Testing Windows vs Hackintosh

Hey, guys, first post in the forum (not quite sure if I’m doing everything right!).

I just finished building a Hackintosh and as I was planning on using it for Blender as well, I made it dual boot with Windows. It is finally ready and I just run the tests, comparing OSX and Windows.

The setup is: Aorus Z270X Gaming 7 Motherboard, i7 7700k, 32gb DDR4, GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 and, to make it fare, both systems are running on identical M2 drives (Samsung EVO 960).

The results were… quite unexpected, actually: OSX was faster.

Classroom Benchmark: 5:12.29s on Windows, 4:54.75 on OSX

Pavillion Benchmark: 6:37.51 on Windows, 4:50.98 on OSX

I wasn’t really expecting that. I was pretty sure that the GTX would run better in Windows, as I always heard that the drivers were better. Any ideas why is that?

Anyway, just wanted to share. Before building this setup I searched a lot about the differences about Mac and Win on the same machine, but couldn’t find any. Hope this helps someone. Cheers!

It suprise me too, Pavillion benchmark if that is correct its insane different. It could be because of a sloppy driver or some kind of software installed on windows that cause the different.

Interesting results. I’m running a dual boot Mac Pro with Windows 7, but rarely use Windows apart from a bit of gaming here and there. Might do a comparison myself and check back.

How did you get the GTX 1080 up and running in your Hackintosh?

Hey, do you have any guides or resources that you can share for how to set up a Hackintosh?

I have tried this a few years ago with a laptop, but could not get it working and gave up. Seeing that I have a similar machine to yours, I would like to try again (i7 7700, 32GB DDR4, GTX 1070, Samsung SSD). I would like to have access to an OSX operating system so that I can compile and distribute programs for OSX users.

best place is https://www.tonymacx86.com/
Or you can set up a Virtualbox with MacOs like I did.

Since Mac is Unix based, I suspect the answer is amongst https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?441422-Does-Cycles-render-significantly-faster-on-Linux-than-Windows&highlight=linux+render

Sorry guys for the ultra late reply!

As far as how to make it all work, I actually wasn’t the one that configured the Hackintosh side of things. As I bought all the parts with the same seller, he installed everything for me. It was actually a bit of a tedious process, but everything went well at the end. As far as the 1080ti working, I checked Tonymac before choosing it and it was confirmed that it worked fine with the new Webdrivers. And it is perfectly fine.

I also read something about Linux being much faster, but I also got curious if maybe some setting is off in my Windows config. As I don’t use this OS for quite some time, maybe I’m not very smart with the correct settings.

Are you using windows 10? windows 10 is pretty average for gpu based rendering http://blog.thepixelary.com/post/167616662857/improving-performance-of-blenders-cycles

wow, this is quite a surprise for me! never imagined that the webdrivers would make the 1080ti works better in osx, but here it is.