GPU Scalping and Availability Driving Me Away from PC - Strongly Considering Mac

Nyghtfall3D

I'd like to get some input from Mac users who render with Daz on Apple's silicon, whether you've always used Mac, or are someone who also switched from Windows.  How has your experience been?

I understand Daz uses Rosetta since it's not natively compatible the M-series chip.  Has that hindered your joy for this hobby?

Do you find CPU rendering and MacOS in general to be worth not having to deal with the GPU market?

Nyghtfall3D

Bumping because Daz temporarily removed my post while they sought my approval to edit it to avoid a potential platform war.

takezo_3001

Speaking as a PC owner, the last time I used a MAC, I found it to be an intuitive and pleasurable experience, in fact, the solitary reason why I don't buy a MAC is because of their use/reliance of/on proprietary parts that discourages building your own computer... For me, I'm both PC and MAC friendly, if I were rich, I'd definitely have both!

Hope my post is not too controversial for this thread...

EDIT: And what ever you do, NEVER, EVER buy from 3rd party sellers, from any online retailer, as most are price gougers, especially from newegg/amazon

 

savagestug

I've tried to get an Apple box in the past but have never been able to accept the extra $$ required to spec one up to the level I need when compared to the cost of a PC

bytescapes

I've used Macs for ... gulp ... many decades, use them both for work and personal projects, and even used an Intel Mac for DAZ Studio work for many years. I eventually, however, built a PC for DAZ Studio rendering. The speed difference between CPU rendering on a Mac and GPU rendering on a PC is very substantial, and while you can certainly use a Mac for DAZ work, you will wait a long time for your renders. That may or may not be a dealbreaker for you.

One thing that you can do is to offload your rendering to a third-party service running Iray server. I used Jack Tomalin's service for a while, and while it was slower than rendering on a suitable-specced local PC, it was quicker than CPU rendering on my Mac.

Note: I haven't tried Iray rendering on current Apple Silicon machines; it's possible that they've narrowed the gap, so that renders no longer take quite as long as they did on Intel CPUs.

Also note: if you're not doing DAZ Studio/Iray work, you may find Macs acceptably fast, depending on what software you use. I haven't got deep enough into Blender to compare rendering speeds, but because Blender's renderers are not so tightly-coupled to Nvidia hardware as Iray, you might find Macs more than fast enough for your needs.

Nyghtfall3D

bytescapes said:

... while you can certainly use a Mac for DAZ work, you will wait a long time for your renders. That may or may not be a dealbreaker for you.

Ten years ago, render speed would've been a deal breaker.  Today, I couldn't care less, not while - for example - 5090s are going for nearly $5000.

Richard Haseltine

Do bear in mind that this is a new gernation issue which will probably fade once production increases (world events permitiing)

Nyghtfall3D

Richard Haseltine said:

Do bear in mind that this is a new gernation issue which will probably fade once production increases (world events permitiing)

Prices have been going up ever since crypto-mining took off in 2018.  I imagine the market getting much worse long before it gets better.

GhostofMacbeth

Always used a Mac but I am not on Silicon.

takezo_3001

Forget the scalpers, just get a 5090 FE over at Best Buy, it's at MSRP, so no scalping, just camp out there on their site and spam the F5 once you get updated info on a GPU that's available; oh, and here's a great GPU tracking site that tells you when one becomes available... Your best bet ONLY hope for a fair price is at Best Buy!

If you're going to go shopping for a new top-of-the-line GPU you HAVE to put in the work, that's how I got my 3090FE, the last thing I'd do is to go to some seedy scalper-friendly site like newegg or amazon and shop at 3rd party shopfronts as you will NEVER get a fair price...

 

nonesuch00

I haven't installed DAZ on my M1 MacBook Air because the UI is so sluggish so I can tell you, even with an M4, you are not going to be liking rendering on a Mac. You'd be better off accepting a 4070 or 3070 instead.

Hylas

wouldn't you be able to get something from the 40 or even 30 series for a decent price at this point?

I have a 3060ti and it's good enough for DAZ rendering and indie gaming, which is all I need it to do (although I think 3060 would be the better choice for rendering than 3060ti)

As for mac, I used to CPU-render on one forever ago. It's night and day, no comparison. I would not recommend CPU-rendering.

tsroemi

Hylas said:

wouldn't you be able to get something from the 40 or even 30 series for a decent price at this point?

I have a 3060ti and it's good enough for DAZ rendering and indie gaming, which is all I need it to do (although I think 3060 would be the better choice for rendering than 3060ti)

As for mac, I used to CPU-render on one forever ago. It's night and day, no comparison. I would not recommend CPU-rendering.

I advise the same, because even with just a 2060 in my laptop, it is still waaaaay faster than rendering with CPU on Mac. I keep my iMac around for the lovely screen (for Photoshop etc) and for editing purposes, but I haven't felt the desire to use it for DAZing in ages.  It works, for sure, but it's just painfully slow.

Totte

I use both Apple Silicon and an old x86_64 mac for studio and rendering. Scenes that are huge, complex or in other cases too time consuming I render at Boost For Daz, where you can pick whatever GPUs you need to get the job done.



