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At this point, my opinion is that the DAZ team would be better off by abandoning the Mac completely. DAZ 3D doesn't have that big a development team, and updating the QT library for both Win and Mac just to achieve Big Sur compatibility just seems silly to me. And it will affect Windows users negatively, unecessarily so. Also, that's not even taking into account M1 compatibility, which will introduce a new set of hurdles to overcome. And for what? A lacluster version of DAZ Studio on macOS that can't even use hardware Iray rendering?
All that hard work, just to get an inferior product (Iray) compared to Windows.
To my understanding, Filament comes nowhere close to the render quality of Iray, so the truth is that Mac owners will end up getting an inferor product, no matter which way you look at it, like they always have been getting since Apple ditched Nvidia. So why bother?
TLDR: DAZ 3D should ditch the Mac version, and focus on making DAZ Studio the best it can be on Windows. It will simplify the process and save the development team a lot of headaches.
The issues causing the mac version to no longer work will catch up with the windows version eventually. DS is a cross-platform application, its not like they're maintaining two separate programs. It's the same program at its core. The QT upgrade is sorely needed, I recall reading that DS is on either QT 3 or 4, which are both ancient in terms of software (we're talking windows XP days). If we ever want to see DS get modernized and more performant, the QT upgrade is needed.
You might be correct about QT. However you failed to mention the Iray issue. DAZ Studio is heavily crippled on macOS due to the DAZ mainly using Nvidia's Iray. The majority of Mac users are forced to resort to software rendering. And that is a problem.
So to say that DS is cross-platform is techically true, but it's a bit misleading, as it gives the impression that performance is smililar on both platforms. It's not. One platform is heavily crippled, due to a decision to go with Iray years and years go.
Unless the DS development teams incorporates a platform-agnostic hardware renderer that equals or is better than Iray (Filament doesn't count), then clearly they should just scrap the Mac version at this point. Why bother developing a Mac version that will always be crippled compared to Windows, especially when the Mac userbase is much smaller as well?
I honestly don't know why the DS team are still supporting the Mac at this point. The DS Mac userbase is much smaller compared to Windows, and the Mac version is heavily crippled when it comes to rendering. So it makes more logical sense to just axe it. I mean, the DS team are working their asses off getting it Big Sur (and eventually M1) compatible, and for what? Just so that BIg Sur users can once again be reminded of how much better a PC is for rendering? What a joke.
For all you Mac owners out there (like me) that uses DS, and want to work with 3D. Get a PC. It's that simple. Even when DS is fully Big Sur and M1 compatible, you'll still end up with a sub-par experience compared to DS on Windows. The devs need to ditch Iray, otherwise what's the point?
There are a fair number of Mac users who, fortunately, aren't like you.
It's true that it's almost like there's two DAZ Studios at times, but it's not a Windows version and a Mac version; I prefer to think of it as DAZ Studio and iRay Studio (or "NVidea Studio")..
DAZ Studio wss designed to allow users to use DAZ content to make 3D images. To run DAZ Studio, you need a computer (Mac or PC), some hard drive space and some RAM. If you're like me, who still does his 3D rendering on a 2012 iMac, you'll need at leats a 4 terabyte drive just to hold your content... actually 5 terabytes is my current library drive. DAZ Studio comes with multiple rendering engines built in (and others available externally), including a very popular one for those who want or need photorealism, iRay, but we can't forget those other rendreing engines, all of which are just as good or even better at tasks other than photorealism.
iRay Studio is very similar; it also works on computers (Mac or PC) but runs iRay faster on *some* PCs than on Macs; it doeesn't render better quality with an NVidea card, just faster. If you have a high-end Radion video card that has lots of VRAM and cost over a $1,000, well, you might as well have a Mac because you don't have an iray Studio system, you have a DAZ Studio system.
You can't tell a Mac user to just buy a PC, what you have to tell them is to buy a really, really good NVidea card and some sort of computer system to support it. If you're running a high-end NVidea card, the PC is secondary.
Many Mac users have either switched to Windows machines to work in iRay Studio or purchased a Windows machine to let them work on Mac but render on Windows. Slow iRay rendering isn't new, and the options have always been there. If a Mac user wants to render in iRay, they can, if they want or need to do it quickly, then they have the Windows option.
