Considering M4 Mac Mini

Ostadan

I've been postponing upgrading my very old iMac, but it's about time.  The new M4 Mac Mini has been very well reviewed.   What configuration (e.g., memory size) is recommended nowadays for Daz Studio?  Any reasons to suppose that Daz Studio will have issues with this platform?

Masterstroke

No Mac, if your prefered number one software is DAZ Studio.
You will need the most powerful computer, you can affort with the most affortable nvidea GPU possible, in order to not have frustrating long render times.
DAZ Studio supports much quicker GPU rendering, but ONLY with NVIDEA GPUs.
 

bytescapes

What Masterstroke says is correct. Because Iray rendering only works on Nvidia GPUs, and no current Mac includes an Nvidia GPU, you'll be limited to CPU rendering on a Mac. Fast as the M4 processor is, renders will be significantly slower on a Mac than they would be on an equivalent PC with an Nvidia card.

On the other hand, the M4 Mini should be noticeably faster than your older iMac, so if you're committed to remaining with Mac, then you will probably notice a speed gain.

You could also consider doing scene set-up on your Mac, and then doing the final renders on a 3rd party service that runs Iray Server. DAZ's Jack Tomalin offers such a service (not affiliated with DAZ), and DAZ partners with another company called Infinite Compute who offer a service called Boost for DAZ 3D.

I used Jack's service, back in the days before I built a PC for DAZ work, and found it good. I never really tried Boost. You have to remember, however, that uploading your scenes to a remote server can take a while, and once uploaded your scene will be placed in a queue, so it's very much not an instant render. Remote rendering is a good solution if you don't want to tie up your machine for days and can afford to wait for your images, but it won't give you instant results.

Ostadan

Actually, I have a Windows box with a (now somewhat obsolete) graphics card, as well as my iMac, so setting up and test-rendering at low res on the Mac and transferring to the Windows box is what I used to do before some hardware issues made that less practical.  It's a snap to keep the Studio assets on both systems and just transfer the finished scene (and local assets like home-edited textures).

I just want to make sure nothing will break, and that Studio will run without annoying problems.

KenYano

I've mentioned this many times before in other threads: I own a 3080Ti laptop with i91200 CPU for Daz. Before that I had an Intel Imac where I learned to use Daz but wanted to utilize Iray and bought a laptop for that purpose alone. I also now have an M1 Mac mini becasue I'll never stop using a Mac and just out of curiosity I downloaded Daz to it. My genesis 8 characters for some reason work more smoothly on the Apple Silocon. I mean for posing and previewing animation. It's like the difference I see between Genesis 9 and 8 on my Windows laptop. I'm not sure every pluguin for Daz works with ARM Chips but other basic functions just ran smoother. In fact I may want to work on scenes on a Mac and render on my laptop. Anyone else notice this about Apple Silicon and Daz?

TBorNot

The new Mac M4 is startling fast using Metal.  Who is behing the Mac graphics algorithms?  Blender.