I am currently on a late 2015 Macbook Pro with the internal GPU (Iris Pro) and considering to buy a new machine because it’s just not really possible to work in Blender with this machine. Normal modelling is fine of course but as soon as it gets to physic simulations, volumetrics etc. it’s not really fun anymore. Even EEVEE doesn’t work as it should with such a low powered GPU.
My background is digital design and I love macOS. I understand that you get way much more bang for the buck from a Win machine compared to a similar Mac. However I actually want to stay with Mac as I need certain software that is Mac only and the usability is just better.
I’ve been thinking about the latest iMac with the highest configuration which includes a Radeon Pro 580X and costs a whopping 2600€. I expect to buy maybe a used one for maybe around 2000€. In comparison would be a system for the same price with an RTX2080 which would be super powerful.
HOWEVER I am not a complete 3D geek and doing it everyday or client work. I just enjoy it and want to do more in the future. Especially I’d like to build cool big scenes/worlds in the future. Currently my fun is beeing restricted by my shitty GPU.
Therefore I mainly wanted to know your opinion about the Radeon Pro 580X. Do you think it is powerful enough for big scenes, decent physics simulations and for EEVEE?
When Blender 2.8 was still in Beta I tried demo scenes in EEVEE on a GTX 1080 and it was quite laggy. Don’t if the perfomance is now way better and if that was just because of the Beta?
Eevee might be more optimized now, but also keep in mind that eevee is not supossed to be buttery smooth as a game engine, even the developers, were debating recently about what would be the best shadow system if they were considering if eevee was a preview engine or a render one.
Apple is depracating OpenGL and the dirvers have never been good from what I’ve read. However at some point, which we don’t know yet when will it be, blender will be ported to Vulkan and therefore to Metal using MoltenVK.
Currently due to drivers related decisions by Apple, Mac OS is a headache for users and Blender developers. For Blender, Linux and Windows are the best options.
I have the iMac 2019 with the Radeon Pro 580x at home. At work I’m on a MacBook Pro 2015 with a Radeon Pro 460 4 GB / Intel HD Graphics 530 1536 MB. Running Cycles in CPU I found the iMac to be roughly twice as fast as the MacBook Pro. I have heard good things about Radeon ProRender for GPU. But I’ve only dabbled a bit there.
Ex Mac user here, returned to a Windows system with NVIDIA GPU early this year. I couldn’t stand the way Apple treats 3D users by ceasing support for OpenGL, OpenCL and NVIDIA, resulting in multiple frustrations when working with Blender, such as:
No more OpenCL support for Cycles.
No CUDA or OptiX to accelerate Cycles.
A number of useful add-ons aren’t available or are much-delayed for Blender macOS, because the developer hasn’t got macOS to test it.
After years of working with macOS I was afraid I’d regret returning to Windows, but the latest Windows 10 versions are quite comfortable, minimizing the gap between macOS and Windows. I’m also happy with the much larger software base for Windows.
This is not meant as Apple bashing or Windows fanboyism, just my personal experience.
Good arguments. Thanks for your opinion!
I am not against Windows and you’re right Win10 is not that bad at all actually. However I’m just hesitant because of the ecosystem. But it is common knowledge anyways that notebooks are not really there for computing heavy tasks … Best solution would then probably be to keep the MacBook for presentations and macOS specific software and the Windows for heavy tasks …
How is it for you to work with the iMac in EEVEE? Smooth previews? And for physics?
Would you generally say it is comfortable enough to work with your iMac in Blender or would you prefer to have a lot more power?
I’m happy so far with the iMac and Blender 2.8. EEVEE is smooth, though I still use Cycles for better renders. I haven’t tried any physics to be honest. Would I prefer to have a lot more power? Of course! In 3D it seems you can never have enough power. LOL. If I bought a PC that I could afford then I would still want more power.
Like you I’m doing other things with my Mac and by no means am I a Blender power user. I use Blender primarily for product visualizations. Still shots. And though I know my CPU Cycle renders take longer than a PC using GPU, I can still justify it because I am usually working on something else while it renders.
If I was a Blender power user I could see the current necessity for a PC.
One of the main things I notice moving from Unix/Linux to Winix is that it will shut your computer down for updates while you’re using it, or better yet, start harassing you every 15 minutes to ask if you’re ready to shut down yet. You know, because the updates are so important.
