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.
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).