Mac or PC
cjrosdat4
Posts: 20
The question of the century and the answer for the moment! I have a dilemma with picking out which platform to utilize and purchase. I am sporting a potato laptop with only 6GB of ram and 3 cores. Obviously, any upgrade regardless of the OS and hardware is better than what I have now. I have heard many great points and pros about PCs. I have also heard very harsh points and cons about Macs. However, it has come to my attention that Macs tend to perform better with production rather than PCs due to certain specks Macs only have. Since Macs are tuned for this sort of production activity, i.e.: Music Production. I am wondering here whether this holds true for DAZ3D as well. Does Daz3d, and other software of the likes, perform better on a Mac or a PC? And, I am in search of a better laptop in the nearer future. So, what is a recommended laptop to use for this type of work? I am not a consistent user of DAZ3D but I come back every now and then to create a still image or something cool. So, any recommendations for how this all fits together? This came to my attention from a YouTube named Andrew Huang, a DJ/Electronic Music Producer. His video sparked a newer idea that Macs are better for Music Production than PCs, and I want to know if this is true for DAZ3D and other software!
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Comments
That is very, very far from a new idea. For DS, a PC with an Nvidia GPU will render Iray much, much faster than any Mac. If you wanted to use 3Delight or some other render engines that only render on CPU, the margin is much smaller, but there's also broader support for plugins on PC than Mac.
Okay, cool! Thanks for the feedback. It is a new idea for my knowledge though (should have made that clear). Regardless, I appreciate you! I Lastly, do you perhaps have a recommendation for which laptops are better for Production on DAZ3D? I am sporting a potato laptop...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/451486/daz-studio-macos-big-sur-compatibility#latest
PC for sure, especially for DS. If you are basing your ideas off a single source (the video) then you need to do some googling. Both have their pros and cons and I have used both in the past. My GF uses a mac and while she doesn't use DS, she tends to run into compatibility issues with software and that is also an issue here in the store.
Also, does it have to be a laptop since the specs you need for high end rendering with DS are harder on laptops than desktops and may cost you a bit more..
The Mac vs. PC debate could go on forever and there are good arguments on both sides. Personally, I like Macs.
But if you're planning to use DAZ Studio to do Iray rendering, then the choice is absolutely clear. You want a PC. Period. This is because Iray is dependent on GPUs made by Nvidia. Apple does not support Nvidia cards now and almost certainly never will.
Incidentally, I've also found that Vue and Mojoworld run a lot better on PC than Mac. And recent changes in MacOS have rendered Bryce and possibly Carrara unusable on current versions of the MacOS. So if you use any of those applications or would like to, then a PC is once again the better choice.
Some things may change over the next few years. Iray will probably never run as well on a Mac as it does on a PC with an Nvidia GPU. However, the new Macs based on Apple Silicon are powerful brutes and Apple is likely to start shipping their own GPUs as well eventually. That might make Macs the platform of choice for other 3D programs and rendering engines in future. But today, you almost certainly want a PC.
I got rid of my Mac and switched to a PC because of the graphic card issue with Daz. I do stuff with film editing as well and though it was a slight adjustment from the Mac programs for film work, I can't fathom going back after seeing how much faster a PC is and what more bang you get for your buck.
I work with both Mac and PC. I personally prefere Mac. But you´re asking on a DAZ forum and specifically for that program, it´s 100% PC. More specifically a PC with a Nvidia GPU with at least X GB of memory.
(What number X is... is a matter of opinion. I have seen 4, 6, 8, 12, and even higher numbers thrown around.)
Personally I would say at least 2-3 times as much system RAM as VRAM on your card. DS/Iray needs the system RAM to to setup things before loading the VRAM on your card.
- Greg
PC/Windows... this from a person who uses a Mac for other stuff and has been a Mac user for decades... Macs are good for plenty of other stuff (don't call me out on that) but there are too many little problems that end up cropping up that become an annoyance over time.
Right now the issue with Big Sur is a perfect example... That and no Nvidia for the iRay.
Whatever makes you happy.
For me Mac is the best for programming and adobe software, but to run Daz you need GPU power, a lot of it, if you wish your stuff to look photo realistic and denoise each render in the shortest time possible.
Firstly, DAZ is the company. Secondly, you need GPU power to run IRay, not DAZ Studio.
For rendering iray in Daz Studio, you definitely want a PC.
However, for music, you would indeed want a Mac, especially when it involves electronic instruments, plugins and mixing tables. A lot of very common software doesn't even exist on PC, and equivalents on PC aren't always as good as their mac counterparts. There's simply more in-depth knowledge about sound and making user interfaces that are convenient for DJs and musicians on Mac. Some manufacturers of electronic instruments only just started PC support for their products. PC is catching up, but it may be another 3 years before it completely catches up with this last technological advantage for the Mac.
dForce needs OpenCL, which was available on Macs with AMD GPUs but I think is now or soon will be removed in favour of a Mac-specific API.
I think there should be another thing to consider:
you can render Iray also on CPU, if you do not want to constantly run after Nvidia's software and hardware updates. For this to work smoothly, you'll need a very powerful CPU (and, I guess, lots of RAM will never do harm).
