Question Regarding Laptop

[Anonymous]

My educational organization wants to purchase new Macs for Maya rendering.

It has to be Macs because we share the lab with UX/UI students who need Macs.

We will be purchasing Mac laptops and desktops with the following specs -- see images attached below. Can someone tell me if these specs are optimal (good enough graphics card/ram for rendering and animation in Maya)? 

I am familiar with the specs listed on Maya but I am not IT and just need a smart person to tell me if these 2 Mac orders (with descriptions) are optimal for Maya 2020 before we order them. Any suggestions are welcome. We need to order soon and I would appreciate any feedback on this.

Thanks so much.

Dom

Dom

Please see the machines we are thinking of ordering below:

[daunish]

Those builds are fine.

Realistically any build will work just fine, it's just a matter of how fast you want them to run at this point. But for students with the requirement of Mac, those will do fine.

I will warn you, the last time I checked Arnold GPU doesn't run on Radeon cards (not sure that matters or is still a thing). Redshift should work.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick reply.
But with these graphics cards will students still be able to render scenes
using Arnold?

Thanks,
Dom

[daunish]

Because Mac GPU's are not supported by Arnold (I just confirmed that this is true), they will not be able to do GPU rendering. However, Arnold is first and foremost a CPU render engine! The GPU rendering still has bugs that are getting worked out anyway, and I wouldn't recommend a student be using it.

So yes, they can CPU render Arnold scene, as that relies more on CPU core count rather than the GPU. To put it into context, I always render on CPU, I only do look dev work on GPU. At the very most you may get a complaint that the option isn't available. But again, nothing would stop them from working.

If you have the funds, again, you can always get CPU's with higher core counts, this would yield faster render times in Arnold. At the end of the day, they are just students, and the vast majority would not notice any of this.

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much for your feedback.
Much appreciated!

Best,
Dominika