Building complex softwares from scratch take time and it’s not a MacOS specific problem. I’m a CPU guy for rendering since GPU can’t handle my scene efficiently, I’m waiting for Vray5(CPU) to be released for over two year and it’s still nowhere near completed(even on Windows) even if developers are working hard on that. I’ve worked in CG for more than 20 years and I know that original timeline for software are never respected, no matter if on CPU, GPU, MacOS, Windows. To be honest the big error is that company like Otoy give users the false expectation that software was ready in time for the MP release. Anyway.. Octane will be released in a couple days, I guess GPU folks will be happy about that.
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MP 7,1 GPU rendering on the new Mac Pro. News, updates, chat.
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GPU's aren't super duper harder than a top end CPU. Intel's previous drive out into the swamp with Larrabee was more a matter of "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" mindset then some substantive difficutly with GPU design. It all took a 'left turn' and into weeds when someone decided to apply a high overlap of x86 instruction set design (and decoder work) to the GPU. That was one of the principle problems.... trying to couple it to instruction set bagged from the 80's and 90's.
Intel had made buckets of money from the inertia of gobs of software saddled with 32-bit ( and smaller) legacy myopia. The substantive problem kicks in when try to apply that inertia to a problem area outside of general purpose CPUs. It is one of those "who made gobs of money off this , so let's just pour it like ketchup on another area. " . That is digging a deeper moat around what you got not necessarily solving the problem. ( but it may be the only way to get funding is whole organizational thinking is deeply skewed and mired in group think. )
Intel's iGPUs generally had a smaller transistor budget. Initially they only got was was somewhat "left over" space. Then after while the mainstream Core i-series got "stuck" around 4 cores because iGPU got biggest shares of budgets. And the performance got better.
Where Intel is now is different than back where their iGPUs started from. It has gotten to the point where there is real contention for floorplan space between iGPU and x86 cores. So getting to the point can just hand most (or effectively all) of the budget to GPU processors and supporting logic isn't as big of a leap as it was.
Breaking into the higher end GPU business is about as big a matter of software as it is hardware. That is a big barrier to entry to most players. And another contributing reason why Intel has been widely floating the DG1 to developers ( that won't be a general retail product at all).
"big dies" that do high end computation "compute" is a good option for Intel to keep their fabs busy with work if the CPU business retracts a bit.
The software being important factor is one reason Apple is pushing hard on Metal ( big, bright, orange "detour' signs around OpenGL , OpenCL , etc. towards Metal). Their iGPU solutions will pragmatically work much better if well designed/optimized Metal code is provider to their hardware.
What's wrong specifically with Zbrush on the Mac? It's a rare case of multicore-utilization for interactive sessions and does not rely on GPU acceleration at all (except perhaps for some retopo plugin I vaguely remember hearing about). It should fly on this machine - better than on a regular (Intel-powered) PC provided you feed it both the cores and the memory that this MP can theoretically be configured with.
I could see it running worse if you opt to use a high-DPI monitor like the XDR though since it would have to render many more pixels for the canvas than a regular 1440p screen - but that is not a Mac-specific issue.
Octane X will be available tomorrow – presumably some sort of open beta access, but anyway, it's here!
"The public release builds will be finalized tomorrow and on staging server by Friday, including updated shop page and downloads section for all plugins (which I signed off on last night). When we are allowed to flip the switch for everyone to get it is being worked out tomorrow."
"The public release builds will be finalized tomorrow and on staging server by Friday, including updated shop page and downloads section for all plugins (which I signed off on last night). When we are allowed to flip the switch for everyone to get it is being worked out tomorrow."
It's more about the interaction with the other apps I mentioned. Zbrush is rarely used on its own and would be in a pipeline with a texturing application like Substance with additional modelling done in Maya, with rendering increasingly being done in Unreal (check the making of the Mandalorian). That is a typical gamedev/movie asset workflow that is just more optimised for the PC. I cancelled my subscription to Substance because they don't officially support the GTX1080i on the Mac and wouldn't help me troubleshoot the constant crashes with Painter. And who can blame them for not supporting such prehistoric hardware? Unreal runs like hell on the Mac, Maya is clearly a PC program crudely thrown onto the Mac, so that gives you a completely broken workflow. And this is without even mentioning the Metal GPU rendering situation.
I just wonder if there is any mileage at all in more waiting at this point. Even with ARM Macs and Metal GPU rendering, will we ever get even a smooth workflow in the apps I mentioned, not to mention speed parity with Windows?
You nail it on the head. Its all about the smooth workflow between apps, and everything for me runs better on bootcamp than macOS.
It actually makes me a bit sad and I have been trying to stick with Apple but recent experiences have just about made me cut the tie. I have a custom PC workstation priced up and ready to order - I am struggling to click the buy button, but the alternative is just compromise as far as I can see.
I am unsure why I should compromise my business and ambitions just so I can use a Mac....... And apple have done absolutely nothing recently to persuade me otherwise.
I have both Macs and PCs in my company with each given different jobs to complete. A musician has multiple guitars, keyboards, mics, etc. Not sure how professionals today can operate without multiple type computers....
Quite easily if there is not one app that actually works better on a mac. ALL of professionals i know don’t use multiple systems, and I know only one other on a mac, the rest are all windows.
I currently am running Mac OS and windows and work on both. The realisation for me is i am not actually missing out on anything when I am in windows, but in fact have better workflows and more productivity in the software I am using.
