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.
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Is Vray on an Intel MacBook Pro 32 g ram with a radeon pro Vega faster than on an M2 Mac? Does anyone know? My Intel MacBook Pro 32 g ram is having kernel panics and I am not sure if I should fix it or buy a new MacBook Air with 24 g ram and, of course, no graphics card.
Anyone’s experience is welcome.
Check out V-Ray’s benchmark list. You can also download and run one yourself to see how your machine stacks up.
You could also look at using a second machine and use V-Ray swarm since you get one render node with your license.
Thanks for the link. I went to the link and it says you can search by OS. Interesting. I did not know it was so much slower!!! I really do not want a PC though… I wonder how much the high end PC configurations cost. Anyone know?
Check out this video if it helps. Perhaps time to upgrade from my tried and true iMac Pro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7xBigcSwVk
Also, as I mentioned, you could get a PC as a render node only. That way you’re tapping into it’s NVIDIA capabilities while enjoying the Mac OS working environment.
There is no GPU acceleration for non nvidia Mac V-Ray now , since Apple and AMD both stopped updating things for it.
Thus V-Ray removed it a few years ago as it didn’t work on many devices anymore.
This leaves you with the CPU render engine - the Modern Apple ARM based processors are probably faster for this than your current machine.
However I wouldn’t worry too much, for very complex rendering, Chaos Cloud is a really affordable option where Chaos will do it for you.
For a very high resolution image of a fairly complex scene , it only cost a couple of dollars.
This would be less money at lower resolutions or with more simple scenes.
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