Mac Pro vs PC Gamer
taiuri
Posts: 590
Guys! I need to buy a new equipment for rendering in Daz, but I have two options, I hope you could help me to buy the best option. The options are:
1).- MacBook Pro 15" 2.8 GHz Inter Core i7, 4 Cores, 256 GB of storage, 16 GB RAM
vs
2).- Xtreme PC Gamer GeForce GTX 1650, AMD RYZEN 5 2600, 6 Cores, 16 GB RAM, SSD 240 GB, 1 TB Storage (Desktop armed)
I hope you could help me to take the best decision for rendering in Daz. I'll hear your advices. Thank you guys!
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Comments
for iray grab the PC
If you want to do rendering with DAZ's Nvidia Iray then you need a Nvidia graphics card. I think the Mac you mentioned has an AMD Radeon chipset. So if you try to render with it then it will use the CPU only. Is there an option to upgrade the graphics card on the PC Gamer?
If you are only doing renders in 3Delight then both options render from the CPU.
I want to render in Iray Nvidia. This Mac has Intel Cori 7, does this render in cpu mode only when render by Iray Nividia? There isn't option for updating the graphic card of the PC Gamer because it has a guarantee for 3 years.
Get a PC. The Macs will only render in the CPU.... You might want to choose a company that will allow you to better configure a PC with iRay in mind.
Yes, I want to render by Iray Nvidia. Is the PC Gamer the best option?
I forgot to tell the PC Gamer has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 OC graphic card
I've seen many bad comments about Macs. What is exactly the problem with the Macs for rendering in Iray Nvidia?
Ok. Thank you for the advice, I'll consider it ;)
Apple and nVidia had a major falling out a few years ago, so no modern Mac will support an nVidia card, and older Macs only support older cards, and then only on the older MacOS versions. As such for Daz Studio users wanting to use Macs this is really only pratical for people with the patience to wait for CPU rendering.
For Daz Iray rendering, the Mac offers you a basic/capable machine at a premium price.
You need a computer with a gfx card that has nvidia CUDA cores in order to render Iray in the fastest mode possible.
If you don't care about that, then by all means, buy the Mac if that's what you really want. There are many reasons to buy Mac/Apple products, so it's really a personal decision.
Or people who prefer 3Dlight. There are some of us.
So, the problem with Macs is they render in CPU mode only and therefore, the render process is slower than a process using an Nvidia Gforce graphic card? And I guess if they're using a CPU mode only, the equipment deteriorates faster, doesn't it?
As others have observed, the MacBook Pro will be forced to do CPU renders for Iray, because it doesn't have an Nvidia graphics card (and as Apple has fallen out with Nvidia, it seems likely that no Mac will ever ship with an Nvidia card ever again).
That said, the GTX 1650 in the PC laptop has only 4GB of VRAM which, as I understand it, is close to the lower limit needed for DAZ Studio (some of the VRAM will probably get grabbed for the OS anyway). The GPU-assisted renders on the PC will be many times faster than the CPU-only renders on the Mac ... but if you try to render a scene that requires more than 4GB of VRAM, then it'll end up falling back to CPU renders anyway.
So for simpler scenes, the PC will be faster than the Mac; for more complex scenes, it will come down to how the Core i7 at 2.8GHz compares to the Ryzen 5 2600. I don't know exactly which i7 is in that 15" Mac (which is probably an early 2019 or 2018 model, maybe even older?) so I can't say which would be faster. Maybe someone else has an idea?
Overall, my feeling is that the PC is likely to be better for DAZ Studio/Iray, but be aware that for complex scenes -- i.e. multiple figures with hi-res texture maps -- the GPU won't be able to help you.
For the record, I used to use a 15" MacBook Pro with a Core i7 (early 2014 model). It's certainly acceptable as a DAZ machine, but for hi-res final versions of my renders I always had to run it overnight, as a 3200x2400 image could easily take 8-10 hours.
Thank you for this explanation, it has helped very well. Exactly, the PC Gamer has 4 GB of VRAM, so if I try to render a scene of 3 or more models of Genesis 8 with a background, it'll use the CPU mode only, won't it?
Therefore is better to look for one with a better graphic card, Geforce 1660 or more?
Hold your horses. The new Nvidia cards are a month away. You should definitely wait. Or you may end up kicking yourself.
I don't know exactly how many Genesis 8 models it will take before 4GB is no longer enough -- although I bet someone here has an idea -- but if your budget will stretch then it certainly wouldn't hurt to get a card with more VRAM.
Maybe someone who has actual experience of working with 4GB or 6GB cards could jump in here and say what their experience is, and how much you can realistically get done with cards of different sizes. As I say, I'm a Mac user, so my knowledge on this subject is mostly theoretical.
