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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Does cs6 run better on mac or pc?

Nikhil Kamkolkar said:
Jeff, how is this even relevant if we are mostly focused on application performance? From my perspective, i've not found my Mac experience from the last 10 years any different from my Windows experience prior to that. Sure, the blue screen of death has gotten replaced with a beautiful spinning wheel of coma, but how does that make OSX better?
Click to expand...

What makes OSX "better"? For me, it's that OSX builds atop a mature UNIX foundation, is inherently more secure by design than Windows and when you get to the nuts and bolts of the OS, it's more extensible through scripting and code than Windows. There are a lot of under-the-hood differences that make OSX a better fit for me. Same with Linux in many regards, also being a mature UNIX system. For general use and simply running applications, there aren't enough differences between two platforms (OSX or Windows) to make any significant difference either way. As I said, Windows is my platform of choice for Adobe CS6 and that is due to supported hardware and available options for GPU choices with proper drivers and full CUDA implementation. GTX 680 4GB overclocked 4GB is king of the hill at the moment for CUDA. The 580 is just as fast computationally, but having the extra potential 1GB on that top of the line GTX680 makes a difference, that combined with the memory I/O being significantly faster.

As for your stability issues with OSX, I'm not sure what to say. I own 6 Macs at the moment, have owned several dozen of them over the past 6 years or so and they have consistently proven to be a superior platform in terms of stability and reliability. Your memory issues seem to me that you more than likely have an application or configuration that is triggering memory leaks or other issues. If you find you have to run a purge on a regular basis, there is something wrong. That is not normal.

All that said, Windows still provides the best combination of computing horsepower in terms of cost. And with the Mac Pro not supporting the current round of Xeon CPUs, that is an issue to some. All things considered, I don't think it's that big of a problem because the new E5 Xeon platform is significantly more expensive for the actual gains offered. I currently have 3 workstations built on the Romley E5 dual-Xeon platform. One being the Z820, which is my primary workstation these days. I have two others, one using a SuperMicro motherboard (X9DAi) and the other build on an EVGA SR-X C606 motherboard. The HP system is the most stable currently with their latest BIOS. The EVGA posts the best performance, but is the most temperamental. Even with that, I consider all of them to be very stable with their current firmwares and setups.


How is all this helpful? Hmmm... I don't know. maybe for you it's not. maybe I'm just rambling on with nothing to say...
 
Noel R. said:
+1 for PC. Plus you can add one of the new Sandy Bridge E5 2690's later on, and have multiple programs such as After Effects that will fly. It also negates the use of a Rocket. You can't do that on a Mac, and this processor blows Mac out the water.
Click to expand...

E5-2687W are actually cheaper CPUs and higher performance. The 2690's are more expensive because they're the top model for the lower wattage units. There are applications for both, but in the case of computationally intensive workloads, R3D, 3D graphics and rendering, etc.. the 2687W's win, while consuming more power.


As for "adding one later". Yeah, that's an option, assuming you build for it from the start with the proper motherboard and PSU. In the mean time, while only running with one CPU, you have fewer PCIe lanes to work with and only half the potential RAM capacity and throughput.
 
Mike Harrington said:
You can do whatever you want with risers and splitters....

Depending on the app you can split a pcix16 into 2 8's and so on....mounting them will be tricky....

Not all CUDA accelerated apps need even close to full x16 v2 bandwidth....let alone v3...

Guys running RR cards via thunderbolt are basically getting 2 lanes pci v2....and that is streaming 4k
Click to expand...

Do you have links to products? I'm aware of the external cages, but ... am unfamiliar with risers and splitters for regaining use of covered up PCIe slots?

Jeff Kilgroe said:
What makes OSX "better"? For me, it's that OSX builds atop a mature UNIX foundation, is inherently more secure by design than Windows and when you get to the nuts and bolts of the OS, it's more extensible through scripting and code than Windows. There are a lot of under-the-hood differences that make OSX a better fit for me. Same with Linux in many regards, also being a mature UNIX system. For general use and simply running applications, there aren't enough differences between two platforms (OSX or Windows) to make any significant difference either way. As I said, Windows is my platform of choice for Adobe CS6 and that is due to supported hardware and available options for GPU choices with proper drivers and full CUDA implementation. GTX 680 4GB overclocked 4GB is king of the hill at the moment for CUDA. The 580 is just as fast computationally, but having the extra potential 1GB on that top of the line GTX680 makes a difference, that combined with the memory I/O being significantly faster.

