Help with external GPU for macintosh
barrieM
Posts: 292
I have a 2018 macmini with 64GB ram with no graphics card. I want an eGRP that will be compatible with iray rendering.
Do I search only for Nvidia GPU's ? If so, Can I use any Nvidia GPU card? Are there any alternaives such as GeForce. I am totally ignorant regarding GPU's, please help.
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As far as I am aware this is no longer an option, there simply are not any nVidia drivers for MacOS that are new enough for the recent versions of Iray. The onyl "external render" option is a WIndows box, which could at least be left rendering while you did other stuff on the Mac.
Thank you Richard. Is a windows box a GPU enclosure box or a windows computer or both?
A Windows computer.
What a darn shame. I am currently looking at Poser. At first glance It appears to support several GPU's and I think one of them is Mac friendly.
Thank you for your help here and for the many times in the past. I will miss Daz Studio but must prepare for another steep learning curve.
See you soon
On Poser or cleaning Windows? Maybe the former ....... and never the latter.
Richard is correct that external Nvidia GPUs no longer seem to be an option for Mac. There is a website called egpu.io that documents people's attempts to make external GPUs work with Mac (and Windows). The short version, as I understand it, is that it was once possible -- with considerable effort -- to make it work for certain machines, but that with current Mac hardware and OS software this is no longer an option (basically, Apple and Nvidia had a falling out and decided that they wanted nothing more to do with each other).
One thing worth mentioning is that you can still use DAZ Studio and the Iray renderer on Mac hardware. However, rendering will use the CPU instead of the GPU. This makes it significantly slower than rendering with a modern Nvidia GPU, but it does work. If you don't mind waiting for results, it might be acceptable.
I believe that Poser also requires Nvidia GPUs for accelerated rendering (but like DAZ Studio it can do CPU-only renders on your Mac).
In theory, Intel-based Apple hardware (like your 2018 Mac Mini) should be able to use an external GPU box fitted with a graphics card made by AMD, a competitor to Nvidia. Reading some relevant forums suggests that this can be a bit hit-and-miss, especially on Apple's newest OS (Monterey). However, it seems as if people have had success getting AMD cards to work.
An AMD graphics card won't help with DAZ Studio or Poser. However, it would probably give you a performance boost if you use Blender.
Thankyou bytescapes that is interesting information. I am only familiar with iray in DS but I did try a render with 3delight. It finished within seconds and displayed an untextured image. Is there another way to render? By the way I have only taken a quick look at Poser before I join the forum' I thought I saw support for AMD cards but I am about to dig deeper. If there is another rendering trick on DS, I will try it.
I also tried remote rendering with irender. They claimed to support macintosh and Daz Studio but that ended with a trip up the garden path..... it is Windows based.
You might be right about Poser supporting AMD. I did some searching, and what I found seemed to suggest that both Firefly and Superfly (the two renderers that Poser ships with) target Nvidia cards and don't get any benefit from AMD GPUs. However, I am not 100% certain of that.
On the subject of remote rendering, DAZ's own Jack Tomalin has a small render farm as a sideline, separate from his work for DAZ. I've used it in the past (and I may end up using it again, as the PC that I built to do my DAZ work has just upped and died on me; grrrr ...). It has been, in my experience, entirely Mac compatible and straightforward to use. As I say, it's Jack's sideline, so he isn't able to offer quite the same slick professional service you might expect from a dedicated business. Occasionally machines get hung up and have to be rebooted, occasionally you find your renders in a queue behind a bunch of other jobs. But I was pleased with it, and Jack is very responsive and quick to sort out any problems that arise. You could certainly give that a try and see if it fits your needs (I think he offers a free trial render for new customers).
@bytescapes Thanks for coming back. You built a PC for rendering... WOW!!! I built a machine for painting rendered images.
I looked at Poser and decided to resolve my rendering problem here. The Jack Tomain solution appears to be ideal and I will try out his service. Many thanks for that. I have also thought of other options that may (or may not) work. I have Two monster Mac G5's collecting cobwebs. Maybe an old DS installed on a G5 will do the rendering. I also have a 2013 iMac that in theory, should do iRay rendering but it only renders in the view port. Tried to get help on DS forums but no luck. I also have an old Dell laptop with Windows. I got it just for model aircraft Radio control simulation so my Knowledge of Windows is non existant.