But what happens when your PC isn't fast enough, where do you go? When you want to make your benders bigger, better, or just plain have so much in them that it's more than your VRAM can hold? What? Your expensive NVIdea card tells iRay Studio to go CPU? You mean it becomes as slow as a.. gulp... Mac? Horrors.
I'm not an iRay Studio guy, and I'm just fine with 3DL, OpenGL and Filament. I've been using Filament for a while and I'm really, really looking forward to it coming to the Mac, and I'm sure it will. I suspect there are others who feel the same, especialy if they're playing with animation.
So, "iRay Studio" is "crippled" for Mac users, and for Windows users who can't afford to keep up their NVidea upgrades but *only* if they're hooked on iRay. Otherwise they can probably run DAZ Studio just fine.
Should DAZ keep supporting Mac? I hope so, but if they don't, I'm cool too. After looking over my Poser/DAZ purchases over the last 25 years (I still have my first Poser beta diskette buried somewhere) and my other pre-Poser 3D software (Infini-D, Macromedia 3D, etc.) I see I've spent almost $100,000 in total. YIkes. Never look back at your purchase list. I can probably keep using my older Macs to play in the DAZ Studio without upgrading or buying new content until I die just fine... or go back to programming gmaes for fun, drawing or 3D sculpting on my iPad, etc.
But, again, your question was *should they?*.
To answer that, we'd have to know DAZ's sales breakdown. Is the Mac platform worth it? I don't honestly know. We hear constantly how much smaller the Mac group is, but how do profits compare? Is it possible that the average Mac user spends much more than the average PC users? They do in the mobile app stores (almost 50% more last time I checked), but even if they do, is it enough?
I've slowed down my purchases a lot, not becaue I'm not an iRay guy (I still buy a lot of iRay stuff as it's all still useable without iRay, and even more so with Filament for me) and I still give DAZ thousands a year. Heck, I've spent hundreds in the last few weeks on $1.99 purchases.
An interestng thought: if there are a dozen Mac customers like me, just a dozen, what could DAZ do with *just* the profits we supply them year after year? Keep developing for Mac, making all other profits from Mac users money that doesn't need to go to development?
Another interesting thought: we know that all of the software development comes from their three-man team. Could they use some of the Mac profit to, I don't know, hire another programmer? Imagine what a four-man team could do... or even a five-man team!
I mean, someone's gotta start working on Windows 11, right? Newer, more powerful NVidea card support?
Regardless of whether you're Mac or PC, there are times when iRay will "cripple" our system. If a Mac user should turf their Mac because it's "crippled" running iRay (still works, mind you, just more slowly, roughly as fast as a Windows user whose system drops back to CPU), what should a Windows user do when their system can't cut it? Give up?
As mentioned, I'm still using a 2012 iMac for DAZ Studio (I have a much faster iMac, but that's for work only, DAZ Studio is on my "fun" machine) and amazingly it can run newer Mac OSs than DAZ Studio can run on, but I've "throttled" it to Mojave just for the 32-bit lip synch, and it runs just as fast and renders just as fast as it did back in 2012. It's almost as fast as a much newer Windows machine with a high-end graphics card (oops, "NVidea" card) when it comes to OpenGL and Filament.
I guess "the point" that you're asking about is simply this: it's not *all* about iRay. There was DAZ Studio before there was an iRay, and it's still doing what it did back then, pretty much better, and once they support Big Sur and Filament on a Mac, even better!
Once iRay's not "the point", then why switch?
One more thing: "The DS Mac userbase is much smaller compared to Windows, and the Mac version is heavily crippled when it comes to rendering. So it makes more logical sense to just axe it." -- this "much smaller userbase" also refers to the Windows users who don't own a hight-end NVidea card... should DAZ just "axe" them too? Maybe make a true NVidea Studio, free of 3DL an OpenGL? That much less time and resources supporting users who aren't really important anymore...?
-- Walt Sterdan
Let's not turn this into a platform (civil) war, please. It is up to Daz to decide whether the Mac version is worth pursuing, although I will point out that the Qt update is also necessary before Daz Studio can gain the much-requested ability to scale the UI for high resolution displays on either platform.
I thought I was trying very hard to not come across as waging a platform war (no one wins), and if I what I posted did come across as such, my apologies, Richard.
