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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 :)

New Mac Pro

Jeff Kilgroe said:
Yep, it's here!

Getting everything installed now. Seems like a really nice computer, more details in a bit. Have not set up Windows, nor will I boot into Windows on this system so can't test the DisplayPort MST mode that way. Have not tried the Dell 24" yet and there's a reason for that, hopefully I'll be able to share some more info soon on that front. Will test with the Dell 24" and ASUS 32" when my friend brings the ASUS one over and we start juggling screens. I had one spare miniDP to DP cable, but I wasn't sure if it supported 1.2 w/ MST. I ordered a couple others just to cover the bases, they should be here tomorrow.

It's so shiny. :)
Click to expand...

oooo.... my precious! Just slap some Dragon footage in there and see what happens???
 
Congrats on the arrival Jeff.

Frank - PP now allows for at least one DX00 to be supported properly for playback, so next test is to see how it leverages the GPU's for GUI and timeline work if they are indeed splitting up the tasks between the two properly. During export, they do fire up both cards as noted.
 
Premiere seems to run alright so far, but I have not given it a thorough workout as of yet. Support for the Dx00 GPUs has only been added to Premiere CC just days ago. Only one GPU is supported for timeline and playback as that's just the way Premiere works right now. They are working on multiple GPU support and this has nothing to do with the Mac Pro or any other sort of system you may have. Currently, multiple GPUs are supported for export, as already noted.

I got most of my software on the system last night and played a bit. I'm just now starting to really dig in…

My initial impression is that throughput on this thing seems to be excellent. It is a finely tuned machine.

Not sure how I can compare or quantify it vs. other options out there at the moment. Seems snappier and smoother than my 2010 Mac Pro, but that's probably due to the much faster PCIe SSD vs. the slower SSD I have in my Mac tower's lower optical bay. That and the faster RAM, etc..

Initial impressions of the system within REDCINE-X… Compared to my Z820 3.1GHz 16-core with Titan GPU, this thing keeps up just fine on Dragon footage. For EPIC-MX and R1 footage, the Z820 has the Rocket kicking in and it screams along faster. That workstation will eventually get the Rocket-X. Not sure what I'm going to do with the Mac Pro in terms of a Rocket card. Probably won't mess with it. Once RED gets the GPU acceleration better tuned and optimized for multiple GPUs, I think the system will perform rather well.

OpenGL performance for Modo, Lightwave and Maya seems nice and solid, smooth.

Feels like a nice workstation. I'll be able to compare vs. the 12-core unit next week. My friend's 12-core is "preparing for shipment". Based on what I'm seeing so far, the 8-core looks like a good choice for me. It's holding pace just fine with my Z820 that has double the number of cores. Of course, the Z820 is also 2X the price for those extra cores and will have an advantage for the 2 or 3 apps that can actually use them.
 
Thanks for the update Jeff. I am on the fence with 8 or 12, as i will be using it for RedCine X and FCP X work and Maya/Nuke and Houdini.....
 
Andrew jump in the middle and go 2690V2!
 
http://blog.macsales.com/22312-owcs-mac-pro-2013-processor-upgrade-benchmarking#more-22312

+ Increased Memory does not effect the benchmark test
+ When 9 cores of the 10c chip are running flat out - it should be 3% faster than the 8c 3.3Ghz running flat out
+ When 10 cores of the 10c chip are running flat out - it's 15% faster than the 8 core 3.3Ghz running flat out
+ When 8c's or less are saturated, the 8c 3.3Ghz should be ~10% faster than the 10c, and 18% faster than 12c

As programs leverage more GPU in their code ... I am Guessing that 10% faster CPU core speed would be of greater benefit than 10% more multicore performance?

AJ
 
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Not necessarily. The GPU processing performance is based on how fast the data is decoded at the CPU and formatted in the buffers that are sent to the GPU ram for GPU processing. Applications and codecs that thread well and require significant processing will get better performance with more threads with the GPU processing.
 