At long last I see a solution. By the way I love your gallery layout, quite unique and user friendly.
By the way, to anyone considering building a PC just so that they can render DAZ scenes, I would just like to say that the whole experience was a nightmare from start to finish. A PC is basically Satan's own jigsaw puzzle, with the bonus being that you have to choose all the puzzle pieces yourself. This means making about forty separate purchasing decisions in each of which you need to choose between ninety-two seemingly identical products, every one of which may or may not play nice with all the others. (In the event you make a wrong decision, of course, there are online forums where you can complain about it and get roundly mocked by a succession of teenage boys who can't believe that you could be such a noob as to buy an EVGA GTX Super ProPlus 4THz DeathKiller Prime and expect it to work with the Asus BowelCruncher 8500QSX Premium with TurboClocking when everyone knows that it only works with the EVGA GTX Pro SuperPlus 3.2GHz Founder's Edition Fondue Eradicator).
And that's before you even start to put the pieces together. I am a Very Technical Boy (to use William Gibson's famous phrase) and it still took me about two days to assemble the sucker. And they were not two good days.
That said, the machine was pretty nice while it lasted. But now some unspecified component has turned up its toes, so I get to take it all apart again and try to figure out which bit isn't working. My guess is that it's the power supply. I assume it's the power supply because getting it out will require me to essentially disassemble the entire thing just to get it out so I can test it. Of course it could be the motherboard, for the same reason.
Bitter, me? Ha ha, bless you, no. Not in the slightest.
Joking aside, I think that if I were going this route again, I might buy a pre-built PC. You get less bang for your buck, but you do get reduced hassle and the benefit of having someone other than yourself to shout at when the whole thing goes casters-up after six months. Also, and this is a big factor, you can buy a complete PC with a modern Nvidia card in it for not very much more than you'd pay to buy just the card from a scalper on eBay. The other sad fact about Nvidia cards is that every last one has been bought up by either scalpers or Bitcoin miners, so good luck trying to buy one for much less than 3 times the listed MSRP.
Sorry, enough whining. With regard to your older Macs, your 2013 iMac does indeed have an Nvidia card, but -- from the specs -- it looks as if it only has 1GB of VRAM. Unfortunately, it's not enough just to have an Nvidia card -- you also need a sufficient quantity of VRAM (video memory). For DAZ Studio scenes, 4GB is probably the lower limit (because some of that memory will be needed to drive the display as well). 8GB is better (the 1070Ti in my PC has 8GB). Really, what you want is an RTX 3090 with 24GB of memory, or perhaps 2 or 3 of them. Fortunately, you can pick up an RTX 3090 for not very much more than the price of a Manhattan townhouse at any scalper's page on eBay. Happy times!
I'm not sure about the G5s. I don't think recent versions of DAZ Studio probably run on PowerPC architectures at all.
Anyway, good luck with your rendering. I hope that Jack's service might offer you a way forward. I was certainly happy with it, although of course your mileage may vary.
Didn't take long for you to come back
It isn't such a nightmare anymore... Most of the stuff is already integrated into the motherboard, so you choose a motherboard, processor, amount of memory and a GPU, throw it in a case with big enough (oversized) PSU and some storage devices and that's it.
No finding the right PCI slots for each and every add on card to avoid IRQ conflicts and no setting of memory spaces anymore.
I notice you didn't mention fighting off the attacks of the ferocious Memory Dragons, rafting down the swollen river of the Data Bus, and finally wrestling the CPU Ogre into submission to prove yourself worthy (after first covering yourself with thermal paste to make it harder for the Ogre to seize you). It's like you want people to think building a PC is easy, or something.
True, PC building is easier than it was. There are still an awful lot of fiddly little screws to tighten, wires to connect to all the right bits, and more. Plus, no matter how big your case -- mine is large enough that I can probably be buried in it, along with my major possessions, pets and household staff, like a pharaoh of old -- there's always the moment when you discover that there just isn't space to squeeze that one last bundle of wires where it needs to go.
You can also pay someone to put it together with the parts you have chosen
I have an old mac with Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Is there an old version of DS that will run on 10.6.8 ?
Older versions of DS are not made available, so unless you have your own backups you are going to be unable to use an nVidia card due to lack of a suitable driver (the current minimum version is later than any Mac driver that was issued).
