Mac vs PC: time to migrate?
marble
Posts: 7,500
I've had a Mac for the past 3 years and have enjoyed using it. However, my iMac doesn't do Iray and there are a few other plugins that are Windows only. Three years is quite long term for me as I used to upgrade my PC hardware every two years. I'm retired now and the money isn't available for frequent harware investments.
Nevertheless, I could still sell my iMac (eBay is showing good resale prices for my model) and put the cash towards a new PC. Much as I dislike Windows, Apple seems to have lost focus on their OSX products in favour of their IOS range. Everything seems geared to encourage buyers to become part of an Apple universe and I'm not interested in that.
So, having scanned the threads here discussing hardware, my price range would seem to include an intel Skylake, 16GB RAM and a GTX 970 or 980. A bit of advice from PC owners would be appreciated, bearing in mind that my funds are limited.
1. Is an i7 essential or would an i5 be good enough?
2. GTX 970 or go for the extra cuda cores in the 980? I've read that the performance jump is only in the order of 12% but most of the reviews are for gaming, not 3D rendering. Both have 4GB VRAM. Both seem to be economical on power usage.
3. I love my iMac 27" screen but I am not sure what to buy for a PC these days. Looks like IPS is the thing but some seem to have odd aspect ratios like 16:9 (plenty of width but not much height). Any recommendations?
I'd love to hear from users who have similar configuration, especially with regard to IRay performance. I'm using Reality 4.2 at the moment. It is pretty good for some scenes but slow for others. I don't tend to have scenes packed with people (2 mostly, 3 occasionally, four rarely). I spend an hour or so setting up materials and a typical render will be an hour with Reality 4.2 using CPU accelleration and Extra Boost. I'm hoping that Iray in GPU mode will be faster. The greally good thing about Luxrender is the fact that it can render away in the background while I work on the next scene. I believe that IRay can't do that so, if the render times are not fast enough, there's not much point in migrating to a PC after all.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Can't help you much on the other questions, but from own experience, I can say: Go for 32GB RAM or more. I.e. When you are using Iray and the scene is too large for the card, Iray keeps reloading all textures into the RAM, and if you have more than three characters in the scene, you'll run out of memory.
if you can't afford more GB for Ram straight away, make sure your motherboard can take it for later upgrading. :-)
When saying, more than three characters, I mean the equivalent in texture, as texture sizes is a main key.
I must have misunderstood the way IRay works, then. I thought that, if the scene is larger than the amount of VRAM on the GPU, then IRay switchs to CPU only and disables GPU rendering.
From what you are saying, I'm less inclined to spend all that money on new hardware. IRay seems to have so many demands that require hardware way out of my price range.
Well, it does switch to CPU, but all the "data" that was to be uploaded into the VRam needs to go somewhere so Iray can render it.
I'm not certain what the technical background is on this behaviour, but it should be happening on your MAC as well.
I've attached some images - first, how it looks pre-render. I loaded the new Colony set into DS.
Now I start the render. As the textures are way more than my old card can handle, it switches to CPU. You can see how immideately, the memory consumption goes up, even though the actual rendering hasn't started yet.
And here's the memory usage after rendering has actually started. As you can see, memoryusage has more than doubled.
I get that but what I am saying is that there is no point in spending money on an expensive GPU to use IRay if it is going to switch out to CPU mode. Once it has done that, it ignores the expensive GPU. I may as well stay with my iMac with 24GB RAM and use Reality.
Well, that's up to you, of course. No one's forcing you to use Iray. A "more expensive" GPU card will only be useful as long as you are able to fit the scene into it. Going by most of the regular set sizes here, 4GB VRam is the lowest size for reasonable use, the more the better. So you will always have that bottleneck, or will be forced to render in layers if your card can't fit the textures.
You were asking for opinions, I gave mine. No reason to shoot the messenger, you know.
