Hi Guys,
Brand new to the forum so hi! firstly, Ive just got one of the new iMac Pro’s and I have done a test on the old BMW benchmark scene and I am getting the following times.
The spec of this Mac is: 10-core 3 GHz Intel Xeon W with 64 GB of RAM and the Vega 64 16GB GPU.
CPU: 1:42.79
GPU: 2:59.53
and I’m just wondering if these are the correct sort of times that should be expected, because I thought that the GPU should of been faster than CPU render. Thanks in advance
I got nearly the same resut on the iMac Pro (8-core and 16GB vega card). Its ok, but the result for the GPU is not what I expected. The benchmark file is rendered on my windows machine (1080Ti GPU) in 15.96 seconds.
Hopefully the driver will become a major update to work proper. More than 2 Minutes on the iMac with this kind of graphic card is not exceptable
Are you sure this is just a driver issue?
The casing of the iMac is very slim. That’s why Apple puts mobile (notebook-class) GPUs in their non-Pro iMac models, as that casing would not be able to dissipate the heat produced by a desktop-class graphics card.
I’d assume that something similar is going on with the iMac Pro, meaning those iMac Pro Vegas are either mobile GPUs as well or severely underclocked/undervolted variants of their desktop counterparts. If so, you’re comparing apples and oranges here, as a mobile GPU can neither compete with a high-end desktop CPU, nor a desktop GPU.
Not an Apple guy, though, so I might very well be horribly wrong on this.
well isn’t that because the iMacPro uses an AMD card and thus u can only use openCL which is slower than CUDA?
Hi, compare times to other Vega user, .blend is in the first post.
Cheers, mib
The vega offers faster gpu in that list? Do I miss something here?
@FireMe, there are different BMW files around where do you get yours.
@cekuhnen, different file or a shader is not working well with OpenCL on OSX.
Cheers, mib
Would be interesting to see win Mac OS conparison on the same iMac
Sorry for my late response I have been really busy.
@mib2berlin, Its the BMW scene from that main forum post you linked to.
Another issue I have discovered with the denoising feature. when I render on the GPU after the denoising process it changes the tile to pure black so at the end of the render I have a pure black frame?
You have an awesome machine. Vega is a beast but AMD cards work bad with Blender Cycles on Macs. Probably you can use up to 4 external Thunderbolt3 Nvidia cards. Look at egpu.io
I just did the same test on an iMac Pro at my local computer store. My computer at home is the first edition iMac 5K (so four years old), which I got before I planned to get into 3D (but I did get the best available GPU for it). At home the BMW render took 5 minutes on the CPU, 50 minutes on the GPU. On the iMac Pro it was 4 minutes on the CPU, 15 minutes on the GPU. Something doesn’t seem quite right. On the other hand, there is the AMD ProRender plug-in for Blender, which should work better, although I didn’t get the chance to try it out.
I am also told that you can download the latest OpenCL drivers directly from AMD, which surprised me, because I didn’t think you could manually install drivers on the Mac OS (I assumed you had to wait for Apple to release the next version of the OS).