Hello everyone. I have a 2021 16" MacBook pro with 64gb memory. I am wondering if anyone can explain if it is possible to use V-Ray for my Mac. I read it is possible but will only be able to render with CPU. I don’t understand what that means though. Please help! Thank you!
New Macs that use the “Apple Silicon” processors (M1, M2…) use the main processor for everything and they don’t have a separate graphics “card”. On the PC, V-ray can use Nvidia graphics cards to speed up the rendering process so depending on the complexity of your models, V-Ray could be somewhat faster when having access to a high-end Nvidia graphics card. Test it if possible.
Hi @caitlinc - Following up on @Anssi’s more detailed explanation, yes you can use V-Ray for Mac using CPU. I render on my iMac Pro and 16" MBP and it runs just fine.
Thank you for letting me know. I am glad to hear that!
Hello @eric-s,
When you say that one can use V-Ray for Mac, and that you render using your iMac Pro, and 16" MBP. How long does it take vs using a dedicated GPU (such as RTXs)?
So far, my research informs me that it is possible (software) albeit slower than using RTX cards; or even CPU gasp. But dedicated GPU’s (hardware) is optimal (speed, CUDA cores).
I ran the Vray trial on my much older 2017 MBP 4-core 3.1MHz i7 with 16GB of RAM. It made me choose Vray over the other renderers i had testdriven (Thea and Enscape). I still went with Vray, so 
Since my built in gpu (guessing yours would be similar) is not nvidia, you cant use the optimisation for it. In other words, the rendering is handled by the cpu entirely.
I am expecting 64GB to make a real difference between our two macs so I think you would run it decently.
I did decide to purchase a pc though, for two reasons: I cant upgrade my MBP and I really want that NVIDIA perk!
Hope that helps you.
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I cannot compare render times for CPU vs GPU since RTX, etc are only available on NVIDIA cards. And yes, it is common knowledge that GPU or GPU+CPU Hybrid is typically faster than CPU alone.