Hi just curious as the New Macbook Pro laptops do not have an alternative graphics card by NVIDIA? I know many rely on this for rendering in 3D from Sketchup?
l have two choices for graphics card neither are NVIDIAs.
Thanks
I have the MacBook Pro 16 inch that is AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB/Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB. Some software does take advantage of Nvidia features that allow GPU rendering, but I’m skeptical about the images being any better than AMD, even if AMD takes longer to render.
I have reasons to be checking out V-Ray, maybe there are some test scenes that I could try, and we can see what is the difference in time, and if there is any quality difference.
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There will be absolutely zero difference in quality, regardless of hardware - AMD based machines cannot use GPU accelerated rendering as VRay only uses CUDA for GPU rendering. You can in fact simulate GPU rendering on CPU in VRay (there is no benefit to this apart from that Vray GPU renders certain attributes slightly differently to CPU - but this list is shrinking)
Its just a speed thang.
If Metal matures enough to handle ray tracing at a suitable level then Chaos may assess it. When they looked at it a year ago it was not viable.
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My thought is that the software render may look nicer (though perhaps microscopically nicer). In Final Cut Pro your export options are GPU or Better Quality, which implies that using GPU may be faster, but isn’t going to be as good as a slower software render.
16’ That’s one hell of a laptop!
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It is actually 17’ real screen shelled in a classic 15’ body
Thanks it is a huge investment so I want to make sure it works first?
Yes Mike, i loved my 17" served me well for few years, their pricing however threatens to shut me out after this. It is almost tripple what the original 17" high end machine costs.Made me a ton of money until 2007-8 all my clients were Home Builders and Architects!!! I received a devastating financial spanking along with several large payments that bounced.
I would suggest Twinmotion…it can render an Ultra 4K image in two minutes with a 5500M. Of course, that depends on your thermals. I recommend working in a room about 65 Fahrenheit.
16" not 16 foot 
Darn! I thought Apple was up to doing great things again. 
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No I have used Blender a few years back. Using Twilight now.
Whilst that sounds good it equals out to 48 mins per second of animation best case and that’s not much competitive these days (everybody wants animation), id recommend renting an AWS machine when you need to render if using a MAC https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/solutions/media-entertainment/
In comparison (in a competitive environment) Im able to render a 4k frame in Unreal Engine (Twinmotion) in 4K in less than 3 seconds. That gives me a 500 frame animation in 3 mins or so including compiling.
Now the machine to do that is expensive and much cheaper running over AWS. We would use AWS in work if it wasn’t for our security policy (our CAD machines can have no internet access).
I’ve had contractors running running (12 core/ 64GBRAM/ 2080ti for as little as as $10 a day)
This isn’t a slight by the way, I am a big mac fan but these days the heavy lifting can be done entirely on a Virtual Machine. Many contractors who work on AAA games and film will use a medium laptop (alienware, Macbook Pro or MSI for example) and run the heavy lifting via an inexpensive VM cluster.
This only really applies to rendering of course, not SketchUp on its own which will be fine on any MB Pro.
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Thanks for the information I appreciate it. Steve
thanks for the idea Liam. As my Mac chugs away on another render, I like the idea of renting a machine (but that site makes no sense to me 
English words but…)
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I will send you a better link, that was not the right one!
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… I think what you mean to say is that where Apple is concerned you purchase 16" for the price of 16’.