Jump to content

Do I need an e-GPU with Mac Pro for 3rd party renderers?


Recommended Posts

This has to have been discussed ad nauseum, but ... 

 

Mac Pro (Late 2013)

Graphics - AMD Firepro D500 3gb

macOS - Big Sur

 

C4D R20

 

I'd love to try Arnold, Maxwell, Octane, and Redshift, to see which would best suit my needs.

 

But it looks like Arnold & Maxwell require NVIDIA cards.

 

My Octane C4D demo plugin gives me a "no CUDA device supported..."

 

Do I need to invest in an e-GPU to work with these 3rd party renderers?

 

Thank you, and apologies for such a rudimentary question!!!

Link to comment

Well if you want to do some serious stuff then upgrade is definitely something you should do. Problem is at this moment its super hard to find a card to buy.

Link to comment

You certainly have a point there! A serious case of temporary (HOPEFULLY) inflation due to all sorts of parts shortages right now. 

 

My plan is to spend time in a good 3rd party renderer education initially, then purchase a new computer or e-GPU if / when needed.

 

Thanks for the response, IGOR

Link to comment

an e-gpu won't help you if you wanna run nvidia cards on a mac with an OS greater than high sierra. Nvidia stopped driver development after that for OSX.

 

redshift and octane can both run now on AMD cards, but only on latest gen ones, and big sur.

arnold should run with your current setup as is, but only in cpu mode.

i recommend trying out corona, which is one of my favourite renderers out there. it's cpu, but freakishly fast for a cpu renderer. it has the best c4d integration of all the 3rd party renderers, all c4d native shaders work with it and it looks gorgeous out of the box.

 

another option is to get a new mac 😛 ... i'm waiting on the new mbp 16" with M1x/M2 chips coming out, so i can run redshift again.

Link to comment
2 hours ago, everfresh said:

i recommend trying out corona, which is one of my favourite renderers out there.

Do you have a perpetual license or subscription? Just wondering, as I don't see an option to buy a perpetual license for C4D anymore.

Link to comment
7 hours ago, srek said:

I meant "an option to buy a perpetual license of Corona render for C4D" ... but I see where my original message might have mislead you.

The fact is that there is an option to buy the perpetual license (of Corona render 😉 ) for 3ds Max, just not for C4D ... hence the question.

3 hours ago, everfresh said:

i have a sub...

Thanks.

Link to comment

You don't say what type of rendering you will be doing. If you can't buy a new system any time soon, then I agree that Corona is your best option for your Trashcan™. I have a couple of them and Corona runs great. Of course, the faster the system the faster the rendering, but Corona can run on pretty old CPUs so you can build your own render farm utilizing older Macs. I just switched to an iMac Pro from a former coworker and have the trashcan on my network via Ethernet. Team Render works great. Corona also runs on C4D 14+.

 

Hopefully you have the 12-core version. The Corona devs are still adding features and fixing old bugs, but I use it every day and am very happy. It also has an Interactive Render window and you can set it to it in the actual viewport. It's not going to be as fast as Octane on a $4,000 GPU, BUT you can get work done now while you figure things out. The workflow is similar to the other engines, so it won't be a huge leap if you switch.

 

You can download a 45-day demo with full functions. I think it's cheaper than other options too. I think about $340/year or you can do month-to-month. I have a bunch of images done with Corona on my Vimeo page. If you have any Corona questions, let me know.

Link to comment

Yes, my Trashcan™ is 12 core. Thanks for the Corona recommendation. Not sure why I didn't have it on my list of what to try. Whenever I read a post on renderers, it's not among the top suggestions, but Corona-users will respond quickly that for quality rendering, it's unfairly overlooked - seems to be a very dedicated fanbase. BIGAL & EVERFRESH are persuasive in praise of Corona.

 

I think having the old AMD Firepro card, rather than a new Radeon, may be why the Octane plug in for C4D is not working for me?

 

I'm mostly rendering large stills, often compositing them with photography and / or illustration. Which is why I'm wanting to branch out from Maxon's Physical Renderer - to hopefully get better initial quality without as much post work (though being primarily a retouching / illustrator, I can't help but tweak every photo or render I get). But I'm occasionally doing some animation rendering as well. 

 

 

 

Link to comment

Another Corona endorsement! The people have spoken. Very thankful to have this forum - I got a great suggestion I'm going to follow that wasn't on my radar. And as a whole this site seems to stay more positive than many others I've been on, with lots of help and encouragement. And when it is negative, it's far more focused in negativity about industry, software, hardware, etc - not just complaining as the first response to everything. At least, this is my take on the vibe here. 

 

thanks everyone!

Link to comment
×
×
  • Create New...

Copyright Core 4D © 2023 Powered by Invision Community