You can have powerful CPUs both on PCs and Macs.
So, if DAZ is not a main issue and you think you could do fine with your still renders also creating them with CPU, you can still rely on a Mac for your music production activity, if it's your main target. I know some musicians, and they use Macs.
I confirm that, on the lower side, you may find compatibilities issues with Daz plugins or "side softwares" that are not developed for mac. For that, you could also consider virtualization or double-boot option to use Windows on a Mac [-> this last thing availability needs to be checked for most recents Macs].
Regardless of how one feels about Mac or PC, when it comes to using applications like Daz Studio, you really want a PC. Iray is Daz's main render engine, with pretty much everything sold being geared for it. Iray skews MASSIVELY towards GPUs, so much it is not even funny. We have a benchmark thread you can look at. You can download the test scene for yourself and compare your times to that of others. This will give you a great idea of what to expect, but if you just have an old CPU, it may be best not to bother benching yours, it will likely time out after 2 hours. Meanwhile, almost any modern GPU can run the same scene in a matter of minutes.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking
You will find benchmarks of both CPUs and GPUs in that thread. I benched my brand new Ryzen 5800X, which has 8 cores and 16 threads. This is one of the better desktop CPUs you can currently buy, it took over 40 minutes to render the benchmark scene. However, my GTX 1080ti from 2017 only takes 6 minutes and 30 seconds. The GTX 1080ti was a top card in 2017, but it is quite outdated now. Pretty much every RTX card is faster, much faster in fact. So yeah, 40 minutes versus 6.5 minutes...it is not remotely close. And this is a simple scene, just think that more complicated scenes will take longer. The scale may vary, but you are looking at 6 times longer with a pretty good CPU versus an aging GPU. And any newer GPU can make that number just look silly. The 2080ti is about twice as fast as the 1080ti. The 3000 series goes totally nuts, as even the 3060 is about twice as fast as the 1080ti, and the 3060 is the slowest 3000 series card! The 3080 and 3090 make the 1080ti just look sad. And they will make a mockery of any CPU on the planet. You would basically need a $2000 Threadripper to even get to a 1080 (that is the non ti) in performance. $2000, and that is just for the CPU! You will not find Threadrippers in Macs.
Iray runs on CUDA, and CUDA is exclusive to Nvidia GPUs. But Apple and Nvidia have had a major falling out with each other, and that results in no new Nvidia drivers for Mac. And Daz Studio updates will require new drivers to run. Thus you will be limited to CPU rendering on Mac. Plus like Richard said above, Apple even plans on killing OpenGL support, which would mean you can't even use Daz at all on a Mac when this happens. At least not until Daz gets updated to use it, but this is not certain.
As if that was not enough, many plugins for Daz Studio may not work on Mac, or may not even be available at all.
It all adds up to this, if you plan on using Daz Studio (as well as a number of other similar software), you are FAR better off sticking with PC, unless you are some kind of masochist.
For Music Production you should choose a MacBook Pro
for anything related to 3D Rendering you should choose Windows with Nvidia qraphics card
Here's my attitude, pure and simple. I want the best chance of loading and using my content, and make art as effortless as possible. In order to accomplish that goal, a Windows PC is a must. I can make a list of hardware that is needed for maximum effectiveness, and build or buy a PC that will accomplish my goals.
...so once the scene is finished loading into VRAM shouldn't the system RAM (and CPU) load drop? I've been monitoring render processes though MSI Afterburner and Windows Task Manager, yet after the scene begins to render in VRAM indicators for both system memory and CPU still show a high usage for both throughout the process.
I´m very much Not An Expert... but I think you can avoid that by deselecting CPU usage in Render Settings -> Advanced
...I have, but it still keeps pegging CPU cores and bloating system RAM load while rendering even though it is rendering on the GPU. I have a Titan-X (12 GB VRAM on W7 so WDDM is not a factor like it is with W10) and the scenes I'm currently rendering are around 4 - 4.5 GB on average.
Just in case aspiring musicians are reading this thread and directly want to throw all their money at Apple: Even for music production, imho it doesn't really matter if you don't want to do live shows and don't rely on some Mac-only synths and effects such as Metasynth or the Logic Alchemy version. PCs are fine for studio music production and since some recent Mac updates, some devs do not even support Mac or more specifically the AU format anymore with their newest synths. For instance, Tone2 Warlock is currently not compatible with Logic but runs perfectly fine in all DAWs on my PC.
Don't know where this myth comes from that Macs are better for musicians. Other than the lack of Logic Pro on PC there is no factual advantage to Mac as far as I know. Wether Logic is desirable or not is heavily based on preference. Plenty of people hate it.
I could well be wrong, but I believe Pro Tools used to be Mac only. There were also a number of hardware manufacturers who only built for Mac; Thunderbolt was never widely implemented on PCs, nor was FireWire before it; AVB works natively on Macs with Thunderbolt, but as far as I'm aware there still isn't a decent implementation of it for PC, etc. Having said all that, I've been producing music on PC for decades and utterly reject the idea that a Mac is necessary.