R2D2 Posted September 28, 2017 Share Posted September 28, 2017 Hi Pylon, regarding the upgrade to V4 there is this statement (regarding Studio): "Mac Users: Maxwell GPU rendering feature is not currently supported on macOS. For GPU rendering, Nvidia graphics cards with CUDA support are required, and Apple does not sell computers which include these at this time." But then: Maxwell | form•Z key feature list: GPU support Confusing me as I have a macpro with dual GPU (2xGTX960) Will maxwell make use of these cards when using the maxwell FZ-plugin in OSX ? And, as long as there is no multi-GPU support: can one of the two cards then be dedicated to rendering only ? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pylon Posted September 30, 2017 Share Posted September 30, 2017 Hi R2,Short answers:1. Your GTX 960 card is unsupported by Apple, so not officially supported by Next Limit either. However, it very well may work for small scenes (RAM limitations). Download the Maxwell 4 trial and give it a try.2. Multi-GPU rendering will be available in Maxwell 4.2, coming very soon. For now, one GPU is used.3. Personally, I've had great success simply using the new denoiser in Maxwell V4 with CPU rendering. With this combination, there are virtually no limitations on scene complexity and image size, and I get a great result at least twice as fast as V3… often 4x faster. I highly recommend taking the V4 denoiser for a test drive.Longer Answer:I reached out to Next Limit for clarification. Here are the summarized details, with a few of my own comments:Maxwell's GPU rendering requires contemporary Nvidia graphic cards, with a CUDA compute capability of 3.0 or greater. Here's a extensive list of cards and their capabilities:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDAAnd here's a list of GPUs Apple has included in their products:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823If you cross reference the two lists, the GPUs delivered by Apple that support Maxwell are:NVIDIA GeForce GT 640MNVIDIA GeForce GT 650MNVIDIA GeForce GT 680MNVIDIA Geforce GT 750MNVIDIA Geforce GT 755MNVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MXNVIDIA Geforce GTX 775MNVIDIA Geforce GTX 780MThese cards are all far behind the state of the art. Unfortunately, Apple has not officially supported high-end Nvidia GPUs in a long time. In practice, to do serious work with large scenes/resolutions you'll need contemporary GPUs with significantly more power and RAM that these.In June, however, Apple announced (forthcoming) official support for external GPUs via Thunderbolt, as well as new Mac Pros sometime after 2017. So there may be better options available soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R2D2 Posted September 30, 2017 Author Share Posted September 30, 2017 Thanks Pylon, Nvidia supports newer GTX cards with their own drivers for OSX (i.e. my 2x Gtx960), these also work using the latest CUDA driver. But the statement: „Maxwell GPU rendering is not currently supported on Mac OS. For GPU rendering, nVIDIA graphic cards with CUDA support are required, and for the time being Apple does not provide machines that include these.“ is true of course- lets hope Apple comes back soon including better Nvidia options again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.