As for your stability issues with OSX, I'm not sure what to say. I own 6 Macs at the moment, have owned several dozen of them over the past 6 years or so and they have consistently proven to be a superior platform in terms of stability and reliability. Your memory issues seem to me that you more than likely have an application or configuration that is triggering memory leaks or other issues. If you find you have to run a purge on a regular basis, there is something wrong. That is not normal.

All that said, Windows still provides the best combination of computing horsepower in terms of cost. And with the Mac Pro not supporting the current round of Xeon CPUs, that is an issue to some. All things considered, I don't think it's that big of a problem because the new E5 Xeon platform is significantly more expensive for the actual gains offered. I currently have 3 workstations built on the Romley E5 dual-Xeon platform. One being the Z820, which is my primary workstation these days. I have two others, one using a SuperMicro motherboard (X9DAi) and the other build on an EVGA SR-X C606 motherboard. The HP system is the most stable currently with their latest BIOS. The EVGA posts the best performance, but is the most temperamental. Even with that, I consider all of them to be very stable with their current firmwares and setups.


How is all this helpful? Hmmm... I don't know. maybe for you it's not. maybe I'm just rambling on with nothing to say...
Click to expand...
Having 4GB is certainly useful, but ... not sure if the GTX-680 has memory that much faster than the GTX-580. It's memory bus width is 256 bit vs 384 bit for the 580.

It takes bloody forever to read all the reviews and make sense of them, and then ... you still don't know if nVidia will cripple the software so that it runs opengl or some other needed operation slower.

(the GTX-285 will run opengl calls much faster than a newer card as they crippled glReadPixels for later cards in software. http://www.opengl.org/discussion_bo...er-speed-on-fermi-cards?p=1216119#post1216119

You can perform the same operation using CUDA calls to work around the issue (which demonstrates that the card is full speed, but the driver was crippled to force users to buy the crummy Quadro cards.

BTW - anandtech is a good source of detailed un-biased reviews - and they have several if you search

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review

---
As to UNIX being better because it's mature ... I write software, and realize that having to conform to older legacy code really causes problems over time. That's why a complete rewrite such as the much newer Windows (even the tcpip stacks were rewritten llately- which in all fairness, can also lead to new bugs) can result in significant gains in stability and speed.

I have far more software issues on the Mac, and I only use Crucial ECC RAM. Even my RAID uses ECC RAM.

But ... hey - make a decision and then forget about it. In most cases there's a workaround. Even on the Mac, they eventually bring out new video cards and the time you spend researching the latest and greatest probably offsets the time you'd save if you had the latest and greatest.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
How is all this helpful? Hmmm... I don't know. maybe for you it's not. maybe I'm just rambling on with nothing to say...
Click to expand...

It is helpful. I wish we'd make more noise as post pros that we are picking among two imperfect solutions. It just annoys me when people claim one is perfect. That will give no impetus to the makers to improve their wares, and that makes us losers in the end.

To my mind at least, the choices are imperfect. Both have their pretty strong pros and cons. That is probably my hesitation to commit to a major purchase right now, as I feel we are on the cusp of a breakthrough - more on the Windows side, than on the Apple side, given Apple clearly is more focused on iDevices than anything else.

I am indeed fishing for some clues as to whether HP might offer a next gen Z series that makes the RED Rocket unnecessary, or... etc. In the end, I need to bump up my post workstation. Its about time. And I wish I didn't have to do so much research to get to the ideal platform.
 
Mike Harrington said:
they can be hard to find

http://www.ebay.com/sch/cablesaurus/m.html

this guy has done splitters....just are not there at the moment....

then you have things like
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Supermicro-RSC-R2UT-2E8R-riser-card/1974977.aspx#TS\

http://www.amfeltec.com/products/x4pcie-splitter4.php


it takes some googleing but there are items out there
Click to expand...

Thanks!!! I've got an X8DEA SuperMicro board where an x4 is covered by my nVidia card, so this product you mentioned sure looks interesting:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/cablesaurus/m.html

Do you know if they are reliable?

