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Hi all,

I'm considering a Mac purchase and want to keep 3D in mind as I do. What level of CPU and RAM do you consider essential?

I'm currently using MakeHuman on a 2009 Mac laptop with 2.13 GHz and 2GB Ram, Snow Leopard OS. Seems to work Ok. Just starting with Blender today so can't report on that yet.

I'm considering another used laptop of that era with 8GB Ram and much more disk space. The extra RAM would allow me to run more recent Mac OSX.

I'd rather not buy a new machine, but we'll keep that on the table pending your advice.

Should I be concerned with the hardware, or will any machine work, just slower on the older machines?

Many thanks for any advice.

Hi Tanny the more RAM and speed will make blender run much better with faster display updates and when you get to rendering they will also be faster.

Enjoy the Choice

Thank you Loki, appreciate your speed of light replies. As is typically the case, I, um, shoulda done my homework first. Here's what I found for Blender. Looks like I have the minimum setup currently, which doesn't surprise me much.


Minimum (basic usage) hardware

32-bit dual core 2Ghz CPU with SSE2 support.
2 GB RAM
24 bits 1280×768 display
Mouse or trackpad
OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics with 512 MB RAM

Recommended hardware

64-bit quad core CPU
8 GB RAM
Full HD display with 24 bit color
Three button mouse
OpenGL 3.2 compatible graphics with 2 GB RAM

Optimal (production-grade) hardware

64-bit eight core CPU
16 GB RAM
Two full HD displays with 24 bit color
Three button mouse and graphics tablet
Dual OpenGL 3.2 compatible graphics cards with 4 GB RAM

The downside of using a mac is that you're pretty much locked out from GPU rendering. For me that's a showstopper: CPU rendering is extremely slow in comparison, even when comparing to a reasonably cheap setup that has a nvidia card.

MakeHuman will work with any discreet modern graphics card on pretty much whatever hardware setup, it doesn't require much. You might experience trouble with el cheapo integrated graphics cards (intel, SiS, via...) because of crappy drivers. Such cards often cause problems with blender too. So if at all possible, try to get something with an AMD or nvidia graphics card independently on whether you plan on doing GPU rendering.

And that AMD card should be a fairly recent one that supports a compute device and drivers for that card are critical which is why most of us prefer nVidia cards don't know if they are compatible with the MAC architecture as I have never had one

Enjoy the Choice