Able Mac

Blender 2.45 works extremely well on the new 17 inch MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz with 2 Gigs RAM and 512 MB video RAM.

Here is a sample Render of the TWiT logo with a Skull from the BlenderNation Blender model repository(just to be distinctive):

Both the blue and red materials have sub surface scattering turned on, as well as Ray Trace Transparency with an IOR of 1.3 like glass. The Skull has sub surface scattering turned on, which brightens the eye sockets and other heavily shadowed areas.

Blender worked well on an original MacBook 13.3 running Tiger (OS X 10.4). There were some issues like box mode for selecting should show a square as you drag across to select, which it didn't. Worse was that brush mode (press b twice) lets you use the mouse wheel to change the size of the selection brush, but you can't see the circle showing the size, so you're either guessing or not using it.

Now that Leopard is out, those issues aren't really issues any more. Leopard's drivers for the GMA chipset in the MacBook (standard) are different. I won't say bad, but they don't play well with Blender. If you setup blender with a single view of the object (the default setup) things work a little slower than in Tiger, but if you add extra views like Front, Side, and Top, then blender slows to a crawl on some actions. Unfortunately they're common actions, like resizing a mesh, or entering edit mode, or something.

Well, I've recently purchased and been using a new, top of the line 17 in MBP (MacBook Pro) and I'm here to tell you, it's awesome! This machine has the hi-res option, so the screen is 1920x1200 with LED Back light. This resolution is higher than 1920x1080p FullHD. And bright... I'd recommend not running full brightness unless you're out in the sun light.

With 512 MB Video RAM, it should be able to crunch some serious video data. I know that early video cards to support 512 MB didn't perform much better than 256 MB cards, but the chipsets have matured so they can make good use of all that Video RAM now. However, that doesn't directly benefit Blender unless it's "Hardware Accelerated" which I'm pretty sure it's not. It'll come in handy for native OS X Software like Maya, 3DS Max, and others if you also use them.

Core 2 Duo means that unlike the original MacBooks with Core Duo, MacBooks (and MBPs) now have 64 bit processors. Unfortunately for Blender artists, there doesn't seem to be a 64 bit optimized edition of Blender. The Download page for blender 2.45 doesn't specifically say it's 32 bit, but it works on the Core Duo. It's possible that it has code for both 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs, but since they don't say, it's most likely pure 32 bit code.

So at this point, some of you are wondering if there's an advantage to having this top of the line MBP to run Blender. To be honest I do a lot more than run Blender, but there are a few tricks that can help a Blender Artist get more out of blender on a rig like this. For starters, on the Render tab, set the threads to the max of 8.

There are only two CPUs, but Leopard manages to double up on those two cores very well. On the Core Duo Blender does better at 4 threads, which is probably due to the added overhead of managing threads. I'm wondering if Leopard some how uses the extra 32 bits in a 64 bit register to manage threads or other system calls while running 32 bit code. What ever the cause, 8 threads does run faster than 4 threads.

The other trick is to use an external renderer like Yafray, or even RenderMan. Use Blender to model, animate, and test your scense, but export them to render in a renderer that is fully optimized to take advantage of the extra CPU architecture and Video horsepower.

Blender
Blender Nation

Able