I guess that means that if you can at least produce a low res version of what you want yourself, you can get the supreme computing power of CC to do the high res work for you (quite cheaply and quickly). But it does have the advantage of Chaos Cloud. V-Ray seems to be the ultimate renderer for SU users but it’s almost three times the price. It’s a shame that those who make the official tutorials don’t tell you the specs of the machine they are running on (though of course you are not always watching things in real time).

Being able to do a render in minutes, even at relatively low res, seems to me to be fine. The main difference is that you have twice as much video memory and that probably does make a difference. Your setup is almost exactly the same as mine (similar date but iMac not MBP). If there is anything more you’d like to add to your advice, please do. But when I looked at a similar spec to the iMac I was considering, it seemed to be just as expensive. I did briefly think of going for a PC alongside my existing iMac using it just for CAD work. I imagine the idea is that it only takes a few minutes to do most simple low res rendering and once you’re happy, you can set it going on the full fat version which might run for hours. I know SSDs respond much faster than hard drives but don’t know why that matters.įrom the tutorials, I got the impression that Podium uses a number of tricks to make rendering faster, at least during the pre-final run phase. I have also read that Xeon chips (as used in the iMac Pro) offer no substantial benefit.Īnother thing I don’t understand is the significance of the storage medium. For example, I am aware that multi cores are good for rendering, useless for SU. I just wanted to make sure that the spec I posted will make a meaningful difference to what I have now and that I haven’t slipped up out of ignorance. I realize that the less powerful the machine, the longer any rendering would take. For the amount of use I have, I can’t justify such big expenditure. I did take a look at a 27' iMac with an 8 core i9 processor, 64Gb of RAM, and an 8Gb Radeon video card. I am guessing that VRAM is video RAM and you are saying that a GPU with 8Mb would be worthwhile. I tried reading your earlier post but I’m afraid most of it is way beyond my pay grade. Thanks for this and I see that, like me, you are in the UK. You can get much more powerful Macs than that but they become astronomically expensive and I can’t justify that for my use.ĭoes anyone have enough experience of SU Podium and iMacs to know how well this spec would work for me?īTW, I know many people will say that PCs are better for rendering than Macs but it’s like advising someone to vote Republican when they have voted Democrat all their lives! I am looking at a 21.5' iMac with the following spec: So it may make sense for me to spend a bit more to get something that can actually handle rendering as well as SU. Happily, I have been thinking of upgrading for a while anyway.

I have a late 2012 iMac and it just won’t cut the mustard for high end rendering. But I have watched the very good tutorials for Podium and am encouraged that its integration with SU and its relative simplicity might make it worthwhile. They seemed to me either too basic to add much to what SU offers, too expensive, or too hard to learn. I have tested one or two render packages in the past but only “toe in water”. I am thinking of using the current situation to learn a new skill: photo-realistic rendering.

Sketchup rendering on mac