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iMac and Iray/DS4.8?

OstadanOstadan Posts: 1,125
edited December 1969 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

The more recent iMacs seem to have an NVidia graphics card with up to 4GB (the Retina does not have an NVidia card). Has anyone had good or bad experiences with the 4.8 beta Iray using GPU acceleration on such an iMac? I will be replacing my 2011 iMac before very long, so will need to decide just what to buy.

Comments

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited December 1969

    my understanding is iRay requires OpenCL to run. So along with a Mac that has an Nvidia GPU you need one that supports OpenC and there are several different versions possible or limited to depending on your hardware architecture.
    I have a mac with an Nvidia Gforce card so I'm SOL with Iray at the moment.

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823

    https://developer.apple.com/opencl/

  • Male-M3diaMale-M3dia Posts: 3,581
    edited December 1969

    StratDragon said:
    my understanding is iRay requires OpenCL to run. So along with a Mac that has an Nvidia GPU you need one that supports OpenC and there are several different versions possible or limited to depending on your hardware architecture.
    I have a mac with an Nvidia Gforce card so I'm SOL with Iray at the moment.

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823

    https://developer.apple.com/opencl/

    For GPU acceleration, you need a CUDA-capable card, not OpenCL. Also you will need to download the CUDA installation from Nvidia and adjust your power saver settings to get access to the videocard in DS.

  • OstadanOstadan Posts: 1,125
    edited December 1969

    So, the card on the iMac is a GeForce GTX 770
    The specs on the NVidia page (below) sound like it is suitable.

    I'd be happier if someone with a recent iMac could report actual experiences, though, before dropping the coin.

    GTX 770 GPU Engine Specs:
    CUDA Cores 1536
    Base Clock (MHz) 1046
    Boost Clock (MHz) 1085
    Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 134
    GTX 770 Memory Specs:
    Memory Speed 7.0 Gbps
    Standard Memory Config 2048 MB
    Memory Interface GDDR5
    Memory Interface Width 256-bit
    Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 224.3

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited March 2015

    I have an older CUDA capable card in my Mac Pro.
    Iray does not work on it in GPU mode, even a few polygons will not produce a render in Yosemite.

    Drivers for Mac are here btw:
    http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cuda-7.0.29-driver.html

    the i5/i7 27" iMac/iMac 5K come with a 770 2GB card but you can get a 780 4GB card as well for $150 more, but only on models that had the 2GB card available as the base card to begin with.

    Post edited by StratDragon on
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