Cycles and the Mac Mini?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hello All,

I was just wondering if Cycles works on the Mac Mini?
I assume it works in CPU mode, but I was wondering if GPU rendering works?

Is anyone using Blender on a Mac Mini?

2

i5 or i7 processors but only Intel HD 4000 graphics so only cpu rendering

3

Hello Atom,

You need CUDA to use Cycles, this is with any NVidia Graphics card. Won’t work for the Mac Mini since it only has Intel HD Graphics.
But, for the best performance, try something like a GTX 500, GTX 600 or GTX 700 series and of course, the higher the VRAM the bigger the scenes you could load on your card. Anyway, there are more threads talking about which Graphics card to buy.

Cheers

4

Just to clarify, CUDA is required if you want to render with the GPU in Cycles, there are however some OpenCL builds but from my knowledge they are far from stable. Using Cycles with CPU isn’t bad either if you doesn’t have a GPU for rendering available.

5

this is true. I totally forgot about CPU rendering since i bought a graphics card. Thanks for pointing this out, if not i would have confused somebody :p… Still, i would highly recommend GPU over CPU for many reasons.

6

Thanks for the info, I was wondering if anyone actually used Blender on a Mini Mac and how it performed?

7

I’m using mac mini 2020 for some blender projects. You can’t work on heavy projects. But for modeling and for simple animations it’s working totally fine. For rendering I use my PC with 2060 Rtx sometimes I feel ma mini is good enough as my pc. But still not for heavy projects. When the project gets heavy mac mini gets super laggy.