Using 2014 MacPro for Cycles

I’ve been researching for a while now on the best specs to use for Cycles since I am starting to work more with the animation/compositing features of Blender. I know there have been some conversations going back and forth on whether the MacPro’s AMD FirePro works well with Cycles, but I’ve been unable to find any benchmarks or “final conclusions” on this. I also read somewhere that AMD has a beta driver out that works with Cycles, but even that drowned out near the beginning of the year.

So, does anyone have any advice on this issue? Final conclusions? or alternative advice on a setup for Cycles?

Thanks.

I have a 2012 mac book pro with nvidia NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB…

it has 96 cuda cores but in most scenes it renders slightly faster using the cpu in all honesty.
the newest mac pros have a 750m…(but only on the 15 inch model) it may be slightly faster than rendering with cpu, but you can get a mac pro at 2.8 Ghz now (mine is a 2.6Ghz) for some reason the latest pro is standard at 2.5… mystifies me why teh 2012 model has been a better spec than teh later ones untill just recently!

the amd drivers are not up to snuff with cycles right now and are usually slower than cpu rendering too…
for some reason the mac is pretty good at cpu rendering in cycles so my “final conclusion” would be that if you want a mac pro then cpu is the way to go…

If you want to burn a ton of cash and still get slow render times, Mac Pro is essentially what you have been looking for.

ok, thanks Michael.

The dual GPU looked enticing, but if it’s not going to play with Blender GPU then there’s no sense in getting it. Just wanted to make sure. So the GeForce 650 is the way to go? My current personal computer is a MBP from '08, but this would be for work and I’d rather it be a desktop so I’m not really that partial to either system. I can learn just about anything. Thanks for the advice.

what’s your budget?

the best performance setup is:

os: linux
cpu: 6 or 8 core intel overclocked (4.2-4.6GHZ)
gpu: (if you can deal with the limitations) 1, 2 or 3 (nvidia) gpus

it depends on your budget :wink:

edit: take a look here

I don’t currently have a permanent budget, just looking around to see what the “best of the best” is currently and then compare it to what I have now and see where I can improve. Thank you for the spreadsheet though. Would you happen to know what model the mac is at the top of the spreadsheet with the 3 GPUs? 27’’ iMac?

The Mac Pro doesn’t have a screen. And the graphics are dual workstation AMD cards.

So I asked an Apple tech rep and he said that the dual AMD chips are Open-GL compatible (which is all it states is required on Blender.org). What is holding the Mac Pro back from working?

You asked about Cycles, so ppl asumed you want to use GPU for rendering.
CUDA is holding you. AMD does not support CUDA it uses OpenCL that is not supported by Cycles, at least not at same level as it supports CUDA, AFAIK.

Apple has a tendency to use cheaper hardware, but still tags an ungodly profit margin on their products. For the money you’d drop on a Mac Pro (even before getting the displays and other peripherals), you could easily take a quarter of that and trick out a really nice Windows or Linux package—it’s what I did. Because Blender tends to favor Nvidia cards, developing a custom system is a much smarter route to follow if you’re seriously looking for a rendering work horse.

Well, to be fair: 3D artists do not seem to be the target audience for the new Mac Pro. It seems to be tailored to fit the needs of video editors and from what I have read, it does a much more than decent job in that field. The memory throughput is insanely high and especially in conjunction with FCP X it reaches a spectacular 4K performance.

Now, that doesn’t help much with 3D apps…
GPU-rendering is still dominated by CUDA, which is a proprietary nVidia technology and therefore is out of reach for Mac Pro users with the only available AMD cards. And CPU-wise you’re stuck with the Xeons, which possibly have outstanding durability, but are not that powerful when compared to modern i7s. Benchmarks seem to indicate that e. g. the Mac Pro Quad renders slower than latest model iMacs - but at a much higher price point.

So, indeed at this time a Linux-based PC might be a better choice for 3D when it comes to Blender: Absolute freedom in choosing the GPU(s), absolute freedom in choosing the Linux flavour (and no extra cost for the OS), no “Apple premium” to pay for the components and faster render times than on Windows machines - if you can live with the fact that some software might not be available for Linux.

This is an euphemism. It’s as if nVidia had bought Blender Foundation…

This is an euphemism. It’s as if nVidia had bought Blender Foundation…

Let me rephrase. Blender currently renders fastest with CUDA acceleration on Nvidia cards (in comparison to OpenCL and AMD). Benchmark tests have proven this and the Blender Foundation has noted it in their documentation:

Currently NVidia with CUDA is rendering faster. There is no fundamental reason why this should be so—we don’t use any CUDA-specific features—but the compiler appears to be more mature, and can better support big kernels. OpenCL support is still being worked on and has not been optimized as much, because we haven’t had the full kernel working yet.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering

So, when it comes to deciding what hardware to buy for a rendering machine, choosing a Nvidia card and Nvidia-compatible system is currently a smarter option than other alternatives.

As much as I love the Mac I have to say if you don’t have an nvidia card you won’t get good performance.
you can actually get better performance from the iMac than the Mac pro on blender because it can run cuda(if I remember correct).
my suggestion is build a hackintosh it will cost you less and you’ll get Cuda working and OS X.

my bad, I was talking about macbookpro! which has to be the best laptop I have ever owned… well worth the premium price which comes with an nvidia gpu but it’s not any improvement over cpu rendering

I think,it’s a good thinking. Use of your Mac notebook battery accrues in the form of charge cycles. A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge.

I’m still hoping for a Nvidia option on the trashcan. Its a great computer but currently z820 is a much better for 3D. I hope they get some kind of Maxwell (980 would rock) as a option, I don’t know about the heat though. Also the 64 Gb cap limits it for some uses.

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

Just a warning, if you ask about anything Mac related on non-Mac forums, people are going to tell you that it’s a bunch of crap not worth the money. That’s just what you’re going to get. Now, that being said, if you want to do GPU Cycles rendering, The Mac Pro just doesn’t make sense because of the AMD cards, which will be very limited compared to what you can do with an nvidia card. If you do primarily other things, once you total it up, the MacPro is actually a pretty good deal considering the high end hardware and the special case that’ll cool better than any case you’ll be building in. The Xeon isn’t as fast as an i7, but it’ll work for longer, meaning your Mac Pro can later become a render slave pretty easily.

Ok, thanks for the different perspectives. I’ll look more into the iMac, but I wasn’t sure of it initially because of the its processing power (or lack thereof). I was researching this morning on possibly using the LuxRender plug-in with the MacPro since it can work with AMD, but it still seems to not be that stable.

As far as building something from scratch such as a Linux-based or Hackintosh, I would totally be into doing that, but because this needs to be as much of an “all-in-one” system as possible (this will double as my primary work comp) and not just a dedicated render machine, then it has to be compatible with the corporate software as well… :confused: