Anyone Here use Blender 3D

[lampliter]

I am wondering what you guys are using in order to have Blender`s new render engine "Cycles" recognize your GPU instead of your CPU. I have a 2011 macbook pro and a 1,1 Macpro with a flashed 1 gig HD 4870 but neither are supported in Cycles. Are any Macs able to support this type of rendering with apple being of the opinion that graphics cards are not important. It is so much faster when rendered through the GPU and I would love to be able to do this. Any suggestions? Thanks

 

[dingdini]

Cycles -> Cuda

I've just been getting into this myself and from what I understand, the Cycles rendering engine in blender is currently only supported on NVIDIA Cuda capable cards. This would include the GTX 285, 480, 470, 570, 580, and eventually the 670 and 680 cards. Of these cards only the 285 is officially supported by Apple.

MacVidCards has a number of 570s available that are compatible with blender.

There is also a limited/experimental support for the AMD cards however it is not very mature at this moment. I have tested the experimental OpenCL engine recently and it seems like they have made some strides but I haven't seen if it fully works yet.

I hope this helps

 

[lampliter]

THANKYOU very much for your reply. This is very helpful to me. Are most other rendering engines in other 3D apps needing nvidia cards also? Thanks again

 

[minifridge1138]

I use Blender, but I don't use the GPU for rendering.
I have an ATI card, and as already mentioned, most applications can take advantage of CUDA.

If you do find a way to use the ATI card, I'd love to hear about it.

 

[dingdini]

found some more information

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering

Here is a link to the blender page that details what it supports. It seems like things are getting better, but still there yet.