The reason I mainly have been using windows was for windows only software [Revit], but then I started testing out Rhino, Unreal, twinmotion and Fusion 360 and none of these apps are as good on a mac with an amd GPU as windows and RTX.
This is not really applicable to a 3D-only business. You could argue that the Adobe suite is generally better on Mac but otherwise there is little need to have anything other than a PC.
Emmm, definitely no, you will not get that. All you have is access to these apps on your chosen platform but you are far away from the industry standard so it's always going to be a distant cousin, less optimized, supported, tested, etc. And with Apple upping sticks again and moving to a new platform soon enough I predict it's only going downhill from where we are, at least for a while.
Looks like the free license for the Mac Pro (2019) won’t be available tomorrow.
I'd really love to start a thread on people's experiences of transitioning to Windows/PC from OSX/Mac Pro for 3D/creative work, for general usage tips and those of us wanting to make the change but entrenched in the Mac way of doing things. Is that on-topic for this forum? Could be a really useful resource for those of us still hanging on to old hardware and wanting to move things forward.
There's not too much to say tbh. I can summarise it:
1. Everything is much faster
2. Everything is much uglier
3. Colour profiles are not honoured system wide
That's really the important stuff. There are apps that can mimic some of the native Mac things such as Quicklook. There's very little downside apart from item 2, which is massively apparent everywhere. It's the kind of thing I find jarring. Like why is this window's font different to that? Why is this UI element not aligned? And the fonts, oh my days the fonts.
It's easily forgotten once you start rendering on 2080ti's and a modern cpu.
but jeez man the fonts
wait here's some other tidbits
-In Houdini, you can't use the system file picker. Which isn't actually so bad, because in Windows you cannot drag drop an item from an Explorer window into an Open/Save type dialog window anyway. Which is ultra annoying and slow.
-There's a lot of what i've come to think basic stuff missing, such as selecting a load of items and doing right click Make New Folder with Selection. I'm sure there's an app for this, but come on now.
-Even on Pro there are hints of the system being at someone else's mercy, such as "allow us to track your life if you want more tiles in the multitask window" etc
-I have messed apps up and had to use Restore Points more often than I'd like to admit
-4k and scaling in general isn't 100% yet
-i'm sure there's more. There's loads of "why?/why not?" stuff in Windows but like i said it's easy to overlook given the speed difference, and hey, apps actually work!
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Best post ever on describing windows!
Exactly my thoughts on it.
It’s certainly not a perfect solution.
Someone maybe in another thread mentioned using 2 machines. I don't specifically use Windows. I do Mac/Linux, but I think the use-case applies. I keep around Mac for Xcode, but 90% of productivity happens on Linux. Use 2 displays or even split screen on some of these newer displays. One for Mac other for Linux. Then use synergy to share mouse and keyboard between them. It's actually very seamless and easy to use. The best compromise that I've been able to find.
I used Windows back in the 90s then switched to Mac right at the end of the Classic era. Windows has come a long way since then, and a lot of the horror stories aren't justified any more. If you're in this realm of work you're likely clever enough to manage Windows/a PC perfectly well. There's little maintenance involved other than periodic cache/cleaning type stuff.
I've managed to mess up a Cinema4D install and despite deleting every preference/support file I could find it still wasn't working, so had to do use a restore point. Some similar things occurred but all in all it works well. It's just ugly
That said, if gpu rendering for Metal actually works out I won't hesitate to switch back completely to MacOS, assuming Houdini/Zbrush/Substance etc are all roughly as quick as on Windows. It's just a nicer environment.
I went the other way.
I was on Windows for many years back in the 3.1 days, up to NT4.0, with a 3D Labs Oxygen gpu (which I still have in it’s box, after chucking the pc).
Changed to Mac in about 2002 because my software was multi platform.
Gave it a go and never looked back.
I was on Windows for many years back in the 3.1 days, up to NT4.0, with a 3D Labs Oxygen gpu (which I still have in it’s box, after chucking the pc).
Changed to Mac in about 2002 because my software was multi platform.
Gave it a go and never looked back.
Why do you have to choose one or the other? I have a PC and an MP on my desk. I like the Mac for general productivity, all the web stuff and I use it to run ZBrush, Affinity suite and Resolve which in my experience all run better/less troublesome than on PC.
PC is for 3D exclusively, there's not much 'workflow' necessary. You deal with the Explorer (which kinda sucks next to Finder but at least you can install Quick Look as an addon) and otherwise you double click on program icons. Done.
Helps to also turn off auto updates for good but same goes for Mac in my opinion. I also disconnected the PC from the Internets for the most part.
After getting an MP I can say: I trust my PC more than my Mac Pro when it comes to stability or user ability to diagnose and fix things without involving support.
PC is for 3D exclusively, there's not much 'workflow' necessary. You deal with the Explorer (which kinda sucks next to Finder but at least you can install Quick Look as an addon) and otherwise you double click on program icons. Done.
Helps to also turn off auto updates for good but same goes for Mac in my opinion. I also disconnected the PC from the Internets for the most part.After getting an MP I can say: I trust my PC more than my Mac Pro when it comes to stability or user ability to diagnose and fix things without involving support.
primarily because sharing a project with external resources from network drives etc isn’t feasible between Windows and Mac. The mount points are all different.
Because it’s a pain in the arse jumping between two computers.
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Any excuse from Otoy for yet ANOTHER delay, what is so different between 10.15.5 and 10.15.6.
Next week it will change to when Big Sur is released.
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It's actually not. Use synergy mouse/keyboard sharing over ip. It's very seamless.