Hello, I’ve been into blender for a year and want a more powerful computer. Would a maxed out 2024 Mac Studio do the trick?
The Mac Studio itself isn’t a bad choice, but it’s far more expensive than a PC workstation, and slower than one too. But if you’re a fan of MacOS, then speed and power might be of secondary concern.
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If the trick is spending as much money as possible, yes?
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Im personally never saw an addons which doesnt support windows, but a few times saw an addons which doesnt support linux and/or osx.
The more money you spend on the hardware the better is not a bad metric for measuring performance in the computer graphics business, except in situations where the softwares don’t support the intended hardware. Blender has been supporting Metal and M CPU / GPU combos for a while.
It can be a terrible metric in certain circumstances. Absolutely the worst one that will make you regret it. One should always consider the specific situation.
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Took this advice, got a 8000 dollar NVIDIA Quadro workstation GPU, but now my Blender is slower?? Send help! 
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But to be honest it pains me quite a lot as an Apple hater that I cannot say with certainty that it would be an absolutely terrible solution.192GB unified 800GB/s memory sounds quite attractive. Is it worth the money? I don’t know. Depends on what you do. If I got a maxed out Mac Pro as a present I would still sell it the next day and buy a workstation computer more tailored to my needs for a third of the money and then get myself a better monitor and would still be left with a lot of money… But that’s just me personally. RTX4090 still renders way way faster… Single RTX4090… you could get 2 for that money if you think about it… I woundn’t be able to justify 2 for what I do though…
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@MartinZ What is the case here? I already said "except in situations where the softwares don’t support the intended hardware. " You need to do your research to see if your top dollar machine is compatible with the software you are using. So yeah do not spend top dollar on an AMD GPU to get super fast renders in Blender, but the comparable Nvidia GPU will be even more expensive.
Is there a cheaper GPU that is faster than a newer and more expensive GPU for Blender?
I personally use maxed out M2 Macbook pro for and it’s been a rocky ride, but it taught me a lot about scene optimization and the importance of post-processing. So it’s a love hate relationship, but I prefer using macOS over the clunkiness of windows…
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Well, yes. There are plenty of those. They even tend to be marketed as superior more professional products while in reality the benefits are not relevant at all for rendering with Cycles or working with Blender. Welcome to the planet Earth. 
They tend to be more expensive because of a few important features that don’t even matter for CG work and also just because they are marketed for businesses as opposed to consumers and so they simply can be more expensive. So you pay for marketing and pretty much no reason at all in many cases.
Speed or support is not the only concern though. You can get a faster more expensive card with less memory for example and it will not be able to render your scenes because they don’t fit into memory, or vise versa - slower card with more memory than you will ever need. Or there are cases where few cards render fast rendering frames a lot slower than one would because most of the render time is used to manage work across multiple devices. You always have to consider the situation first and just going by the price(or marketing) is not smart at all.
Apple even uses prices as a part of their marketing - if it’s more expensive than anything else, people tend to feel as if it’s better than anything else. It’s genius. This is not something I came up with by the way - I had a friend who studied marketing and apparently they teach this stuff in universities(or they used to like 15 or so years a go, it’s nothing new either)! It’s really part of marketing strategy. That’s how you end up overpaying enormous amounts of money.
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Its in fact much older than 15 years. Its called veblen effect or veblen goods. But yeah thats how it is, strange world.
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Right now, the fastest Mac Studio is the M2 Ultra (I have that). The M3 received HW Raytracing, making it twice as fast at Cycles. The M3 Max is beating the Studio right now.
When Apple releases an M4 Studio, it will very likely render more than twice as fast in Cycles as the M2 Studio: the HW gains and 2 regular generational speed bumps.
This will bring it way closer to the Nvidia 4090 in Cycles, but will probably not be faster.
I personally really enjoy the Mac Studio 128gb shared memory for large scenes. It’s also one of the fastest machines around for other apps like AfterEffects and Affinity.
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As in all kinds of things… a one dimensional measure between different things mostly doesn’t cover all aspects… ( only speed, only price…)
Some professional cards simply has a bigger bandwith or VRAM and may be “designed” to not overheat because they almost have their own housing (one block with powerfull fans). They also do have their own kind of driver (gaming/profesional). Of course sometimes this overlaps. ( I even remember where someone ask about a “moster” card which does not support some basci 2D-render API method…)
So it alwasy depends… as @Sworly mentioned sometime very big shared memory migth be nicer then the clockspeed of the card itself… 
…so the question may be not …for blender but more for what kind of 3D work(-flow) or mix of modeling, sculpting, texture painting, simulation, animation… and finally rendereing.
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And yet that specific article is full of misleading nonsense.
…if a problem occurs on the software side, GeForce is unlikely to offer driver updates to correct that issue quickly (if at all).
It’s important to state that GeForce cards can be used for 3D modeling or AI training, but usually not to a professional level.
If you’re looking for a quality experience while gaming and also want to experiment a little with 3D modeling or animation, GeForce is a pretty good solution.
There is a clear tone there. It’s generalizing and misleading. People should care less about articles like that.
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In fact i thought also this a bit … after i posted it… 
But the “original” idea is/was dedicated hardware for dedicated use cases, like: office, games, graphic-workstations and this is everytime connected to higher prices . And as i mentioned before there are also sub-categories (and different mixes of them) in each area making it not easier to choose from.
So everone has to double (and triple) check: what do i do or want to do and how does my actual hardware perform in ever area. And because of this has to do some re-search about what might be better. Buying the most expensive or newest or trendiest ( ← is this a word ? ) or most recomendet might not fit the personal use case… ( also depending on the rest of the hardware setup… and there is also this vexatious problem called “money”… 
)
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I think of it like this: the consumer grade Geforce cards are generalist hardware, they’re good at everything, but aren’t great at anything. Higher end hardware is almost always more expensive, and more tightly focused on excelling at one thing. You’re paying more for it’s ability to do this one thing, and for everything else, it’s about as good as the consumer cards you can get for a 3rd of the price.
You can do so much with consumer hardware. Design scenes, sculpt characters, animate characters, make games, make TV shows, ect. ect. ect. But if you need to render out an hour long simulation of 50,000 orcs attacking Helm’s Deep, and you need it done before 5, you’re gonna want that high end hardware.
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Let’s just come back to the topic. …and you will never ever use Mac Studio to render those orcs. They will probably be rendered on a render farm consisting of who-knows-what hardware, but one thing is for sure - none of that will be Apple products. Let’s not mix those categories.
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Okay, to get back to topic, a maxed out Studio would work great with Blender, but if you want more bang for the buck, you can get that same performance for less from a PC.
Really, for anyone who’s just a year or so into Blender, you don’t really need THAT much of a computer. If you’re just wanting to sculpt characters, or build up scenes for individual renders, A standard gaming PC with an 8+ core processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 4070 super would get you by 99.999% of the time.
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