does anyone know how well blender runs on an iMac

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I was looking at a iMac and the specs are 2.66ghz intel core 2 duo, 2gb ram, up to 8gb
and a nvidia 9400M gpu with 256mb shared memory,the screen size is 1680x1050.
does anyone know how well blender will run with say a high poly model
or highly detailed scene?

2

Should be fine, NVidia is the way to go, though if you really want top-notch performance sharing the system ram isn’t so great. Though I never used these, best speak to someone who has.

(psst a PC with an NVidia+64bit Ubuntu) </bias>

3

Blender runs great on iMac. You should be fine.

4

I ran Blender on my iMAC Core2Duo 2GHz with 3 GB RAM and 250GB HD (standard graphic card) … It run fine even though it crashes here and there, not ideal as a mac app as mac apps have the reputation of being rock solid. It is the only mac apps that manages to crash on my imac.

But the crashes are still quite rare .

So I would say it runs ok , speed wise, preety much the same as windows. Save your work in each step to be sure.

Are you absolutely certain that the video memory is shared ? It is the first time I hear this for imacs. At least on my imac does not appear to be so.

5

Best Buy website says it has shared graphics memory but Apple only says integrated 9400m graphics processor. I was looking on Best Buy at the time to see the prices and specs locally.

6

apple says:
20-inch and 24-inch model with 2.66GHz processor
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory

didn’t know a quote took moderator approval would of replied with the quick reply

currently I’m running Ubuntu and Windows with Pentium 4 3.0ghz with 2gb ram and ati radeon 4670
but I’m either going to build a new pc with Ubuntu 64-bit and upcoming Windows 7 64-bit or buy a Mac
I’ve never used a 64-bit OS or a mac, anybody got any suggestions and tips? thanks for replies

7

I have an eight year old mac and Blender runs just fine with hi-poly scenes. I have never had Blender crash in over two years.

8

I haven’t crashed it yet on my imac either. Runs pretty solid with only 2 gigs of ram and an ati 2600HD.

9

While it depends a lot on the feature set your using, blender 2.49 should be quite stable now and shouldn’t be crashing randomly.
Most of the crashes I have seen reported recently are because blender runs out of memory while rendering or compositing.

10

Blender runs fine on my iMac, 3.06gz intel Core2Duo, 4GB Ram and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 512Vram

11

For optimal performance, get the higher end iMac with a dedicated graphics card.