[luis.hijarrubia]

Sounds like you guys are giving up Mac .. sad to hear .. well .. we all know what happens to a software that goes only with one (the easiest and the buggiest) operating system.

Thinking about what is easy to do, and what is necessary is probably two different things. And regarding mac Gpu renders .. well .. then let's not mention radeon ProRender .. GPU for macs .. 'cause that would be impossible .. right

In fact I was not complaining ... but you guys probably need to go out to the industry and see what operating system dominates .. And I can assure you design, media, production and advertising studios they all mostly on macs .. and you guys want to give it all up because you're just pissed at apple giving up nvidia ? ... well .. that is also a strategy .. just don't say it is impossible ... people say it is impossible to render on maxwell because the waiting time is too long .. but once you figure out main principles - you're good to go.

I think that's not the point. It's not about not wanting to develop for mac. As i've said the technology on Apple OS is so antique that it's impossible (please understand impossible as we cannot do it with our team size) do a GPU engine working on mac default cards that goes faster than cpu (and if it goes slower we don't want it, right?). And we know that Mac was (and i remark the past form) the OS for designers, artist and so on. But I think (and this is a personal thought, don't take it as NL politic) they are being forced to leave Mac and the market is smaller day by day. Some products are no longer supporting mac, and many other have less (or worst) features on Mac. And that's because Apple has stuck on time, and is really late right now.

Anyway, we support everything that maxwell have just the same for windows, mac and linux.

[Nasok]

Well, again, don't get me wrong - I'm not criticising NL's work or anything like that. All I said that GPU is not necessary for a render engine to be successful. Especially for a Maxwell users )
I would prefer stability over the new releases. PCs are adopting new cards and architecture faster but trade off are the stability and amount or restarting / re-installing.

And, well, I'm not planning to argue what is the preferred OS for creative people here, but I work with them every day, I communicate with them every day, and whenever we go for a beer - we discuss OS'es and the tech specs, workflow and so on. You'll be surprised but in bigger studios rarely people render on their machines, it is mainly in-house (or outsource) render farms. So majority of them are working with iMacs, and even laptops Personally I work on Mac Pro and I can afford myself to render on it, but for big projects I send everything out either to our in-house render farm or to , say, ranch.

Last time I've worked on windows machine it was in 2008. And since then I've been in production and post-production studios (all macs), multiple TV channels (all macs), product design studios (all macs, no single pc there), advertising agencies (95% macs) - That's where I've worked since 2008 .. maybe I was just "lucky" on Mac's environment .. but you can't deny that the possibility of that is super low. Now, again, I'm not saying that PC's are worse than macs or anything like that .. absolutely not .. for instance currently we have a few pc's for programmers (since we're doing more of a VR stuff here) like .. for 92 people that works her jin my office - we have .. hmm .. 3 window's machines. And that is fairly big international advertising agency.

I'm just saying that we shouldn't underestimate the quality of Macs, even if their architecture is "older" generally they are more stable - that's why these days majority of creative industry uses them.

In other hand, talking about necessity of GPU, well, I hate to bring other Render engines as an examples, because I think Maxwell is a truly unique, but there are some render engines that don't have GPU, and they are adopted across the top studios in the world .. for instance Arnold .. you hardly can name a big film studio that doesn't use Arnold in it's pipeline .. no GPU there

And again, please don't think that I'm against you guys or criticising your work. Absolutely not - I'm a huge fan of Maxwell .. still and I'm pretty proud to be a part of Maxwell community. And I have huge respect to you guys who make it - I wish I could contribute in anyway.

[luis.hijarrubia]

Well when I said that people are leaving mac I was referring to artist and designers in general. My perception is that although mac is still the OS for them, is decreasing, and some 3D tools are starting to leave or have worst versions on mac (and I don't mean just render engines), as graphic card capabilities are essential now for almost everything related to image. Anyway, that doesn't mean that we should leave too. It can be a good opportunity to get a good portion of mac market if other ones are getting lazy here.

And about stability, I don't agree either. From a developer point of view each OSX version is a pain, your software never works on new versions. They always change something stupid that make you do things again to make it work on new system. And there are several known issues with graphical drivers on El Capitan that made many programs unusable or double slow than in previous versions.

[Nasok]

Aha, but when it comes to consumers ... for instance one of our managers recently got a latest alienware laptops for 3.5k (that's a decent price for a laptop) there were no a single week without a blue screen. Every week. And he doesn't do anything beside the excel, word and other office tools. Originally we though that we could use it as a partial computing power, but well, with blue screen happening randomly every week .. (during meetings, presentations, photo viewing, etc) .. well I don't know how is that stable ... maybe it requires less effort for developers .. probably much less effort - and this is probably the result ..

I guess we have different opinions regarding what platform artists prefer these days .. You're seeing it for a developer's point of view and I'm seeing it from artist's point of view.

and regarding the software .. you're right there is couple of software pieces that aren't compatible with mac's but that's not because mac architecture is bad or old or constantly changing. It's because the lack of need and investment of resources. For example 3D max .. it belongs to autodesk, those guys could easily port to for mac .. but there is no need for that . .not anymore. Back in the days when there were not that many options major studios shifted aways from 3D max once it couldn't follow them to a new OS. that's why now, major film, production, tv and entertainment studios are using maya, or cinema, or modo .. anything but less 3DMax.
And for sure Autodesk could easily create a Mac version of 3D max - but it is too late now, because now it already doesn't make sense.

Would be sad if people would start leaving Maxwell only because they are working on different OS or in different software.

[luis.hijarrubia]

Well, in fact I'm not a Windows supporter, and I don't want to start the umpteenth OS war, but my perspective is completely different as a user. I mean at home, where I mainly play games, navigate and renderize videos (premiere pro and vegas 13), on a 700€ Lenovo laptop from 4 years ago. It's still with the same installation it come from fabric (upgraded to Windows 10). Never had a freeze or a blue screen in 4 years. My only big complain is that it restarted itself without asking to make some upgrades 1 time.

Well, my feeling is that Windows just works. You have to do things it's way, not the way I would choose if they let me so, but it works. My period of more happiness with OS was on Linux (Ubuntu and Mint), I was using it for 5 years fully personalized and without a single problem. But Linux is not one Linux, there are 35.000, each one with each own vision on how to save the (computer's) world, and a little market, so most artist tools skip it. When I started in the computer graphics world I was forced to move to windows. But as I said I feel more restricted, but never had what I would call a stability issue. And I know BSOD is famous, and I have that on XP days, but windows can be so bad as having weekly blue screen or nobody would be using it right now.

[Nasok]

Well, I guess it all goes down to who operates the machine.

I just hope that NL will support something beside windows, otherwise it would be a shame for all of us to loose something like Maxwell.