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Bern

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 10, 2004
1,854
1
Australia
Taking a look at the system requirements for Blender over on their website and I'm not entirely certain how well it would run on a 2Ghz MacBook with 2GB ram.

Anyone have any experience or idea?
 
Horrible on MacBook with Leopard. (Blender v2.45 Universal)

Horrible on MacBook with Leopard. (Blender v2.45 Universal)

This may have been great performance on Win98, but it's main interface is slow feeling. And there are several things that don't display, so even though they render, you're left to wonder where they are when editing.

You'll get better performance if you run it in XP through Parallels.

Wm
 
I'm using Blender on my Macbook (2.16GHZ C2D with 2GB RAM) with Tiger, it seems to work fine however the more floating points and the higher the quality of the texture maps you use it does seem to slow the performance.
 
I'm late to the topic buuut..

Blender on a CD 1.8 2GB Rev.A Macbook with Leopard is pretty terrible - i boot into windows to run it. Maybe on the newer GMA chips it's better.

It's only been like this since the Leopard upgrade, it was fine before that, but there's a huge amount of UI lag now, things take a while to actually happen when you click, which makes it pretty unusable. :( Hopefully they'll fix it soon. It's not just me, lots of users have mentioned it online.

On Tiger it ran like a trooper, so a newer Macbook would be very capable. :)
 
The scoop on MacBooks and Blender

In summary, if you meet both of these criteria Blender will not be usable for you:

(1) You have a MacBook with an Intel GMA chipset.
(The black and white MacBooks both have these. Newer aluminum one does not)

(2) You are running Leopard.

So if you want to use Blender, don't get the white MacBook (black is discontinued).

The cause is an OpenGL bug in Leopard that only affects certain OpenGL calls and only if the graphics hardware is "Intel GMA-something-something".

The only way around this is to run another OS on your MacBook. Dual-booting or using a virtual machine through software like VMware Fusion are both viable options. Of course if you are running Tiger on your MacBook, by all means do not upgrade to Leopard if you plan to use Blender.
 
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