A little tidbit on Dragon footage. In REDCINE-X, this system (8 core 3GHz, 64GB, D700 GPUs) plays back 6K Dragon footage at 1/2 res (100% scaling on display) without skipping a beat, the frame caching chugs along just a bit faster than playback at 24fps. It shreds through 6K R3Ds at 1/4 res way faster.

It handles 5K EPIC R3Ds with ease and it makes mincemeat out of 4K and lesser files.

My Pegasus2 RAID is being delivered today. :)
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
A little tidbit on Dragon footage. In REDCINE-X, this system (8 core 3GHz, 64GB, D700 GPUs) plays back 6K Dragon footage at 1/2 res (100% scaling on display) without skipping a beat, the frame caching chugs along just a bit faster than playback at 24fps. It shreds through 6K R3Ds at 1/4 res way faster.

It handles 5K EPIC R3Ds with ease and it makes mincemeat out of 4K and lesser files.

My Pegasus2 RAID is being delivered today. :)
Click to expand...

Awesome. Are you going to test any FCPX with Dragon? Finally, will you be using the default Raid 5 on the Pegasus?
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
It handles 5K EPIC R3Ds with ease and it makes mincemeat out of 4K and lesser files.
Click to expand...


This is great news for older MX users :)

I still love my ROCKET card but our offline machine can shed some weight by not having to lug an ROCKET enclosure.
 
I'll be giving FCPX and Premiere a better run-through with Dragon and other R3D footage here. I'll try to put some numbers to all of this. I plan to run RAID-5 on the Pegasus2. I may reformat if I decide a different configuration in terms of block size would be better. Although I'm betting it will be just fine out of the box as the TB1 Pegasus RAIDs have been great.

I Have the ASUS 32" 4K en route and will wrap up some 4K display testing shortly. As of right now, I have already done the following 4K display testing:

SEIKI 50" works via HDMI at 24Hz and 30Hz. Of course it still has the same SEIKI issues we get with all other sources like the panel still refreshing at 30Hz to give us judder and the inability to completely remove all sharpening/ etc. for monitor use. Even with it dialed all the way off in the service menu.

Samsung 55" F9000 -- works at 24Hz and 30Hz via HDMI. Have to run in game mode to get rid of all the extra "enhancements" crap. Looks nice, but too big for desktop use. Kinda like it since my 55" is mounted on the wall at about 11 feet away and I can sit in my recliner to use it. :)

Dell 24" 4K -- HDMI, DP, miniDP, all fine at 24Hz and 30Hz 4K. 60Hz via DP 1.2 MST (standard DisplayPort connection only) has issues with the secondary stream. Not as bad as described in the Anandtech reviewing of this pair, but there's sparkles, flickers and drop-outs. Some of the drop-outs cause both streams to blank for a split second here and there. So not useable. I have a couple other miniDP to DP 1.2 MST 21Gbps cables coming today to see if that helps. Since the Anandtech review, there has been an EFI update for the new Mac Pro, installed here. And there is also a new FireGL Dx00 driver package in the OSX 10.9.2 developer seed, which I have not installed yet. If MST fails to work with the ASUS and/ or with the newer cables, then I'll try the 10.9.2 beta. I don't recall if the Anandtech review system was running 10.9 or 10.9.1. I'm currently on .1 here and it had a video driver update to 10.9 as well. Even if it's not quite working yet, I think Apple will have this all working shortly. Hopefully in time for those $700 28" 4K monitors that are about to hit the market. We have Dell, ASUS, Lenovo, Acer and presumably others bringing these 28 inchers to market soon.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
A little tidbit on Dragon footage. In REDCINE-X, this system (8 core 3GHz, 64GB, D700 GPUs) plays back 6K Dragon footage at 1/2 res (100% scaling on display) without skipping a beat, the frame caching chugs along just a bit faster than playback at 24fps. It shreds through 6K R3Ds at 1/4 res way faster.

It handles 5K EPIC R3Ds with ease and it makes mincemeat out of 4K and lesser files.

My Pegasus2 RAID is being delivered today. :)
Click to expand...