-- Walt Sterdah
Let's not forget the fact that 3Delight has a built in pathtracer, accessible via scripted rendering. A good option for those that want results similar to IRay but are on a Mac or a PC without an IRay compatible GPU. Rendering on the CPU will be many times faster than IRay. I find it sad that DAZ never unlocked this feature for the DS end users, since it's been there many years before IRay came along.
That said, I have a question...been asking around a bit but never really got it sorted out. I'm on DS 4.9 and render in 3DL. Will this 4.9 version work on the M1? I'm about to upgrade from my late 2015 IMac and can't decide if I need a ProMac or the new M1. Only thing I know is I need CPU horsepowers, the quad core Intel5 processor is a sad story to be honest:)
Sorry, working while browsing, I missed that version 4.9 was stipulated, please ignore my comments.
-- Walt Sterdan
No DAZ Studio version currently works on macOS Big Sur, be it Intel or M1, especially as M1 Macs require macOS 11.0 Big Sur or above.
WRONG.
DS may not run natively in Big Sur, but it runs perfectly fine in both Windows and High Sierra VMs on Intel and M1 Macs.
I don't think the poster was thinking of VMs, and they were specifically asking about M1. Parallels and other VM software do not support ANY x86 OS'es on M1, which includes macOS High Sierra.
I remember seeing a post where someone used DS 4.11 under Big Sur, that's why I still had some hope. Of course the post is now digested by the forums and impossible to find. Ah well, guess I have to go the Intel route then...
Removed by mod for TOS violation
One user (Tugpax) is running D|S under Big Sur using betas:
"We may have stumbled on a working solution for the Mac version of Daz Studio 4.15.02 working on the Mac with BigSur. No more need to use Windows version.
BETA TEST WARNING! Not Official
I have tested 4.15.0.2 with other users and it works fine, actually its faster. You will need to have 4.11.0.383 Pro installed to get this to work. Keep the 4.11 installed make a backup copy of the folder. Install 4.15.0.2 and confirm that it fails to start. Check that 4.11 will still starts then close the application. In the new folder containing 4.15, rename the DAZStudio application executable and copy the 4.11 DAZStudio executable into that folder. Launch the newly copied application and you are good to go. Let me know if you have any issues.
Please test your plugins and let us know if you have issues. "
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/453421/why-8-9-months-for-a-big-sur-update/p4
Hope that helps.
-- Walt STerdan
That's really just a band-aid. And well, if you don't have DS version 4.11.0.383 Pro, you're hosed, since DAZ doesn't give you access to previous versions of the software. And are you sure this method works on M1 Macs?
That was not an m1 Mac, that was simply running a version of DAZ Studio under Big Sur; Sven was also thinking of a Mac Pro.
-- Walt Sterdan
Richard this past November:
"Daz is working on an update to address this issue (Big Sur), but it is not due until mid-2021."
Richard this month:
"…the work (Big Sur) is not something that can be released part done and it isn't something that admits of estimating how nearly there they are to give an ETA.»
So, which one is it? If the devs are unable to give an ETA, then why did you initially promise ‘mid-2021’?
And why didn't you make a sticky on it once you learned that the ETA changed from 'mid-2021' to 'uncertain'? Instead you only mentioned it in this thread when you were pressed on the matter.
This is really lacklustre, incoherent communication on your part. And that doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
At the start of the huge undertaking the developers gave the best estimate they could; they're at a point now where they can't accurately estimate how much longer it will take (the ninety-ninety ruile in program humourously states that the first 90 percent of the code accounts for 90 percent of the developement time while the remaining 10 percent accounts for the other 90 percent of the develpment time, but it's often not that far off for many larger projects).
Richard was good enough to let us know that we're not there yet and that the team isn't comfortable giving another ETA at this time. I am easlly one of the most vocal about wanting to know the status, and quite frankly just knowing this is good enough for me for now.
Richard can't give us information that doesn't exist, and I appreciate what he has done. He's helped measure my expectations.
I'm not sure why this matters to you, though, as you refuse to use a Mac due to it being crippled.
-- Walt Sterdan
*edited to correct typos and to make sentences out of gibberish
Stop making excuses for them. I'm sure Richard can answer my post himself.
I bought a Windows system earlier this year when the Big Sur & DAZ Studio issue landed. It is refurbished and has a Core i7-6700 CPU and 16 GB of memory. It does CPU renders just great and handles DAZ Studio without issue. I admit that this CPU (being a 6th generation) has some age on it, but I took DAZ at their word that this issue would be fixed around mid-year. This was not intended to be a long term system, more of a band aid to get my by until the Big Sur compatibility issue was fixed in mid year. Mid year (IMO) is July which is two days away.
