What's your experience with Daz Studio and M1 Macs?

cishanjia

Hi, all,

I've recently bought a new M1 (Apple Silicon) iMac and want to try Daz on that.  Tech support reported when asked that Daz runs through Rosetta at the moment (which means it has to be "interpreted" from the Intel version in order to run on an M1 processor), which is going to add an overhead.  Plus I'm expecting there might be some stability issues.  But, I'm willing to give it a go - at least while I look to upgrade my older Intel iMac to Monterey and upgrade the Daz install on that.

So I'm wondering (can't find the answers by scrolling or searching the forum):

Anyone here running Daz on an M1 iMac under Monterey - if so, what is your experience of it?  Is it stable?  Is it fast enough (given it has to run through the processor and not a graphics card - but that's my set up on the Intel iMac anyway)?

Presumably it's installed via the DIM download?

Many thanks.

Take care,

Ian

 

TBorNot

I have an M1 Mac Ultra and it works just fine.  Haven't had any crashes.  It's not NVidia, so you won't get any speed, but you won't get any on an AMD PC either.

leemoon_c43b45a114

I'm running DAZ Studio 4.20.1.38 on an M1 iMac (16 GB RAM / 2 TB. SSD / macOS 11.6.6 Big Sur) without any issues.  I've also updated my Intel i9 MacBook Pro 16" to macOS Monterey and DAZ Studio 4.20.0.17, also not seeing any issues (though that's on an Intel Mac w/Monterey.)

The Intel MacBook Pro can do Iray rendering a bit faster, but I'm comfortable with the render times.  As a matter of fact, I do 99% of my renders with the M1 iMac.

I also have an M1 MacBook Air that I'm planning on upgrading to macOS Monterey.  I'll try to remember to report back on my experience once I've done that (probably over the weekend or early next week.)

On a fresh DAZ Studio install with Monterey, I couldn't get DIM to install it.  I copied the DAZ Studio installer .zip file from the DIM downloads folder to the desktop (for convenience), unzipped it, and right-clicked on the installer (to select the "Open" option which lets you open/run files from non-App store sources.) The install went perfectly (DIM just hangs at 0% installing for the actual DAZ Studio app, the other support files installed fine via DIM.)

My experience mirrors that of TBorNot.  Very happy with DAZ Studio on Apple Silicon Macs.

Lee

 

juliano.cruz_97bea1265e

I have a newbrand Mac Studio M1 Max processor, and Studio Display. Everything works fine, but my render windows looks blurry because of the retina resolution. When I am rendering, the result in render window is blurry, but when I save the image is ok in its real resolution. 
Has anyone else noticed this detail on retina displays?

cishanjia

Thank you all for your answers.  You are such wonderful people!

Looks like I may be able to double up the M1 and Intel Macs, then.  If I run into any trouble installing Daz on the M1 Mac, I'll do the usual and contact tech support!

Regarding the blurry image question, I've (obviously) only used Daz on Intel Macs, but haven't come across any differences between the render window and final viewing window - aside from the obvious caveat that the resolutions may differ.  I use a third party viewer, and since I usually render the master versions in 8K, if viewing on the 5K screen the viewer is going to be downgrading the image from 8K to 5K.  Similarly, if changing from an 8K master to an HD final image for the galleries here, I use another third party graphics app.

Neither when viewing the rendering (8K) image, nor the final (8K) image in 5K, nor the final HD image do I notice any obvious blurring.  The one exception (possibly) is that sometimes eyes appear blurry when the rest is in focus, but that's consistent in both the rendering image and the final image viewing.  So that doesn't sound like the same problem.