 

Richard Haseltine

Hylas said:

wouldn't you be able to get something from the 40 or even 30 series for a decent price at this point?

I have a 3060ti and it's good enough for DAZ rendering and indie gaming, which is all I need it to do (although I think 3060 would be the better choice for rendering than 3060ti)

As for mac, I used to CPU-render on one forever ago. It's night and day, no comparison. I would not recommend CPU-rendering.

The higher memory models seem hard to find, at least stand-alone. My usual store has nothing over a 12GB 3060 in the pre-50x0 ranges, though it does have "preorder" available for a couple of 16GB 4060s.

savagestug

I would go for the 16g 4060 for more VRAM, or a 4070. I went from a 3060 to a 4070 and is was noticably faster at rendering

Nyghtfall3D

To be clear, I'm not in the market for a new GPU.  I built my current PC three years ago and currently use a 3090.

However, my take on the responses so far is that, unless the market has normalized by the time I am ready to upgrade, several years from now, my 3090 will be the last GPU I ever bought, which means my current PC will be the last one I ever built.

takezo_3001

Nyghtfall3D said:

To be clear, I'm not in the market for a new GPU.  I built my current PC three years ago and currently use a 3090.

However, my take on the responses so far is that, unless the market has normalized by the time I am ready to upgrade, several years from now, my 3090 will be the last GPU I ever bought, which means my current PC will be the last one I ever built.

Oh, that's cool, yeah I'm still using my 3090, as the reason why I bought it was for the VRAM, so it's gonna last for quite a while!

Well in the future, if the market does cool a bit, maybe my info will be of some use to you.

nonesuch00

A 3090? Well, yeah, it may well be they last GPU you ever need really if you only DAZ render. If it's too expensive, you don't need to upgrade to save 30% render time on a render that is  likely less than 2 hours already.

murgatroyd314

Mac works just fine, as long as you're willing to be patient. Speeds are slower, but you don't have to worry about your scene being too large for your card's RAM. For what it's worth, I've tested my high-end M3 on the various benchmark scenes, and I'm getting render speeds comparable to graphics cards that were considered good back when iRay was first released.

Nyghtfall3D

murgatroyd314 said:

For what it's worth, I've tested my high-end M3 on the various benchmark scenes, and I'm getting render speeds comparable to graphics cards that were considered good back when iRay was first released.

Nice... Thank you for that info.  Can you navigate the Viewport with relative ease while in Iray mode?

wsterdan

Nyghtfall3D said:

murgatroyd314 said:

For what it's worth, I've tested my high-end M3 on the various benchmark scenes, and I'm getting render speeds comparable to graphics cards that were considered good back when iRay was first released.

Nice... Thank you for that info.  Can you navigate the Viewport with relative ease while in Iray mode?

Similar to what murgatroyd314 noted, I'm also getting render speeds equal to an older nVidia card from around 2016 or so on my MacBook Pro M4Pro, with 48 gigabytes of RAM.

You already know it's never going to render anywhere near as quickly as a current nVidia card; until they release the next major version of DAZ Studio, you won't have Filament either, or other PC-only items, like HEAT or a few other, recent releases.

That said, you were asking about working in iRay preview. I find that it takes a second or two to depixelize when I change my view; not ideal, but nowhwere near the time it used to take to redraw multile multiple 3D figures using 3DL back in pre-iRay times.

 I did a quick test to try and give you a feel for what I'm getting; the scene is an old one (about eight years old) with 20 G3 figures, with 20+ sets of clothing (bodysuit, cape, belt, boots) and hair (mostly toon hair).  

The video has been compressed a bit to make uploading more manageable (I'm limited to 100 gb files on my site) but the original viewport size is 1600 x 1200. If you'd like, I can customize something for you to give you a clearer idea if this isn't enough.

For the first part I zoom in and out, rotate, etc. in iRay mode; it takes a second or two to pop into "focus" from the pixelization effect. For the last little bit, I swapped to Texture Mapped mode and everything is pretty much realtime (which is great for me, since I don't normally use iRay). I wouldn't have a problem zipping around and setting a scene up in Texture Mapped preview and switching to iRay for fine-tuning, if necessary.

I'm not sure how Filament will work once the next DAZ Studio major upgrade comes out, but I imagine it'll be similar to OpenGL now for speed; it's been suggested that it'll use Metal on the Mac platform, and if they actually get it to be silicon-native, eliminating Rosetta should give us a speed-up of somewhere in the 10% range.

Hopefully this helps a bit:

https://sterdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UI_Test.mp4

 

Nyghtfall3D

wsterdan said:

Similar to what murgatroyd314 noted, I'm also getting render speeds equal to an older nVidia card from around 2016 or so on my MacBook Pro M4Pro, with 48 gigabytes of RAM.

until they release the next major version of DAZ Studio, you won't have Filament either, or other PC-only items, like HEAT or a few other, recent releases.

I don't use Filament anyway.

Hopefully this helps a bit:

It absolutely did.  Thank you, verify much.