The Mac FAQ

Scavenger

DoctorJellybean said:

Scavenger said:

So, does Apple Silicon use the CPU cores for the rendering ? Like, obviously it doesn't have Nvidia CUDA/GPU...but does iRay or other renderers stick to the CPU cores or the GPU ones?

Iray uses both. If it runs out of GPU memory, then it switches to CPU. In the case of Apple, it is CPU only.

...So...Apple Silcon doesn't have two sets of memory.

Is it only the rendering software that determines what cores it uses, as opposed to the OS moving things to the better ones for a task?

Has anyone done any kind of benchmarks for Apple Silcon vs like a PC with Nvidia? (likely not M4, but maybe previously?)

Scavenger

Totte said:

Scavenger said:

So, does Apple Silicon use the CPU cores for the rendering ? Like, obviously it doesn't have Nvidia CUDA/GPU...but does iRay or other renderers stick to the CPU cores or the GPU ones?

Iray will be CPU only, Filament on the other hand will be GPU as Filament is built on top of Vulcan which sits on top of Metal. 

so, that'll be a whole need shader system to learn?

Totte

Scavenger said:

Totte said:

Scavenger said:

So, does Apple Silicon use the CPU cores for the rendering ? Like, obviously it doesn't have Nvidia CUDA/GPU...but does iRay or other renderers stick to the CPU cores or the GPU ones?

Iray will be CPU only, Filament on the other hand will be GPU as Filament is built on top of Vulcan which sits on top of Metal. 

so, that'll be a whole need shader system to learn?

Indeed - but filatoon is based on it, and I guess it will expand over time, not good for animations, not eally for images, yet. 

Scavenger

Totte said:

Scavenger said:

 

so, that'll be a whole need shader system to learn?

Indeed - but filatoon is based on it, and I guess it will expand over time, not good for animations, not eally for images, yet. 

Not good for animation or images?

Totte

Scavenger said:

Totte said:

Scavenger said:

 

so, that'll be a whole need shader system to learn?

Indeed - but filatoon is based on it, and I guess it will expand over time, not good for animations, not eally for images, yet. 

Not good for animation or images?

sorry, good, good for animations!

Was editing and edited badly :P 

JoelLovell

Can anyone help me figure out why I can't get DAZ working on my MBPro 16" M3 Max. 

I had it working - for like, the first time ever, really really great not too long ago; and made the mistake of doing some kind of update, and then it broke and crashes and is not able to get database working errors again, I had to completely remove every scrap of DAZ off of it and try again, and it still had issues; I had to install it on a parallels windows 11 arm and that is barely working. 

Wish, after years of wishing, that  mac support would be better.

Totte

JoelLovell said:

Can anyone help me figure out why I can't get DAZ working on my MBPro 16" M3 Max. 

I had it working - for like, the first time ever, really really great not too long ago; and made the mistake of doing some kind of update, and then it broke and crashes and is not able to get database working errors again, I had to completely remove every scrap of DAZ off of it and try again, and it still had issues; I had to install it on a parallels windows 11 arm and that is barely working. 

Wish, after years of wishing, that  mac support would be better.

The most common issues are installation going wrong of the postgres CMS (mostly because Apple made a decision on that data in your ~/Library/Applicaltion Support/ folder should be accessible by anyone in your group (grp access) while postgres only likes to open a database where only the user has access to it (no grp access). Doing update permissions will, not always, but often, make the postgres db go sad, but you can look in the ~/Library/Application Support/Daz 3D/cms/ folder to check that:
(a) You  have a ContentCluster folder
(b) what errors are reported in the in the ~/Library/Application Support/Daz 3D/cms/ContentCluster/dblog.txt file (does it yell about access permissions?)

Let's start there...

 

Elor

Scavenger said:

1/ Is it only the rendering software that determines what cores it uses, as opposed to the OS moving things to the better ones for a task?

2/ Has anyone done any kind of benchmarks for Apple Silcon vs like a PC with Nvidia? (likely not M4, but maybe previously?)

1/ The rendering engine is the key element to determine if the rendering will be done with the CPU or the GPU. So with Daz Studio on Mac, Iray rendering can only use the CPU.

2/ There is a 45 long pages compilation of benchmark to get an idea how fast Iray is on GPU:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1

And @memcneil70 did the same benchmark on a M1 Pro:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7369491/#Comment_7369491

The key element to compare is the number of iterations per second (the number of iterations done per second will vary from scenes to scenes and doing a higher resolution render will also lower it, but the benchmark still give an idea about the relative performance of various CPU and GPU):

• The M1 Pro was rendering 0.55 iteration per second.
• A higher end Nvidia GPU can reach a bit less than 30 iterations per second and one like the 4060 Ti 16 GB is around 9 iterations per second.

M4 Pro is faster than M1 Pro, but I think at best, a M4 Pro's CPU will be able to do 1 iteration per second.

inquire

So is the video card GPU rendering about nine times faster than the M4 CPU rendering?

Totte

inquire said:

So is the video card GPU rendering about nine times faster than the M4 CPU rendering?

Much depending on scene and videocard, but about so.  Simple scenes (like prop promos) kind of render instantly with a  fast GPU (hitting final 95% coverage in like 2 seconds.
But some huge scenes cannot even be rendered with videocards unless you have A6000s with 48 GB VRAM or A40s with 80 GB VRAM (and the price of those are huge unless you rent by the hour, then you get down to like 8-12 dollars an hour. Those cards cost like  5k USD.

 

inquire

Of course, with the M4 Chip DAZ Studio Is rendering in emulation. I expect that it would be faster if it were running natively on the macOS. In that case, might the difference in speed be less than nine times faster on a Windows machine?

algovincian

inquire said:

Of course, with the M4 Chip DAZ Studio Is rendering in emulation. I expect that it would be faster if it were running natively on the macOS. In that case, might the difference in speed be less than nine times faster on a Windows machine?

I don't think so. I think Iray in DS has had native Arm code for macOS since January of 2022:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7616791/#Comment_7616791

- Greg

 

wsterdan

algovincian said:

inquire said:

Of course, with the M4 Chip DAZ Studio Is rendering in emulation. I expect that it would be faster if it were running natively on the macOS. In that case, might the difference in speed be less than nine times faster on a Windows machine?

I don't think so. I think Iray in DS has had native Arm code for macOS since January of 2022:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7616791/#Comment_7616791

- Greg

I don't think we'd see any evidence of that until there's a native Mac version of DAZ Studio.

Over the last few years, it looks like the average difference between native and emulated applications seems to be clocking in between 15 and 25%. I'd be surprised if a native version of D|S bumped the rendering speed up more than 25%, still very low compared to high-end NVidia cards. That said, a Mac-native D|S on an M4 Pro Mac Mini with 64 GB of RAM would run Filament faster than I'd ever need. Hopefully we'll see that in my lifetime.