Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Dear NL

I have considered myself a happy NL customer…until about 10/10/16. What followed then can only be described very politely as an amateurish "launch". No need to elaborate further, most has already been said here and elsewhere. I should, however, particularly like to point out poster limbus’ comment over in the “Maxwell render v4?” thread with which I could not agree more.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 85#p392516

So, what is the plan with OSX? No GPU support, no mention in the GPU roadmap, the one major selling point hence is non-existing and you really expect us Mac customers to “upgrade”?

To make things worse, €600 for an upgrade from V3? Compared to a €700 full licence, this makes my existing 3.2.5 license worth about €100. I think I could get more than that on the used software market. There are far more developed GPU renderers and plugins out there, working on OSX, with currently way better bang for buck.

As much as we are used to be left in the limbo as Mac users by Apple themselves, please, what is NL’s plan, what are the binding timelines for GPU support on OSX? And no, a statement such as “We are working on Linux and Mac support on GPU engine. So not being on the roadmap doesn't mean we are not going to do it. ” by Luis in the aforementioned thread, I am afraid, is by no means sufficient, completely unprofessional and is definitely not what I am looking for.

Hoping for the best

Well, for Mac users, there's no official Mac computers with a recent nvidia card (maxwell or pascal). So you can put an nvidia card inside by yourself, not officially supported by Apple, or having a thunderbolt external device. We are trying to having it working on these environments, probably something like beta / if you want to try, as it's really difficult to support these not official configurations. Hope Apple consider their no nvidia politic. No plan on short time to support AMD cards.

I'm ok for testing Beta. I have both, A Linux Calcul machine with Fedora 24 and A Hackintosh working Machine with OS 10.5.6. Both have Nvidia Driver and Nvidia Maxwell Card (GTX 980Ti). I really don't want to go to Windows OS....

Linux will have GPU official support soon, so it's a good option for windows haters.

But my working machine is on OS X (photoshop & Sketchup User) ...
I only used the linux Machine for the final render (big image size for A0 printing) ...

Luis

You raise a valid point there regarding the lack of official Apple support for Nvidia cards.

Happy to help with testing time permitting, I am running a MacPro 4,1->5,1, OSX El Cap, with a single GTX 980ti on NVidia web drivers, working beautifully with e.g. Thea, Octane.

cheers

I choose Maxwell Render (I was looking for TheaRender) because I can access to the full plugin (I use Lightwave, Sketchup and some of my client have Revit) ....

As a Mac user I must say that Im appalled by this, and very frustrated.

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I'm not sure about the lack of pre-installed Nvidia GPU in Macs being a reason for NL not supporting it. Windows doesn't preinstall any GPU's, people build custom machines and install a GPU, surely it comes down to drivers from Nvidia which means that OSX currently does support maxwell cards, but not pascal. I have a MacPro 5.1 and was very close to buying a GTX 980ti which runs in OSX before finding out to my shock that GPU rendering is not supported on OSX a fact that NL never mentioned in the leadup to launching Maxwell 4 with a number of users being caught out by this. A plug in for Rhino Mac was touted as a main feature in this upgrade suggesting that maxwell 4 would fully support OSX.

The argument also doesn't wash with me given that I assume I can install a Nvidia card in my Mac Pro and if I was to install windows via bootcamp Maxwell 4 should work on the same machine. This implies its not the machine itself that determines if Maxwell 4 will run.

Im really shocked by this launch and have lost a lot of faith in the Maxwell team. I still love maxwell and especially love working in studio but am not pleased with the direction that you guys are heading. When the announcement was made that GPU rendering was coming I was super excited, and spent the 10th of October refreshing the maxwell page with my cash in hand, and started browsing the local eBay equivalent looking at the great range of cheap 980 and 980ti cards that people are flicking off, thinking down the line of how a retina iMac with an egpu would be a great compliment to my workstation. You might even be able to pack the egpu if you need to travel for work and render on the go with a thunderbolt laptop. The idea of being able to render quickly without being tied to a desktop is pretty exciting. The news of a lack of OSX support filtered through the facebook page (this fact was not obvious in any communications from Maxwell) and no mention of the no studio for OSX. The new maxwell webpage was down for me for over a day and Im so happy I decided to hold off upgrading until I found out all the compatibility and details.