Thanks. I have old mac backups but before I start digging do you know which version worked on Snow Leopard 10.6.8?
@bytescapes I tried Jack Tomlins server and DS crashed. Jack updated his server but itcrashed again. Did you use his service on a Mac? See attached Crash report. Jack asked me to get Daz tech support to sort it out.
Still trying to render. Hoping someone knows someone who may be able to help before I die trying.
I have a 2018 Mac Mini with no GPU. Tried to render on a remote server. DS crashed immediately after connecting to the server. I also have trouble with iCloud email and wonder if there is a common cause.
Turns out that iCloud email is blocked by my isp. They (Bell) told me to change the port to 587 and all will be well. I have to get Apple to help with that.
• Do server connections use the same port as email?
Yes, I used Jack's service successfully from a Mac: a 2019 MacBook Pro running OS X 10 (Catalina). I don't remember exactly which DAZ Studio version I used -- maybe 4.12? It looks like you're on Big Sur; I wouldn't expect that to cause problems connecting to Jack's Iray Server, but I haven't tested that personally, so it might.
Sorry not to be more helpful.
On the other hand, I may be able to help you with the email issue. In answer to your question, no, Iray Server doesn't use the same port as email (can't remember what port it does use, but the GUI is on 9090, so I'd expect it to be somewhere in the same range; it's unlikely that your ISP is blocking a port that high).
The reason you're having trouble with iCloud email is presumably -- based on what your ISP said -- because your email client is trying to connect to port 25, which was the original standard port for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Spammers started hijacking people's PCs and pumping out spam emails targeting port 25 on badly-configured mailservers that would accept mail from anywhere and send it anywhere. So ISPs gradually adopted a blanket ban on port 25: they simply wouldn't allow any client on their network to talk to port 25 on anything.
Instead, they encouraged people to use port 587, which supports authenticated SMTP. In other words, your computer can't just go "Yo, I gotta mail I wanna send," and have the remote mailserver go "Sure, whatever you say, boss." Instead, your mail program has to say "I'd like to send this mail, and I am this authorized user and here's my password." And then the mailserver goes "OK, I know who you are, send away." (Or, alternatively, "Never heard of you. Get lost.") Because servers on port 587 support proper authentication, ISPs are happy to let you connect to that port.
OK, that's more technical detail than you needed.
The odd thing is that an iCloud mail account ought to be set up by default to use port 587. If you went through the usual setup procedure, you'll just have added your iCloud account in the 'Internet Accounts' preference, and the OS will have applied all the standard settings for iCloud, which should include connection on port 587 (port 25 blocking has been around for years). All I can imagine is that, if your ISP is right about your mail client trying to send on port 25, that you're somehow working with an old setup that has been migrated forward from a previous machine or OS.
Anyway, this is off-topic for DAZ Studio. If you'd like to DM me, we can talk about it and I can try to figure out what's going on.
Many thanks for the education. Very interesting. In factI have just finished a magical session with Apple. And you are right icloud account was reinstalled and my email is now OK. I have yet to try the remote render. What does DM mean? I would like to contact you off forum because all my posts are not stirring much interest.
DM usually means direct message - click the profile link, then the Message button.
Thank you Richard
My Mac Mini with no GPU renders an Nvidia iRay image in the viewport. I thought iRay renders needed a GUP. Is it possible to render a full size image using Nvidia iray?
Iray doesn't require a GPU, a (compatible) GPU just makes the renders faster. Rendering on CPU doesn't even impact the quality of the render.
Absolutely.
Iray will use an Nvidia GPU to render if one is available. If there isn't one available (or if the GPU doesn't have enough video memory to hold the data needed for the render), then it will fall back to using the computer's CPU and main memory instead.
The final image will be essentially the same. However, because the CPU isn't optimized for rendering in the way that the GPU is, CPU renders take much longer to complete. A render that might complete in minutes on a powerful GPU can take hours to render using only the CPU.
You can still use DAZ Studio to make Iray renders using your computer's CPU, but you might find yourself adopting a workflow where you do a set of small test renders to get the scene looking the way you want it, then do the final high-quality, high-resolution render overnight. It's a slow way of working, but you can certainly do it.
How do I set up for cpu rendering?
CPU rendering is the default, so you don't need to do anything.