That'd be so great if someone who knows better about Nvidia cards could explain us better about cards sizes.
And you as a Mac user, how much time would you delay if you had to render a 1920x1080 picture with 3 or 4 genesis 8 characters in a scene with a background?
I have a new 16" MacBook Pro. It does not have an NVIDIA card. It does just fine rendering iRay scenes. In fact I was schocked at how fast it renders them. But the MacBook heats up, and the cooling fans go like crazy. When a computer sounds like it's going to explode, it's probably unsuited to what you're asking it to do. Mac is a luxury brand, not a workhorse. If you do, like, one render a day, and the scene is not full of high poly content, it's fine. But I belive the older 15" MacBooks will self-destruct if you try rendering much on them.
I have rendered 11 characters (some G3 others G8) and a complicated background on a 4GB nVidia card, but it was heavily optimised, ie most of the characters' maps were reduced to 2Kx2K or 1Kx1K depending on how close they were to the camera. To be honest I would recommend a card of a least 8GB these days, that should be able to handle most scenes you are likely to want to render.
I only render on GPU, leaving the CPU free for me to work on other stuff whilst the scene is rendering. I have a quiet PC, so the fan on the GPU is barely heard when rendering.
If you only have one computer you do everything with, this is an important consideration, IMO. You can even start setting up your next scene in an additional instance of Daz Studio while the first is rendering, as long as you stay away from Iray previews, and probably heavy dForcing.
Could you tell me the features your MacBook Pro has? And what about if you render 3 or 4 1920x1080 pictures per day with 3 or 4 genesis 3/8 characters and with a background, doesn't your Mac heat up too much? And how much would it delay in every render?
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How fully rendered would you want the image? Do you render to 100% every time?
This is my Mac - with the most expensive processor, the cheapest graphics card, and the cheapest memory. https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space-grey-2.3ghz-8-core-processor-1tb#
I have an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015 - 4 GHz Intel Core i7) with 8 available cores, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB with 32 gb ram running on High Sierra. Yes, if you want to render fast with Iray you need a Nvidia graphics card. The image here was rendered in 7 hours with 6 complete G8 models and no optimization whatsoever. I am on the fence now as I would like to build my own PC just for rendering (even though I have no experience it would be great to learn how with so much information out there). As I get more involved with learning various 3D software and applications I'd like to render things while continuing to work on other projects. Touch wood, my iMac has never crashed while rendering in the 5 years I have owned it...and yes, I have heaps of patience, but Apple seems to be moving in a direction that is uncertain when it comes to 3d rendering, so I have to look to the future with an open mind. :-)
I custom created this just for you. I stopped the render at 5 minutes. 1920x1080, with the entire town of Alsace, and 4 Genesis 8 characters fully costumed, and with hair. The Mac cooling fans stopped about 90 seconds after the render stopped. The machine heated up a bit. I have no idea how long it would take to render it to 100% - maybe hours and hours, maybe 40 minutes - I don't know. I didn't "optimize" anything. All the textures are at full resolution.
Iray is extremely GPU focused, it is owned by Nvidia after all. That is why Iray will not work on AMD GPUs, as it uses Nvidia CUDA. It is even worse for Apple products, because Nvidia and Apple have parted ways, and there have not been any new Nvidia GPU drivers for Apple. That means you cannot run Daz on Apple even if you manage to plug a Nvidia GPU up to it. You can render on CPU, but for most people, that is a fraction the speed of even a half decent GPU. But GPUs do have a major drawback, VRAM is an absolute limit. If you run out of VRAM for your scene, then the render will drop to CPU mode anyway! I cannot stress this enough. So VRAM is as important a factor as the GPU rendering speed itself, and VRAM is something you need to consider if you are serious about using GPU. Sorry to say, but 4GB is really going to be tight. I used to have 4GB, I wasn't happy, LOL. You can get by, but you will be limited in what you can do.
As for how much you will need, well that is very hard to say. Every scene is different, and the data that a scene will take in VRAM is different from that of system RAM. So you cannot really look at RAM usage and say this is how much VRAM you need. Typically the amount of RAM I have in use is around double or more than that of the VRAM in use.
So that is the one advantage to rendering with CPU only. You can make scenes as large as your system RAM can handle. Though like I just said, that does use more. So while 16GB might sound like a lot, even that might be limiting. That would be comparable to a GPU with around 6 or 8 GB of VRAM. But again, it depends on what you are doing.