At the same time I'm following talk about Windows 11 and the Core i7 is not on the approved CPU list. Remember when Windows 10 come out and Microsoft said that it was the final version?
Between MIcrosoft and DAZ this is becoming a pain in the you know what! I had just upgraded the memory on my 27 inch iMac to 24GB when DAZ Studio died on macOS.
And yes, I think this qualifies as a rant.
Daz didn't promise anything would be released mid-2021, they said nothing would be released before that.
That's quite a stretch. Note the use of the word 'due'.
The definition of 'due' is:
Expected at or planned for at a certain time.
"the baby's due in August".
And that sounds like a certain time-frame to me. Hence why so many people have asked now that it's mid-2021.
Yes, and I should not have put due (maybe it was going to be not due before, or maybe I was just clumsy).
In any event, mid-2021 has a way to run yet - I'd certainly regard July and perhaps early August as mid-year
All this development time and effort, and Mac users still get an inferior product (compared to the PC) when the wait is over.
I find that pretty funny :P
I posted earlier that I assumed you'd meant late July, early August, so no problem. Just letting me know that they're not comfortable giving an ETA at this time allows me to relax and plan my system updates and purchases, as well as concentrate more on prepping my project assets without worrying that I need to have a new computer standing by imminently. I recognize as well how difficult it is for you to have to keep frustrating and grumpy people like me from fomenting open revolt all the while without being given the information to do that properly.
Again, thanks for your update, and for your patience.
-- Walt Sterdan
It's not just about BigSur, but at the same time it is about DS 5.
We have no knowledge of how long the have been working with the new major update (my uninformed guess = 5-6yrs), but updating the Qt is big enought change to make the BigSur compatible version DS 5 with everything that has been planned for the next major update.
In a project that extensive, it is impossible to estimate how long the last stages will take - I have been involved in (closed) pre-release beta testing of products (hardware+software) for some 5 years and just the testing and the fixes of the found problems usually took a whole year.
What does that have to do with Mac users still ending up with an inferior product?
I don't fantasize about the usual things but rather Daz open sourcing Daz Studio. I think about what Daz Studio would be like if every person who posted a relatively simple yet crucial question in the SDK forum, just to be ignored, was actually able to succeed at his/her idea.
What does that have to do with Mac users still ending up with an inferior product?
I really shouldn't reply to rage baiting, but just this once.
Mac users don't get an inferior product compared to Windows users, period. Once Filament is supported, they will get the same product.
A hi-end Mac will render iRay faster than a low-end PC without an NVidea card; that doesn't make the Windows version "inferior" to the Mac version, so if a Mac system renders it slower than an NVidea-enabled PC, it's still not an inferior version of D|S.
DAZ alone knows how much profit it makes from Mac users; if they decide that the cost of supporting Mac outweighs that profit, it would be a good business decision on their part to discontue Mac support. It hasn't happened yet, but it might, but if it does it will be for that reason, not because you don't think it's a good idea.
If a Mac user decides that they need more speed and don't want to export to C4D and use Redshitt to GPU render, or Ocxtane, or Blender, or use a cloud-based render farm to speed things up, they can always buy a Windows machine; many have, and many haven't, but if they do they'll base it on their needs and their financial situation, not because you tell them they have to. I honestly can't see your opinions on the matter making any difference at all.
As someone who has removed DAZ Studio from their Mac and hasn't yet purchased a new Windows machine (based on your earlier posts), I'm at a loss to see why you feel the need to make these posts.
I'm pretty much done with this now, I hope you can get the attention you seem to so sorely need. Good luck with your future endeavours.
-- Walt Sterdan
Interesting. The PC version of Daz works fine on M1 Big Sur in emulation except the bug that makes characters instantiate really slowly makes the emulator explode. You guessed it, it's in the Qt section.
Up until the bug surfaces, the interface is far faster than on my old Intel Mac mini.
Thanks for the info, that agrees with what people are seeing running Poser, Blender and C4D under Rosetta 2 as well (well, except for the exploding part, that is).
Are you able to jump right into a render, or is that one of the Qt UI parts that self-destructs?
It's very encouraging, thanks again for sharing,
-- Walt