One of the most important components in any video editing setup is the graphics card (GPU). This means that editing requires some serious computer hardware.
#Best graphics card for mac pro 1 1 professional#
Professional video cameras are operating at still larger resolutions using RAW codecs, which give the maximum creative control available. It's the only laptop in Apple's lineup with a dedicated GPU, the MacBook Air/12"/13" all use integrated graphics which is admittedly insufficient for Blender 2.8 (it's too slow).Working with video content can be demanding for any computer as the best camera phones can now routinely shoot 4K 60fps video. If you absolutely have to buy a Mac then the 15" MacBook Pro is probably the best bet. Laptop with a 20-series GPU might be a bit expensive though, but it might be worth-it specially if you were planning to spend ~$3k for a MacBook Pro. NVIDIA will soon release new GPUs for their 20 series.
#Best graphics card for mac pro 1 1 series#
A laptop with specifications like Intel Core i5 for CPU and 8GB RAM would also work just fine, and you can find a laptop with an NVIDIA GTX 970 on Ebay/Craigslist for pretty cheap these days.įor the NVIDIA 10 GPU series cards a GTX 1060 would be a good entry point. With a gaming PC, you could buy something with very good specs for about \$1~1.5K. GPU acceletarion for rendering will likely still be unavailable.įor that reason, I cannot recommend a Mac for Blender. Even once optimized we are likely looking at systems that will under perform for heavy tasks like rendering or animating heavy scenes with lots of particle systems or animated objects. While Blender does run on M1 it is at the time of writing not yet really optimized and crash prone. On the new ARM based M1 Macs Blender runs natively without the need for rosetta, since Blender already supported compiling for the ARM platform on Linux, so only a few adjustments were necessary.ĪRM processors are known for their lower power requirements suited for mobile devices, but not their performance. Even if you could somehow get an NVIDia card to work on your Mackintosh, Apple decided to deprecate third party toolkits on their platform, thus making CUDA unavailable for GPU acceleration of Cycles renders.Īdditionally, given that also Apple decided to deprecate support for third party graphics APIs like OpenCL and OpenGL in favor of their own Metal API you will always be looking at a feature crippled system when compared to competing platforms in terms of GPU rendering and real time drawing performance, which makes MacOS an even less of an advisable ecosystem to invest in if you are seriously looking at open source software. Macs these days come equipped with AMD cards which have sup-par support for GPU rendering. Unfortunately, to get an even remotely decent GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on a new Mac you'll be looking at $3K+, certainly not worth the money. The most important component for Blender is a good graphics card. Since hardware questions and computer recommendations are considered off topic here, and this is a frequent topic that often comes up in new questions, here is a somewhat canonical answer that hopefully covers the main points.