides from them said.
Yeah, if Apple gets their way they will drop AMD so they can produce their own GPU chips. They want to get rid of Intel ASAP as it is. Apple wants to fab their own parts to control everything. So really, Apple splitting with Nvidia was bound to happen eventually no matter what Nvidia did. It sure will be interesting to see how this turns out, because it is no doubt going to create a lot more situations like the OP had here. I am one of those people who never understood the fascination with Apple anyway.
Export to Blender; it's not as easy as rendering in Iray, but for me it is a far superior experience.
It doesn't help when Intel is tripping over their own feet, and there are people out there with DIY AMD Threadripper Mac builds.
Really, I think that Apple should have just adopted Threadripper for the Mac Pros, but with 'iffy' Thunderbolt 3 support I guess I understand. Intel has mostly open sourced Thunderbolt 3, so that could have been worked out I think. But of course Apple want to move it's CPUs in house again...
As for Apple's compatability (or lack thereof) with the latest Nvidia GPUs, yeah that's annoying.
I suppose there's always Daz to iClone. Some people have had some success with that, but yeah I do wish ProRender would get wider support. I remember reading a while back about CUDA emulators for AMD graphics cards being worked on, but there hasn't been a lot of news on that front.
I'd have bought a Radeon VII last year without blinking twice if it wasn't for the 'no AMD GPU support in DazLand' thing... 16 GB of VRAM for only $700?!? Yeah buddy! Oh wait...
You can use AMD graphics cards in Blender and they also have a redeon render engine that works in Blender but Cycles and EVEE in Blender are better render engines in my opinion.
USB 4 is thunderbolt so that mess is going away soon.
There are TR3000 motherboards with Tbolt but you have to look.
I got a new MacBook Pro, and it seems to render Iray scenes VERY fast - like, I can get an acceptable 8x10" Iray render of a couple of dressed characters in about 2 minutes. If I want to wait for iRay to render to 100% it's about 15 minutes, but the improvement in the appearance of the render by waiting till it finishes isn't that perceptible. I was actually schocked at how fast it renders.
Well I am putting it together as we speak.
You can always use your Mac for preparing scenes and use an outside render farm until you have made a decision about Daz Studio.
This is not directly connected to Daz the company, but it's kind of related.
http://www.jacktomalin.com/iray/
Some people don't see the worm in Apple.
TBH I had been a Mac user all my life but a month ago I purchased my first PC Dell Laptop with Nvidia. I have not looked back since. With my 2019 Macbook Pro, it was a pain to do live Iray scene previews let alone the 18-24 hour overnight renders (and redoing that if I want to just make a small modification). On my Dell, with even just 16GB RAM and the most basic Nvidia 2060 (we are not even talking about the 2070 or 2080), I can easily do Iray previews and complete my renders in 12-20 minutes. Whereas I could previously achieve 2 or max 3 renders per week on my Mac, I can now produce at least 1 render per day, more if I am less picky. Getting the PC also helped me lots with learning DS as the whole experience has become fun and most importantly, efficient. My Dell is 100% dedicated to DS and I do not use it for any other purpose.
ps. I don't own shares in neither Nvidia nor Dell :P
Octane must released beta OctaneX for Mac, that crazily can utilize AMD gpu's because of a geometry handling change, Octane seems to run on OctaneX without needing Cuda cores.Bringing Mac to Octane is a big deal indeed. See here:
https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1
Yes the ideal that Mac is "superior" to PC in every way when all of them are using the exact same hardware is ridiculous marketing hype that seems to echo off the walls of the cavern enough to seem true in face of so much evidence to the contrary. That isnt to say there aren't benefits to Mac over PC and vice versa in certain situations. Generally speaking, both approaches are correct and viable. You may bweel end up using Mac again at some point. No real reason to have any real loyantly to any of them, since none of them seem to have loyalty to any of us users.
Pretty much the only actual argument for Mac is that the user has more experience with MacOS or that the software is only available for Mac. Any Mac can be trivially outperformed by a cheaper PC.
The thing I find frustrating about Macs is the group that uses them as an excuse for not being able to do the simplest things on a PC. I've lost track of how many times I've heard "I can't use windows, I'm a Mac person." when asked to drag and drop a file or start a browser.
The last time I used a Mac, Pagemaker and Freehand were a big deal, and the 'subscription model' for software was rare. I actually miss Freehand - there are some other programs that have similar functionality these days, but I haven't tried playing around them. The one and done licenses are becoming a rarer breed these days, which is why I STILL am using Photoshp 7 btw... In any case, I think a couple of said vector based art programs with 'Freehand-like' functionality are open source these days actually, but I'm too distracted by Daz Studio and too lazy/stubborn/crochety to try to learn yet another program ATM...
Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field. Rember the PPC based G5 that they called a "supercomputer" and nicknamed it the Pentium Killer? Yes, maybe a Pentium killer, but not the chips Intel was releasing at that year. I can't remember anyone actually calling Jobs on his blatant BS.
And today, a $53K Mac Pro that a $20K PC would destroy? What are these people on?
I have literally no idea. Linus of LTT got raked over the coals for arguing that the Mac pro was price competitve because the same parts in a PC cost roughly the same. The problem is it is trivial to build a TR rig that obviously crushes the Mac Pro at much lower cost.
Apple tried marketing the Mac Pro as a sort of video editing/ingest system, based on the dedicated HW encoding card, however even with it is just not going to match much cheaper systems.
The only place where those things seem to have sold well is in very niche parts so fthe audio production world. Apparently, this isn't my field so I'm taking others words for it, there is in studio SW that only exists, or the prefered versions only exists, for Mac and those guys had been making do with old trashcan Mac Pros or various mac laptops which were so inadequate they were starting to swicth over to PC's out of simple neccessity.
I'll be nice because Jobs has passed and say there was a great Steve at Apple and Jobs wasn't him.
Well this discussion is veering off but I am curious to see where Apple will go now that it is going to start cutting its own hardware both CPUs and GPUs. True innovation might take place.
Amen. My Apple IIgs was autographed by him.
Get a PC mate. Buying AMD cards for 3D work will bring you nothing but pain. BTW, Don't worry about "Windows crap", as you said.
Windows 10 kernel is the most stable in windows history. I'm a WIN 10 user since the day it came out, and i have not had a SINGLE crash or any kind of instability. If you know how to configure your hardware when you build the PC yourself, you won't get any problems.
The transition between using a Mac and PC may seem daunting, but it will be outweighed by the possibility of natively running a lot of applications that only offer CUDA architecture support :)
cheers
Have fun with Apple in the next year, they gonna make their own CPU and GPU, so it will be completly useless for DAZ and tons of other programs.
And why would Nvidia let AMD use iray, they developed iray. They invest in technology, like RTX, RTX Voice, DLSS etc. AMD has nothing of that because they got no money to invest. (or they are just late with features)