We’ve worked on both sides. Here's what we've learned.

Mac: clean, stable, but limited for rendering

There’s a reason creatives love Macs. The OS is clean, the experience is smooth, and for general design tasks or motion graphics with standard renderers, they work beautifully.

But when it comes to heavy 3D and GPU rendering, especially with Redshift, Macs still fall short. Apple’s move to M3 and M4 chips brought big improvements in efficiency, but Redshift performance is still not on par with high-end NVIDIA GPUs on Windows machines.

If your workflow is light or you work mostly with CPU-based previews and send renders to the cloud, a Mac can still be a great choice.

Windows: power, flexibility, and real-time rendering

This is where Windows shines. You can build or buy a machine with RTX 4090s, full GPU acceleration, and tailor your setup exactly to your workflow. Redshift loves NVIDIA cards, and the performance difference can be huge especially in production-heavy environments.

Drivers can be a bit more temperamental, and the OS isn’t as polished as macOS, but when it comes to raw speed and flexibility for 3D, Windows is hard to beat.

Our take

For us at Este, performance is key. We rely on Windows workstations for production because they give us full control over GPU rendering and let us push Redshift without limitations. That said, we also use Macs for lighter tasks and for layout, concepting or presentations.

No setup is perfect. It depends on what you value more: stability and simplicity (Mac) or performance and freedom (Windows). But if you're doing serious 3D with Redshift, we’d say Windows is still the most capable platform right now.