As for heat, well a laptop's form factor is going to make it run hot, and it doesn't matter if it is GPU or CPU. If you render on CPU, the CPU gets hot, and if you render on GPU then that will get hot. Iray is a very demanding task on whatever hardware it runs on, as it runs without any limits. Most video games have a limit as to how far they will go, like you might cap the frame rate at 60 frames per second. Iray doesn't do that. Having said that, video games can run a GPU hotter than Iray will, if it is a demanding game on the hardware. If you game with unlocked frame rates, it can run hotter than Iray. On my machine, I have games that will run 10C hotter than Iray.
We have a nicely organized Iray benchmark thread here. You can download the scene yourself and try it out. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1
This bench only factors speed, not VRAM, because there is just no way to factor that in. There are some CPUs on that list, but very few. The i9-9900k runs around 0.58 iterations per second. A Ryzen 3700x hit 0.633 iterations per second. A Ryzen 2600x is on that list, which is slightly faster than a non x version of your #2 option, and it does 0.486 iterations per second. Meanwhile, a GTX 1650 hit 1.55 iterations per second, that is almost 3 times faster than a high end desktop. Let me assure you that a laptop CPU will not be nearly as fast. Though a laptop 1650 might be slightly slower than its desktop as well.
But if you go up to a 2060, the iteration count goes up to 3.832, a huge jump over that 1650, and even more massive compared to the CPUs. A 2060 offers 6GB of VRAM, so a little more wiggle room on VRAM. The 2060 Super is where things begin to get really good, as it offers 8GB of VRAM. The 2060 Super hit 4.444 iterations per second in the benchmark scene. That is 7.6 times faster than a desktop i9, and that i9 costs more than a 2060 Super! Actually, the i9 costs more than all of the GPUs I listed above. I like the 2060 Super because it is the cheapest GPU to offer both 8GB VRAM and RTX. The ray tracing cores in RTX GPUs make a real difference in render speeds. You can see on that chart the 2060 and 2060 Super are much faster than nearly all of the non RTX GPUs, even ones that are much more expensive. The 2060 Super is faster than a 1080ti, a monster of a GPU that was the fastest GPU of 2017 and still commands a solid premium on ebay. The 1080ti is a better GPU for gaming, and it offers 11GB of VRAM. But for Iray, the RT cores allow the 2060 Super to smoke it. That is amazing. (Though for me, I would not trade my 1080ti for a 2060 Super because I do want that sweet sexy VRAM.)
Sadly, a 2060 Super in a laptop is a huge upgrade in price as well. I usually recommend doing desktops for this reason, along with the heat generated. Can you do a desktop? A 2060 Super desktop with a decent CPU is going to cost less than most Macs while offering a lot more performance, and being Nvidia it will be fully able to do Iray. And being a desktop, you can easily upgrade it later on. If you want a new GPU, just buy a new GPU and pop it in.
BUT I do want to point out that new GPUs are literally around the corner. Nvidia is set to announce their new lineup on August 31, and most believe they will launch in September. Now even if they do not launch a replacement for the 2060 and 2060 Super right away, you can expect these to be easier to get, or maybe better GPUs might get cheaper in the used market as people upgrade to the new stuff.
@Fauvist wrote:
I don't believe this is the case. I was using DAZ Studio for years on a 15" MacBook Pro with a Core i7 (early 2014 model). It coped just fine with all the scenes that I threw at it, including multiple-figure scenes with hi-res textures. Because these were CPU-only renders, they took much longer than a GPU render would take, so I typically left it to run overnight. I render final versions at 3200x2400, which generally took about 8 hours or so on that machine. Rendering maxed out the CPU and caused the fans to run at full speed, but the machine never 'self-destructed'.
In 2019, I upgraded to a 2019 model, with an i9 processor (also a 15" model; I upgraded a few months before the 16" models came out). This also handles DAZ Studio well, and renders significantly faster than the 2014 (although still not as fast as a GPU render).
Incidentally, here's a pro tip for you: if you're running one of the newer MacBook Pro laptops with USB-C ports, make sure that the power cable is plugged into one of the ports on the left-hand side of the machine, not the right-hand side. It turns out that charging from a right-hand port generates far more heat on the motherboard. This may sound crazy, but after months of having my machine constantly throttling its speed to avoid overheating, I turned it around and plugged the power cable into a left-hand port. The difference is like night and day.
@outrider42 wrote:
Much of what @outrider42 says is correct, but this isn't (obviously, given what I said above). DAZ Studio runs fine on Apple equipment, although it is limited to CPU renders only.