Sorry, I didn't mean it to seem like I don't appreciate the advice. I was just trying to clarify whether I understood the process correctly. I'm trying to determine whether my typical scene will be too big for 4GB and, if so, the option of migrating to a PC with a GTX 970 or 980 is a non-starter.
I have tried IRay in CPU mode on my Mac and it is glacial compared to the latest Reality 4 in CPU accelerated mode. Having said that, there are issues with R4 too and they do become annoying when the problems limits me to a certain sub-set of my available library.
16GB and an i5 processor coupled with preferably a 980ti, failing that the best you can afford. The best i5 you can afford too. You could save a little cash by only having mechanical Hard Disks, and not having any SSDs. They don't add anything to rendering.
I use an i7; have 16GB of RAM - 32 would help at times, and sometimes more than others. I have a 970 and also a later bought 980ti to further improve render times. The extra 2GB of GDDR5 RAM over the 970 is also occasionally useful. But very rarely,
As an experiment I had about nine or ten figures using the same textures loaded and the scene was less than 2GB on the card.
It does depend on your scene, but two, three and four figures can certainly fit on your scene. Depends on how many textures, and much scenary apart from the figures - and its complexity.
Thanks. That gives me some idea of what I can do with what I can afford. The choice is really between the 970 and the 980 (the 980ti is out of reach for me). I configured a system online with a small SSD for the op sys and a 2TB mechanical drive for storage. It just stayed within my budget. I think UK prices are quite a lot higher than the US.
I'm surprised you prefer an i5 but that is why I asked in the first place. Also, I'm not sure how to choose the correct i5.
Just checking prices. The i5 cheaper than the i7 by the same amount the 980 is cheaper than the 980ti. Thus I could go for an i5 and use the savings for a 980ti.
Thank you so much for that reply, it did help me very much.
Getting a PC in March and now know what to look for.
Petra
I am not sure what is currently available, as I am not currently looking in the market, but I would suggest you consider AMD processors too, as they often give more bang for buck.
I have been using AMD processor families since the 1990s.
Never really been disappointed.
I prefer the i7; there will be some benefits to having it instead of an i5, but a top end i5 is a very capable processor, it has 4 threads instead of 8 which means when using the CPU to render it is slower. There will be less opportunity to multitask as effectively, but not greatly affected for most applications. Indeed for many, they only use one thread anyway.
But yes on a serious budget, I would go good i5 and 980ti to i7 and 980.
One thing worth considering is Nvidia are releasing a new graphics card series (Pascal) this year, and it will use an upgraded CPU die and process; although there are reports saying some cards will use existing (Maxwell) architecture.
I would be tempted to see what happens with the new Nvidia cards, once they start releasing Pascal cards with Pascal architecture. Pascal cards are also rumoured to be available with 12GB and more memory; the cap for Maxwell is 12GB, and for Pascal 32GB; http://www.pcworld.com/article/2898175/nvidias-next-gen-pascal-gpu-will-offer-10x-the-performance-of-titan-x-8-way-sli.html
As ever, such considerations are an individual's choice. You could go for the system you wish, with a 970, and then add an additional card later for rendering; two cards would be a lot better. But that would put your long-term budget up, but save you about £300 in the short term. Not sure if you're UK or not, but dollars or whareever have a somewhat similar differential. The only concern I would have is that the new card architecture might not be compatable with the motherboard you got. I would be very dubious about taking assurances from someone selling you a system - depending on how well you know them and what written guarantees they are prepared to offer. :)
970
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-asus-gtx-970-strix-direct-cu-ii-oc-pcie-30-7010mhz-gddr5-gpu-1114mhz-boost-1253mhz-cores-1664-dp
980ti
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/6gb-asus-gtx-980-ti-strix-directcu-iii-pcie-30-7010mhz-gddr5-gpu-1000mhz-boost-1075mhz-cores-2816-3x
Yes, I do tend to be impatient once I start thinking of buying. You are probably right - I should wait a while. An important consideration for me is that I upgrade before I emigrate later in the year. I'm going to New Zealand where the prices tend to be even higher than here in the UK, so I'll buy before I go and ship with the rest of my stuff. Later in the year means, however, at least October so plenty of time.
