Trying to steer back on course… Long time Mac user here , but if your plans are to use Vray stick with a Windows machine. You will be able to make use of the gpu rendering ability of Vray. Suggest spending some time on Vray forums to see what would be the best setup for a new machine.
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SHORT don’t go to Mac.
Apple advised me to get a PC to render.
Couldn’t give me the assurance a new Mac would do the job to render in Enscape3D.
Speaking of rendering.
Have a look at Enscape3D.
You can achieve amazing result in a fraction of YOUR time; w 1920 pixels, 4 seconds 
I can Advice ENSCAPE. I am working with this for 2 years and it is so good.
that’s pretty simple, permanently claiming that something is OT is often more annoying than the OT itself.
Besides of this, there is a OT flag available under every post (“…”).
mac! don’t think twice !
ollie
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That was the essence of the question and in theory it should be possible to find a factual answer.
If you are still posting here your personal preference (no matter how much you like it) without relating to this use case, you are totally disregarding the needs of the original poster.
Ideally Moriah would get testing versions of both systems and evaluate side-by-side. Better even, she would find an honest forum user with long-term experience with both setups which one cannot obtain in a quick test.
- Look at the facts. Think.
- Listen to your (own) heart.
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You are probably better off in the V-Ray f. SketchUp forums.
I use iMac late 2015 3.2 intel core i5 (24gb ram) and Vray and love it. I can knock out very quick renders without going crazy in 5-10 mins with lights and materials. See Link. The question is largely moot if you want to render with crazy complexity… you can then use Vray cloud rendering (for a price). Also Mac gives you a very good (and beautiful looking) piece of kit for the price. The 5k imac screen is sublime…
Having used V-Ray for many years, I will try to answer the question as best as I can.
I will put aside OS preference, as this is a subjective matter.
I will focus an the only objective thing that makes a difference in V-Ray: performance.
Performance can come from 4 main components:
- CPU (processor)
- GPU (graphics card)
- RAM
- Storage speed
RAM and storage speed are identical on both PC and Mac.
But it’s a bit more complicated for CPU and GPU.
GPU (graphics card):
V-Ray can render using the GPU, but it needs CUDA, which only runs on Nvidia GPUs. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t sell Macs with Nvidia GPUs. So you can’t use V-Ray GPU.
That’s a huge performance boost, only available on PC.
CPU (processor):
You can get similar CPUs on both PC and Mac. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they perform the same.
Due to Apple thin and slick designs, Macs don’t have much room to cool the high temperatures induced by the CPU when rendering.
If the CPU gets too hot, it will throttle. Meaning that it will run slower to avoid overheating and getting damaged. Which in turns means that V-Ray will not be as fast as it could be. The difference can be huge, up to 2x slower than when using the base clock speed.
Note that this is also true for most thin PC laptops. That’s why it is encouraged to buy a desktop PC workstation, which has plenty of space to have a sufficient airflow to cool down the CPU during the very intense workload that is V-Ray rendering.
Even the iMac Pro suffers from overheating/thermal-throttling due to its thin design.
Here is a video explanation: Macs are SLOWER than PCs. Here’s why. - YouTube
For these two reasons, I can only encourage you to buy a desktop PC if your only concern is V-Ray rendering.
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When it comes to productivity I believe the only way to go is a desktop PC / workstation. All of the above mentioned points as well as the fact that you will have a monitor that gives you the real estate you need. I find with laptops that the screen is always too small and I spend far too much time zooming in and out and panning which dramatically degrades my efficiency. In fact, I typically run with two 24" monitors so I can open multiple windows (SketchUp, text editors etc…) and move models or information back and forth as required.
MacBooks can support multiple large monitors.
There’s nothing about a PC workstation that is more productive than a macOS one, but it was another chance for you to share your opinion on this again.
From my perspective - as someone who sells V-ray and works with technical support, I would not recommend a Mac for users that are not too good with computers overall, as an overwhelming amount of V-ray technical support I have to give is to Mac users. And this trend is not an isolated case to just our company.
I think that is more of a fault of the users and not the OS. When using software with such complicated licensing it will be much more difficult to find technical support for Mac’s, as the user base is much smaller and not all designers have dedicated IT support to help out.
I would be interested to know what the split of SketchUp users is, how many are on Mac and how many are are on Windows. I know from Aaron’s presentations that he and Josh use MacBook Pro, and I have a some amount of insider knowledge to know that a lot of people at SketchUp are using MacBook Pro.
In general, from an improving SketchUp point of view, if the team are trying to get SketchUp to work well for their own lowly MacBook Pros, and they achieve that, it is great news for high end desktop PC users. Also for 5K iMac and Mac Pro users.
I worked in Apple tech support for a few years, and in other support departments, and the general case is that for Mac you are fixing things that are not perfect in your own software, and for Windows you are fixing things that are not perfect in other people’s software. You are sometimes able to adjust your own software to work around the limitations of the third party software, but that didn’t fix the original problem itself.
Everything you fix on Mac is likely to help both platforms, and a lot of things you fix on Windows only help people using a particular graphics card, and even a particular mouse.
Back to the original question, as I said, I cannot dispute that a high end PC (that has any issues sorted out) will out perform most or all standard Macs. I have some doubt about how much support is needed for Mac versus high end PC, and suspect that for SketchUp most tricky issues are on Windows machines.
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Case in point: the endless flood of issues solved by “run as administrator “ for the Windows SketchUp installer.
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A SketchUp license used to be OS-specific, but is now ‘agnostic’
(I had to switch back to Mac, some years ago, was loosing to much time with housekeeping my laptop:)
Working for support, these days, and we sell SketchUp and V-ray also.
SketchUp:
In our region, 16% is on Mac, but this figure might be slightly different now, since we do not need to know on what OS they are installing it, anymore.
V-ray:
For version 3.x, ⅓ was Mac, but some of them buy render nodes for windows, to create a little renderfarm.
IMO. ‘Best of both worlds’
Most support cases we encountered with V-ray (and SketchUp for that matter) are with clients who outsourced the computerstuff to the IT-guy:
They tend to boobytrap systems with write permissions, advanced serversoftware, antivirus and antiwork software etc.
Maybe Mac users are less tech-savvy, and need more assistance because of that?
Our data shows 15% Mac, 85% Windows.
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We had major licensing issues on the Macs because of the security provisions both Apple and our firm put in place. Even the most tech savvy people in the company couldn’t address it, but after an AMAZING 3 week back and forth with Chaos Group, we got it all sorted out. Really obscure network port stuff done on a high level, and not the fault of Mac user tech-savviness.
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I see, thanks for the explanation.
My sentence “Maybe Mac users are less tech-savvy” was not very well phrased. My point was that, since Macs have the reputation to be easier to use than Windows PCs, I guess the less tech-savvy users tend to go to Mac.
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