Mac OS Catalina 10.15.3
Imac 21.5 inch 2017
processor 2,3 GHz Dual Core Intel Core i5
Memory 8 GB 2133 MHz DDR4
Graphics Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB
For example I want to try Vray but a person told me he saw my profile info and thought my comp wasn’t good enough. Not remember what I wrote in the profile but here above is all the comp specs.
The easiest way to find out is to try.
Renders take a lot of time.
Your specs are probably workable. But slowish.
Yes but as I’m a beginner I might not know for sure if its not working because of my comp specs or because im a noob and do something wrong 
Every rendering engine software has a web page with minimum recommended hardware specs.
For Vray there is Documentation - Chaos Help
Your computer is there in that minimum for CPU rendering but you will not be able to utilize GPU rendering without Nvidia GPU.
From my experience, your computer is on the low side with specs and if you will render products probably it will work with CPU render just fine, slow but will work.
For comfortable, faster, rendering Vray will utilize all of your CPU cores, so as many you can buy than better. The same goes for GPU rendering, the better, unfortunately also more expensive, GPU you can buy faster the rendering will be.
Also, you can download a trail of Vray, and almost all rendering producers will offer you a trial, and see how it goes.
Its not the best specs but not too bad.
You can definitely use it to learn VRAY.
I use VRay on an older iMac, similar specs.
Good for Shadow study and simple room lighting.
I would stay away with heavy photo realistic texture.
Just try it out with simple textures and focus on lighting. That hardware should be able to handle it.
As has been noted by others, your specs are on the low side for rendering, but if you’re judicious in your render settings you should be able to generate usable results — as long as you don’t mind waiting a while.
I have a 2014 13" MacBook RD that has even weaker CPU/GPU specs. I use Twilight Render and manage to produce decent (if simple) renders, but I do have to be careful with material and lighting settings to prevent overloading my hardware.
I’ve never tried VRay, so I don’t know how it compares in terms of performance requirements, but I would suggest trying Twilight Hobby version: it’s free (unlike VRay) and seems simpler for render beginners to learn and use.
As many cores as I can buy? Not sure what a core means, what about buying more RAM, that’s a core? I have 8 right , I can make it 16 or 32 will it make a difference?
How much money do you have? Eight cores give 16 threads. V-ray utilizes both the CPU and the GPU in one configuration and CPU only in another. This makes having a GOOD GPU a must.
Money not so much an issue, but time is, I just looked at a who new laptop (which I needed anyway) so I might buy a very good one, hope its good enough. Maybe you can tell?
Processor i7 , 6 , 2,6 GHz
turbo boost to 4.5GHz
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4 GB memory GDDR6
Memory DDR4 16 GB with 2666MHz
SSD 512 GB
Retina 16 polegados with True Tone
Touch Bar
4 Thunderbolt
Only thing I would like to do is connect to another 27 inch iMac with a cable so I have a bigger screen and can even use two. Is this possible?
I do no speak Mac lingo. Search the forum, there are many threads about Macs pro and con. That said it should work.
Vray uses only Nvidia GPU for GPU rendering.
Depends on the model, google ‘Target display mode’
It needs to an iMac with thunderbolt and not having a retina screen.
Tildome,
what stuff do you want to Render?
Rendering needs a lot of Compute-Power. To get a feel for this here’s an Example: Check out the following Animation I made.
It’s 4 Minutes long = 240 seconds. 30 frames per seconds = 7.200 frames. Per frame my PC rendered about 8 seconds (Average).
= 57.600 seconds = 960 Minutes = 16 hours Renderingtime.
(Rendered with Lumion 10 Pro on my Windows-PC with Nvidia RTX 2080Ti and AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core)
And as you can see this is not photorealistic. If you want photorealistic Renders with Vray you need to wait not seconds, but minutes till one image is rendered (on my Windows-PC).
I love my Macbook and do everything with it. But not Gaming and not Rendering, which I use a PC for. My opinion: this real thin Apple-Machines are not made for rendering hours-long with 100% cpu-/gpu-usage.
And Vray uses Cuda-cores for Rendering. Which are only built in in Nvidia-GPUs. Means: Renderings with Vray on Apple-Machines take longer.
So my Recommendation, when money isn’t so much an issue as you wrote: Buy yourself a powerful Windows-PC and use your Macbook beside it. Or, buy the quite expensive Mac Pro with the AMD 5700 X GPU.
But the question is: What do you wanna render? Maybe you don’t need 100% photorealistic Images. There are a lot of other Render-Solutions out there. For example TwinMotion which runs on MacOS. You can’t render photorealistic like in Vray, but it’s much easier to use and learn.
Thats very nicely done sir! My dream to become so good
To be honest I don’t need foto realistic rendering, but your quality is more then good enough for me. Your render looks close to reality!
I only would like to render and get as close to reality as possible because my house is being rebuild and I would like to test and see as many material combinations as possible so I can decide which I like best. The materials are all from a store which say they are connected to sketchup/3dwarehouse.
So I might get a problem testing a 100 different colours/materials as you say it might take long time to load every time I change it. Btw I don’t have a MacBook but an iMac. Pretty thin as well that’s true. Well I thought about buying an expensive max , for example the 5700 AMD but another person in this thread said Vray only uses Nvidea GPU, but you think this 5700 AMD is good as well?
Thanks a lot!
Hm, maybe you don’t need Vray at all. Vray is for creating stunning photorealistic images for Professionals or Semi-Professionals. And learning it takes quite some time.
Check out the Video from 3d Basecamp below. They do awesome things just with SketchUp. The first presenter shows their SketchUp-Models with awesome Textures (from Minute 4:20).
It looks good for sure and is very handy for the specific layouts of the project. I did that already it sketchup helped me a lot to visualize. But I think its not good enough for what I want to do now, which really is comparing for example the colour white in different structures of porcelain. And not just white, just every colour in the bathroom. I guess I am an perfectionist and am hard to choose, most will be awesome anyway if I buy all new but I just would like to try combinations of textures and colours. For this I really need rendering I think. I need to decide within 10 days or so as I have a contract with builders. I have loads of time so I can try to learn it (within those 10 days :D).
Ok, so my advice is: Buy yourself a powerful Windows-PC.
But - I am not an Vray-Expert. I just started to learn Vray. I think you should go to the official Vray-Forum.
Or maybe you could achieve your Renderings with Twinmotion. Which runs on Mac. But I guess this program will need a dedicated GPU.
There are a lot of Rendering-Solutions out there. And it’s not easy to decide which way to go…