Who knows? Luxrender might do something wonderful and Reality might be a better option after all. Although my Mac doesn't do OpenCL either (Apple have bugs in the drivers). Or Maybe Octane has a March Madness Sale! Even so, I would still need a PC.
Speaking of Luxrender ...
The first question is are you able to build a PC from scratch? If yes, then a intel i5 4 core is enough, if you are doing Iray and 3delight renders. I would recommend a i7 3930k (socket r or 2011). This is a 6 core Intel but it is DDR3. The upside is that you can get a really nice deal on these processors due to the fact that everyone wants the Shiney new DDR4 platform but this is a wast of money. Make sure you get a motherboard with 8 memory slots most just come with 4 but the X79 chipset can handle 8 DDR3 memory chips. I own a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 and an Intel i7 3930k 6 core with 64 gb of ram. This motherboard comes with 4 pcie video card slots and I have a nvidia 640 2gb card in the first slot to just run video in the other 3 slots i have 3 nvidia 780 gtx's with 6gb of video ram each (for Iray). I built this system from scratch, and everything but the CPU, Memory, and Hardrives were refurbished or used. Why pay so much for new if you can get good deals on refurbished but this only works if you can built and trouble shoot computer systems. I would recommed a nvidia 750ti 4gb edition if you are on a budget for a video cart if not I would buy the 750ti first and save up and get a 980 with 6gb of video ram later. You can always just add the other 980's or 750's to your system for more Iray speed. Hope this helps.
I have built PC's in the past but from new components and with the advice of the vendor as to what is compatible with what. I'm not clued-up enough to know the technical intricacies of various generations of motherboards, processors, memory and GPU's. My harware support days are long behind me (20 years and more).
Thank you for taking the trouble to list the components though ... I will give these options a lot of thought.
marble, don't rush out yet and buy anything. 3DL and Iray do benefit from an i7 and more physical RAM on the motherboard. 32 GB really should be the minimum if you are concerned with speed. It will help load your scenes faster and help very much if you use 3Delight or if iRay defaults to the CPU. The i7 has hyperthreading, the i5 does not.
To save with money on the CPU, You can get an 8-core AMD processor and it will work well and save you a bunch of money though it won't be as fast as an i7, it will be faster than an i5.
The one thing everyone seems to forget... render stuff separately in your scene and composite!!! That's one of the biggest time savers around. If it's good enough for the studios, it's good enough for you.
Good point, but likely to run hotter and use more power; how much depends. It would be better checking out benchmarks.
There is also the fact that core for core AMD is not always quicker than a i5, but can be faster if it has more - a benefit for rendering; but if you are mainly using IRAY( then no matter the CPU a consumer can throw at the problem) a decent graphics card is very often faster.
And yes I composite images.
I would check benchmarks. Many 6 core and quad core intels are rated higher than an AMD 8 core. Only downfall to Intels is they run a bit hotter but if you have room for good airflow it won't be a problem. Liquid cooling would be best and cost about the same as a decked out fan system. My liquid cooling don't run any higher than 36C even on heavy loads. Most fan systems run upwards of 50+C
I looked at composite a while ago but didn't follow up. I think I decided that there is no way for the shadows to be realistic. The lights shine on the foreground figure and cast shadows on the background props but this can't happen if you composite. Or am I completely misunderstanding?
The more I read the advice here, the more it makes sense to wait. The new Pascal cards look a long way off - Q4 at least. Luxrender 1.6 looks promising (see the Youtube video above). But that also requires a PC with a decent OpenCL capable GPU. My Mac is not there by a long way so a migration is on the cards (pardon the pun) sooner or later.
You can do lots with compositing. If shadows are a concern, render out a scene one light at a time, and then composite each render together as layers in Photoshop with screen blend mode adjusting opacity for each. iRay can also render out a shadow canvas in Interactive render mode if it's needed.