And I guess if I used it for anything but an internal RAID card, internal USB3, etc., I'd have to find some way to deal with connecting inputs from the outside - which would probably be a very messy situation? Of course, the RAID card is the very last card I'd want to take a chance with!!!

I've been trying to limp by until I saw what was coming down the line Xeon-wise to build a new computer, but ... I may just give up and replace my current Xeons with faster ones with more cores (limited by the max throughput by QPI up to 6.4 GT/s, unfortunately)

Ahhh - frustration. I think it's going to be quite some time before we see any new Xeons or new nVidia GTX-980's.
 
I've switched from Windows 7 to 8 and love it. I don't use the "modern interface", but there's no need to. There are some performance improvements that make Windows 8 superior to Windows 7, and you can install a free or $4 3rd party app to get the start button back if you want it (I did). Lots of people dis on Windows 8 without knowing anything about it.

And it's cheaper than Windows 7.
 
Les C. said:
Thanks!!! I've got an X8DEA SuperMicro board where an x4 is covered by my nVidia card, so this product you mentioned sure looks interesting:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/cablesaurus/m.html

Do you know if they are reliable?

And I guess if I used it for anything but an internal RAID card, internal USB3, etc., I'd have to find some way to deal with connecting inputs from the outside - which would probably be a very messy situation? Of course, the RAID card is the very last card I'd want to take a chance with!!!

I've been trying to limp by until I saw what was coming down the line Xeon-wise to build a new computer, but ... I may just give up and replace my current Xeons with faster ones with more cores (limited by the max throughput by QPI up to 6.4 GT/s, unfortunately)

Ahhh - frustration. I think it's going to be quite some time before we see any new Xeons or new nVidia GTX-980's.
Click to expand...

They should be totally reliable...
The guy can also build you a lot of custom cables....I know some guys running octane(gpu path tracer) that had custom cables made up with splitters running pcie cards externally....

Not sure if he made the splitters though....might require a daughter board
 
Nikhil Kamkolkar said:
...given Apple clearly is more focused on iDevices than anything else.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I'm not sure if this really is true. Mountain Lion is the best OSX so far. It kept the best things form Lion and removed/fixed it's annoyances... The Retina Mac Book Pro is a 100% professional machine, perfect for mobile media professionals. The new iMac is a really nice Mac, but it's probably more consumer oriented than the Mac Book Pro retina. I have faith in their next MacPro aswell...
 
I have to agree with Jon....

and as a matter of fact...judging by windows 8...it seems windows is trending towards being jealously focused on idevices...they really dropped the ball with 8 just to accommodate tablets....
I am genuinely scared of there future OS's....I just hope this is more of a ME Vista, phase...and not a sign of things to come...

One thing is for sure, both mac and PC are distracted by the giant carrot of mobile devices, and I dont blame them....lots of money there
 
Interesting multi-page article on OS X.

http://macperformanceguide.com/AppleCoreRot-intro.html

I wasn't even aware of some of the 'magic' Apple has added, like with the "silent gamut conversion truncating color" mentioned here: http://macperformanceguide.com/AppleCoreRot-10-bit-color.html

Of course, I just bought the $15 Win8 upgrade for my laptop, and have zero intention of installing it unless MS gets their Win8 act together - so the current Win future seems 'less than rosy' to me also.

Ahhh! I hope both Win and OS X can get re-focused away from dumbing everything down for the common masses.
 
unfortunately for PC users....every bit of gains they had over Mac in not being 'dumbed down' are almost single handedly being erased by windows 8.....

its almost as if we need a professional based OS, and one for people who use facebook and like shiny bittons...
windows by trying to compete in both arenas is not satisfying either party....

I would wish windows would break the product up and have home and professional versions that are vastley different...in context to win 8...I am fine with 7 right now.
 
Actually, from the people I've talked to and what I have read online Windows 8 performs better than Windows 7 and is a good upgrade, BUT the UI sucks. There are ways to use the classic "Start Menu" interface. I've thought about upgrading for the performance boost. The only thing stopping me is I'm worried about RAID driver issues. If/When I do it I'll use the classic UI.
 
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