The shell sucks, the default utilities suck, you have to pay for office when openoffice is the same for most users, VB scripting is garbage, it’s ugly and unthemable without replacing explorer.exe with rainmeter (unless you just want to change the colors I guess), the hotkeys are trash, the design ideals are throat-shoved (true in OSX too), the system is bloated in both ram and disk usage, there are too many services no one cares about, the task manager doesn’t report resource usage coherently, overall it’s a giant piece of crap no one likes but everyone is stuck with because it has a majority of users.
I could go on, god what a piece of garbage.
and of all people, I write ML64, the 64bit windows specific ASM.
god what a piece of crap
I agree with CygnusRK.
I’m using blender on an iMacPro. Modelling, texturing and so on works perfectly well. (Unless you have extremely complex scenes/models. But as I hear, that’s also a problem on PC’s.)
The real downside of a Mac is rendering, as we can only use the CPU. Render times with cycles can get really long. Since I’m mostly doing photorealistic animations this is a problem. For Eevee this is not a real issue. Render times might be longer than on a PC, but they are still ridiculously fast.
I do have some issues with eevee and very complex scenes, though (eg. A street scenery of 1km length). In such cases I can’t use eevee at all. Not even to preview. As soon as I switch to eevee render view (or look-dev view) EVERYTHING becomes extremely slow and laggy. It’s completely unusable. Sticking to cycles render view or viewport shading view is the only solution, then.
I don’t do a lot of physics - and I never worked with blender on a PC. So I can’t really compare and judge this properly. But rather simple physic simulations (eg. paper blowing in the wind or easy soft body sims) work smoothly. Liquids on the other hand take a loooong time. But I guess that’s the same on every system.
if you like to hear more about my experiences with blender on my Mac you’re welcome to have a look at my thread in the WIP section (CG Effects for live action Feature Film)
What is the status with the RadeonProRender from AMD?
When I go on AMDs website it’s downloadable … Is the issue that the BF still needs to integrate it in Blender somehow or why is it not usable?
I used Radeon ProRender back when I had a Mac. It should work fine, and it uses Metal, so it was my go-to replacement of Cycles. It just doesn’t match Cycles yet in terms of rendering refinements and features.
I followed the development of ProRender for a while, as I was also looking forward to it. It seemed to take longer than expected though, so for the last month or so I didn’t check anymore. The biggest problem for me was, that some important nodes (eg some ‘Color’-nodes) did not work. And those are essential for me. Plus there seemed to be still quite a few bugs. RPR seemed to be ok for some very basic work. but for some in-depth, refined work not yet.
there is good thread on discord about it, if you’re interested:
and here they officially present new versions:
be careful with the AMD website. I read, that they hardly update new versions there.
I read the discussion about adapting Blender for Metal in the dev forum and it seems that the willingness is not there as the fund sees other things as more relevant for the near future.
My question then is: Is ProRender on par with Cycles? Are all then nodes the same or are there some differences?
Blender is a cross-platform project, and adapting to Metal would require separate maintenance for a particular Blender version. That’s why the Blender developers are planning to use MoltenVK for a Metal wrapper. This is of course a workaround, and will probably cause some overhead.
Cycles has been developed for much longer, has more nodes and less issues. In terms of speed RPR is a bit faster with low-quality settings, but once you go for realism, the rendering speed difference with Cycles becomes small.
Having said this, RPR is definitely the most interesting Cycles alternative for Mac, as it is the only renderer that utilizes Metal. And RPR is actively being developed for multiple 3D editors, so it will undoubtedly keep improving.
You might want to check out my list of free Blender renderers. LuxCoreRender is also a very competent and Blender-compatible renderer.
Don’t wait for Apple anymore. With a PC for 800 Euro and a good graphics card, you get a good computer for Blender. macOS is no longer the best operating system for Blender. Linux and Windows is for Blender.
Anyway, the user who opened the thread seems very willing to want to buy a Mac machine, regardless of what other users have recommended. My question is, is dual boot installation possible with Linux/Windows in these Mac machines?. Maybe that’s the solution if he really wants to buy a Mac.
There’s Boot Camp, which allows people to easily install Windows alongside MacOS. It’s also very possible to dual boot Linux on a Mac, though from what little I’ve seen, it seems to be a much more convoluted process.