It is theoretically possible to do GPU renders on some Apple equipment. Some older Macs -- such as my 2014 MacBook Pro -- actually shipped with Nvidia cards, although in the case of the laptops the cards mostly have too little VRAM to be usable for Iray rendering. It's also possible to hook up an Nvidia GPU in an external 'breakout box' via the Thunderbolt interface. I know of at least one person who posts on the forums who has made this work successfully. However -- and this is a big however -- you can't do this with newer versions of MacOS. Nvidia drivers for Apple aren't available for Mojave or Catalina (due to the Apple/Nvidia dispute that @outrider42 correctly described), so you have to drop back to at least High Sierra. Newer machines won't run High Sierra at all, so this is generally only an option with older Macs. You also run into issues with the Thunderbolt interface. Apple's external GPU code is designed to run over Thunderbolt 3, but older machines mostly have Thunderbolt 1 or 2 interfaces. There are scripts available at egpu.io that will let you work around this, but you end up piling patch upon patch to get it working.
So, in summary: DAZ Studio runs fine on current and recent Apple hardware, but you're limited to CPU-only rendering for Iray. GPU rendering is possible for a select number of mostly older machines, either using internal or external GPUs, but it's a gigantic pain in the ass to get it working.
There is one other option for Apple users, which is to use an external rendering service. You set up the scene using DAZ Studio as usual, then use the Iray bridge to send the geometry and textures to an external server for rendering. DAZ's own Jack Tomalin runs such a service, and there may be others available. I've used Jack's service, and found it worked pretty well: it takes a while to initially upload a scene (because all those giant texture files have to be sent over the Internet), and of course you're sharing the resources with other users, so you may have to wait a while for your scene to make its way through the queue. But it definitely works, and it's a decent option for anyone who can't find a space in their life or home for a PC.
Having said all of this, I would have to say that a Windows PC will generally be a much better platform for DAZ. Unless you're an absolute Apple loyalist or need to use Apple hardware for some other reason, a Windows PC will probably give you more power for less money, especially if you get a GPU with a decent amount of VRAM. Moreover, because most DAZ Studio users are on Windows, DAZ's engineers pay more attention to the Windows builds of DAZ Studio than the Mac version. Other things being equal, you can expect the Windows version to be more stable, more up-to-date and so on.
In 2011 I bought this, secondhand from a friend, because I needed something to surf the net after a brandnew pc laptop had melted down from watching a couple of YT clips.
Installed DS and it has been rendering more or less non stop since, have replaced the fan once for 20€, still working. And it has been used to test brute force pathtracing since Sep 2018 when aweSurface was released:) It's actually rendering right now, fan is going full speed. Granted it is super slow, and I rarely use it for final renders, for that I use a Macbook Pro 2015/ 8GB RAM. It's my job computer, doing some heavy rendering and working with 30+ audiotracks simultaniously is no problem at all, fan is not saying much, but yeah, if I open another DS instance and add to that some dForce sim, I can hear it
(NOT saying pc:s are crap etc. just a story from real life)
One thing I would add to this discussion is that if you plan on doing render regularly, then in my personal opinion I would recommend getting a desktop and not a laptop. Unless the laptop is built for constant gaming that uses a lot of graphics. The reason is rendering puts a continous load on the processors and memory and that generates a lot of heat. Constant heat tends to accelerate wear on electonic components and desktop (mid-tower) computers have more room to dissipate heat especially if you put in a good cooling system.
Also when a computer gets too hot (internally but may feel okay externally) the processors are supposed to slowdown to prevent damaging the components. So long renders would take longer. Keeping things cools gives you faster renders and longer life computers.
One option you might want to consider is getting an affordable laptop that can let you do your scene building in DAZ Studio and a well cooled desktop computer (with or without an Nvidia graphics adpater) and leave it to do your renders. In both machines I would recommend atleast 16GB RAM and atleast a 2.5GHz CPU more RAM and faster CPU is better and ofcourse a nice Nvidia graphics adapter would be nice. Also if you go this route and you plan your desktop computer properly, then you could always make upgrades to it down the road when you can afford it.
You may also want to buy these items to help reduce scene size for rendering:
Scene Optimizer - https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
Resource Saver Shaders Collection for Iray - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
Older Macbooks had ok cooling for the installed HW. It's the more recent, and the Macbook pro's in particular, that have completely inadequate cooling. They certainly won't melt the first time you run a render on them, at least they shouldn't, but they will hit 100C and thermal throttle hard. I certainlt wouldn't sit one on my legs in shorts or thin pants while doing anything serious.
If you use them heavily they will have relatively short lifespans though, overheating frequently will degrade the components.
I'd definitely avoid those for DS. But for iRay you should avoid those anyway since no Nvidia.
But please unless you absolutely need portability don't buy laptops as a computer for this sort of work. It will cost more, be harder to use and you will get far less bang for the buck.
Thank you so much for all your advices guys. I'll consider each of them carefully.