iMac and cycles advice

I want to buy a imac desktop but it only supports AMD graphics.
Then I cannot use cycles gpu rendering.
Anyone have any advice for the future.

Difficult to say… No idea if apple plans to put nvidia card into them in the future… Cycles support for amd could take a while… (i don’t think it comes sooner than a year /or two)

so, imho - if you want cycles gpu and mac go for macbook pro or mac pro (or buy a linux pc :wink: (But in general mac gpu’s are way to expensive…)

There are people that use external gpu’s - usually over pci-express (or how it’s called) - i think there might/or already has come something out for thunderbolt. No idea though how performance is, and if it works with cycles at all (but i think so).

Mac Pro is only available with ATI graphic card or am I wrong.

hackintosh :wink:

hackintosh only works when done correctly with the right hardware

If you want Cycles with GPU, my advice would be don’t buy a Mac. You’ll save a boatload of money and have more flexibility with your hardware/software if you just decide what you want in it yourself.

I was in the same situation, switching back to PC/LNX now just because Blender/Cycles. I’ve read in the ‘Cycles benchmark’ thread that someone installed a nvidia 580 into a Mac Pro. It can be done, but afaik you have to flash the gfx card on a pc. and/or use netkas drivers.

Thanks for the advice but I thought most graphical artists use a Mac.

That’s mostly true, but you’re talking about 2D artists and video editting / VFX. I think that the 3D branch is heavily windows/linux based.

3D artists in production environments almost exclusively work on Windows/Linux machines. No idea where the sentiment is coming from these days that to be an artist you need to overpay for a Mac.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”

What about big studio’s like renderman and walt disney.

Why would it matter to you what “most graphic artists” use anyway? If you can get a better machine at a better price which will still do everything (and certainly a lot more as well) that the Mac can then why pay more? Don’t worry, customers can’t tell the difference.

Why would it matter to you what “most graphic artists” use anyway? If you can get a better machine at a better price which will still do everything (and certainly a lot more as well) that the Mac can then why pay more? Don’t worry, customers can’t tell the difference (because there is none).

Sorry for the double post there, tried editing the post then ended up with an additional one.

I actually installed an un-flashed of the shelves GTX 570 2,5 GB in my old Mac Pro 1.1
Edited a few files following Netkas tutorials and it runs fine in Lion with Cycles.
It’s a temp solution waiting for next years new Mac Pro’s but it runs fine.
Only thing with an un-flashed card is you don’t get any boot screen, it’s black until have your desktop.
Another issue is you risk loosing your CUDA when OS X is updated, usually you only need to tweak 1-2 files and it’s all fine again.
I threw in a SSD as well so my old work horse feels like a new comp again :slight_smile:

Mac is crap, I have a toasted-baked MacBook Pro 4,1 with a Nvidia 8600 Card and for speed I recomend Linux all the way.