Here's another way using iRay's LPEs. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/62101/relighting-with-iray-canvases
as an owner of a powerful and expensive PC system, maybe I can help with your decision to change to PC, but some questions on initial:
1-Your work really needs be rendered in iRay?, I've seen folks with zero knowledge of 3Delight and trying iRay and being frustrated, or maybe their workflow does not need iRay realistic capabilities.
and now the tips:
a-Yes, you will need a lot or Ram, even if you have a 4Gb of memory on a GPU you still will need normal RAM, 32 is a must.
b-Core i7 for iRay?, well I have Core i7 and combined with GPU does slower than GPU only, a simple Core i5 will do fine, remember that iRay uses GPU, not CPU, other tasks for CPU are irrelevant in this case.
c-YOU NEED A BEEFY GPU CARD!, no excuses, iRay uses CUDA cores, all, and more cores the best for speed rendering, when you use iRay you need faster previews, and only a GTX series can do that faster than any other combo like GT or GTS.
d- Yep, be prepared for invest a ton of money, I'm still paying my actual PC but the benefits are great!
Great advice!, but not all users have the patience and tolerance to do that, that's why studios uses that tecniques but they're an army of people, not one single user, and even it takes months for composing an scene!
It does not take long to composite. You render out what you need and it's faster because there are fewer calculations. Import everything into Photoshop, adjust whatever you need to adjust, if anything, save, then you're done. It's also cheaper than buying a big card with lots of VRAM, requiring a big power supply if you want to do a bigger scene.
If marble ever wants to go back to 3Delight, he will curse the idea he bought an i5 instead of an i7.
As a retired person on a small state pension, a ton of money is not available. I'm looking at selling my iMac and a couple of other gadgets I hardly ever use so that I can scrape together the funds. Having said that, I calculate I can get a reasonable PC which is a step up in graphics power from my current iMac.
So, in summary, at the moment I use Reality which creates decent images in about an hour in CPU accelerated mode. No GPU involved but I have 24GB RAM. I can speed that up using network mode and an old Linux PC running Luxrender. However, the scene has to be small if I do that because the Linux PC has only 6GB RAM. Luxrender has a GPU only option but, unfortunately, the Mac drivers for OpenCL are broken. Still, having read through the advice so far, I'm veering away from IRay again because of its hardware demands and other limitations (no network mode, can't work on the next scene while IRay is rendering).
Kevin, compositing seems worth another look. I do prefer the look of the Luxrender images to 3Delight so I wonder if you are aware of how I might try that with Reality? If not, I'll dig around and try to find some tutorials.
Rendering each light separately is probably the best way to go since you want to keep shadows accurate.
A little more info - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/60530/render-passes
LuxCore can do some passes except for shadows, I don't know much about LuxRender or Reality, though, and if it has a pass option or not.
Unfortunately it doesn't. I reminded myself of the last time I asked about this on th Reality forum. Paolo (the Reality developer) stated categorically that compositing was the wrong way to go (because of the natural light, shadows, etc.). However I believe there can be compromises. It looks to me like even Luxrender is adopting some bias in their GPU option so it will no longer be a truly unbiased engine.
As a mac user for around 10 years, I'm not willing to switch back to windows full time, but I did want to be able to enjoy GPU rendering. So, I purchased a render machine and build my scenes on my imac and render them on the windows computer using VNC (and a connected mouse since vnc isn't quite good enough to use the mouse to rotate cameras, etc. ). If you are happy with your mac, maybe look at buying a used windows machine to start with and try that out. If you get one in a good case, you can probably slowly upgrade it as you go.
I haven't done buy a couple of multiple character scenes, and didn't have any trouble with my 16G RAM. I do have a 980 card, which has 4GB of RAM on it. If it ever fails over to CPU, I can probably render it more quickly on my mac, so having two machines has it's advantages.
A low-cost (or do-it-yourself) networked Iray rendering appliance would be a boon for Mac folk for sure.