I however have made the tough decision to sit this upgrade out and spend my software budget on a new seat of Modo and maybe will look at upgrading maxwell when you guys have got this mess straightened out. The overwhelming disappointment for me is not the lack of availability of anything or the change to a more restricted plug in model or lack of OSX support off the bat, but the failure of the NL team to communicate this in any clear way and be upfront and transparent to the most loyal of they customers.

andyjacobs wrote:finding out to my shock that GPU rendering is not supported on OSX a fact that NL never mentioned in the leadup to launching Maxwell 4 with a number of users being caught out by this.

The news of a lack of OSX support filtered through the facebook page (this fact was not obvious in any communications from Maxwell) and no mention of the no studio for OSX. The new maxwell webpage was down for me for over a day and Im so happy I decided to hold off upgrading until I found out all the compatibility and details.

Your exactly right here, I was caught out and feel incredibly foolish for not understanding more about compatibility and graphics cards, but having said that, I firmly believe that NL did not make it clear that there was no support for GPU with Mac, in actual fact this feature was the main driver behind their whole campaign! They MUST of known that they were leading Mac users down the garden path.

In my eyes, it was falsely advertised. Not once is it mentioned anywhere that the Mac version of Maxwell 4 is essentially sub standard compared to the PC version, and I don't care that its due to the Mac graphics card either, NL still have responsibility to make this point so that people who aren't up to speed on the tech side of all this don't get caught out.

Even now, Studio for Mac is still not available. Basically, the Mac side of this entire thing hasn't even launched yet - its a shambles

I agree with everything here. But i have hope. I'm Simon Edwards on Facebook I have seen some mac screenshots of the app and plugin. I see some GPU options ? Im guessing the software has a minimum requirement need for the GPU. I am hoping someone will test the demo on a mac pro 5,1 like mine, to see if this is a dead end. It seems to me the app is already written for OS X just not supported ? Thunderbolt does have a bottleneck but i don't think it's a real killer. Running internally on PCI or a PCI extender is also an option. Fingers crossed someone posts some news in this thread.

I want to buy this card but I'm hesitant for feedback here.

http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p44/Nv ... ll%29.html



Simon / Chedda

chedda wrote:I agree with everything here. But i have hope. I'm Simon Edwards on Facebook I have seen some mac screenshots of the app and plugin. I see some GPU options ? Im guessing the software has a minimum requirement need for the GPU. I am hoping someone will test the demo on a mac pro 5,1 like mine, to see if this is a dead end. It seems to me the app is already written for OS X just not supported ? Thunderbolt does have a bottleneck but i don't think it's a real killer. Running internally on PCI or a PCI extender is also an option. Fingers crossed someone posts some news in this thread.

I want to buy this card but I'm hesitant for feedback here.

http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p44/Nv ... ll%29.html



Simon / Chedda

i did buy a few cards from macvidvcards, no problems at all with them, the shipping to europe was expensive, but reliable. i'm using these cards mostly with octane for lightwave and the best performance / price ratio currently seems to be the 980 ti card with 6G of RAM. basically fast as the X - but much less expensive. at least with octane, none of my most complex projects ever needed more than 6G (usually fitting into 4G or less) - but if you't looking for a future, hypothetical maxwell mac GPU version i can't tell you, of course about it's RAM needs. as soon as GPU render software is adapted and full using the new pascal generation cards, these may be of a better value.

btw. currently it's smart to get some (ordinary, non adapted) 980 ti cards for additional processing power to put into expansion boxes, as long as they are sold out...

cheers

markus

I have the GTX 980Ti working well on OS X 10.11.6 with Nvidia Driver (not working with the apple driver) . Cuda works (Octane or thea Render). But It's true that the Pascal series (GTX 1070 Or GTX 1080) apparently is not working on OSX for the moment ...