Octane and the new 2013 MacBook Pro. Will it work? YES!!!!

Wed Oct 23, 2013 7:05 am

OK, I'm salivating at what Apple just released yesterday and am seriously considering going for one of the new Macbook pro's 15" with the new GT750m discreet graphics card. Does anyone know if there's any reason why this won't be supported by Octane (running under OSX?)
Currently I run Octane on a media pc with a 96core 460 card with 1GB onboard and connect to it using Splashtop from my Mac. According to the specs the GT750m on the new macbook has 384 cores (over 4x the amount of my current card) and 2GB of memory. I'm just wondering, will I be able to use all the cores doing an octane render while the intel Iris graphics takes care of the UserInterface (and /or ) will I be able to allocate some of the cores to UI while the rest to rendering as I can at the minute?
I know, probably no-one has had time to test this yet but just wanted some advice based on anyone who is using a previous macbook with the 650m and who has any technical details on the components used in the new macbook.
Thanks

Wed Oct 23, 2013 4:10 pm

Hi Stealthworks,

Here at our studio, we have several set-ups to work on: One of them is a recent retina MBP with a GeForce GT 650M (1GB), the 2,7 i7 and 16GB ram. This works great for building, lighting and texturing basic scenes in C4D+Plugin, but for some decent rendering power you need another solution.

Therefore, we pair each iMac/MBP (used for compositing, basic scenes) with a Windows workstation with SLI Geforces for rendering. It lets us work on our beloved macs and let the buggy Windows machines do the powerlifting

A simple server is where we share and store our files at.

So: I would not recommend doing professional rendering on a MBP, but it's strong enough to do your modeling and reviewing on.

Cheers,

Max

Wed Oct 23, 2013 7:16 pm

Hi Max,
Thanks for the info. I'm not a professional artist and only Render has a hobby so if the MBP outperforms my current media PC with its GT460 with 96 cores then I would be happy. Actually I couldn't resist so ended up buying the new 15" MacBook Pro today.!! I'm currently transferring apps from my previous laptop (which is taking ages over wifi) but once I get round to installing Octane and, if anyone's interested, I'll post some benchmarks (assuming it runs at all!)

Thu Oct 24, 2013 12:43 am

Ok, I've just installed Octane on my new 2013 MacBook Pro 15" and am delighted to report that everything is working perfectly. The speed increase I am getting is a lot more than my old GT460 card on my media PC and the additional 1 GB of memory on the GT750m means I can render larger and more complex scenes. For you professional users it's not going to compare with your desktop rigs but for me, it's more than enough. I'm really pleased with my decision to buy this and now finally I can happily scrap my windows media PC and Win-doze!

Thu Oct 24, 2013 7:31 am

That's great to hear! Happy rendering

Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:06 pm

MakeEmSay wrote:Hi Stealthworks,

Here at our studio, we have several set-ups to work on: One of them is a recent retina MBP with a GeForce GT 650M (1GB), the 2,7 i7 and 16GB ram. This works great for building, lighting and texturing basic scenes in C4D+Plugin, but for some decent rendering power you need another solution.

Therefore, we pair each iMac/MBP (used for compositing, basic scenes) with a Windows workstation with SLI Geforces for rendering. It lets us work on our beloved macs and let the buggy Windows machines do the powerlifting A simple server is where we share and store our files at.

So: I would not recommend doing professional rendering on a MBP, but it's strong enough to do your modeling and reviewing on.

Cheers,

Max

ooh interesting, I have just had my mac pro rendering in octane so looking at building a windows box for moments like these, out of interest what spec are your slave pc's

Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:14 pm

Ehm, just two game PC's we bought at a local custom pc shop. They have moderate i7's, 32GB Ram and two GTX 670's or 770's. Works like a charm and costed only €1500-€1800 a piece.

Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:37 pm

oh thats awesome news, as obviously the less i need to spend the better, do they run ok with team render on c4d?

Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:50 pm

Uh, don't know about that but we let each set render it's own EXR-sequence on a server.
We could combine that already with R14 by letting each system render it's own part of the sequence.
You should check out the rest of the forum about R15, I think Aoktar planned to integrate Team Render in the next release?