Hey Jeff, whats this mean for crunching, exporting? Do you think the Rocket 1 will be obsolete with a new mMP regarding redcine exporting situations ?
 
Since the original Rocket is non-functional for now with Dragon footage we can't really get a direct comparison, we don't know what we're missing there. If anything. For 5K footage, this system races right along without the Rocket. Based on the 5K footage handling, I see no reason to connect an original Rocket to this system. Not going to gain anything and with the Rocket being housed in a clunky external box with increased latency and potentially crippled throughput (if using a TB1 expander), I just don't see it offering anything. For apps like Premiere and Resolve it could be an advantage still because those apps don't yet use GPU decoding for R3D's.
 
Hey Jeff,

Awesome to read all your posts and have been keeping up to date in earnest as I await the arrival of my own nMP. Does anyone know if REDCine is making use of both of the GPU's for playback or just one of them?
 
It's great to have a first hand account from a trusted reducer. Keep it coming. Is the realtime results you are referring to coming off your TB1 Pegusas or directly from the SSD? I'm curious as to whether or not the TB1 version will handle realtime 4k? 5k? even at reduced resolution.
 
Mohammed Almedfa said:
Hey Jeff,

Awesome to read all your posts and have been keeping up to date in earnest as I await the arrival of my own nMP. Does anyone know if REDCine is making use of both of the GPU's for playback or just one of them?
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As far as I know, multi-GPU support in RC-X isn't there yet. However, I can select both GPUs in the preferences panel. One was checked by default for OpenCL, I checked the second one and restarted. Have not compared performance between the selection of one or both.


Frank Weeks said:
It's great to have a first hand account from a trusted reducer. Keep it coming. Is the realtime results you are referring to coming off your TB1 Pegusas or directly from the SSD? I'm curious as to whether or not the TB1 version will handle realtime 4k? 5k? even at reduced resolution.
Click to expand...

So far, off the internal SSD as well as an external LaCie TB1 dual SSD RAID Little Big Disk TB edition thing (garbage). As long as the drive is fast enough to read the R3D data… Playing back from a Buffalo 1TB miniStation Thunderbolt (single 2.5" 1TB HDD) playback is choppy.
 
Fully loaded performance with multiple TB & USB3 buses in use

Fully loaded performance with multiple TB & USB3 buses in use

Jeff,

thanks for posting your ongoing experiences with the new MacPro. I am especially interested as you have chosen the exact configuration I was considering buying.

If you have a Scratch License and full Resolve license on hand I would be very interested to hear of the kind of performance (fps) you are getting transcoding various Raw and non raw camera native formats to multiple simultaneous output formats in these apps and then what kind of performance you get whilst doing checksum verified copying to multiple destinations at the same time. To simulate real world use this would need to be done on an external RAID and secondary copies made to other shuttle drives attached through USB3 or Thunderbolt or even a Thunderbolt enclosure or dock and eSATA. Theoretically all this should work well but it is definitely worth testing how all the various busses cope under heavy load and how it impacts on video performance. Checksum verification seems to be a big IO and CPU hog and I wonder how the 8 core copes with this alongside feeding the GPU with frames to render.


On the peripherals front one thing I want to see going forward are PCIe thunderbolt docks that accept multiple Thunderbolt inputs so the multiple slots can each be fed with a full aggregate 20gbps Thunderbolt channel. Most have 3 slots but only 2 can be on faster connections - for us power video users we need more high speed slots to accommodate our IO needs and legacy PCIe cards. Multiple enclosures means too much mess and too many boxes. Give us one box (maybe rack mountable with built in storage like the wonderful soon to be TB2 upgraded Netstor NA333TB or NA381TB) with built in dock functions like more USB3 ports, eSATA 6Gbps, FW800 for legacy, multi card reader front panel all on one TB connect, and a couple more TB connects to feed to the PCIe slots. I think trying to get all we need in one tidy external box we would all hit a lot of bottlenecks if it just connected via one TB cable.

Having said that I currently use a Netstor NA211TB (which I plan to upgrade to Thunderbolt 2) with my early 2011 TB1 equipped 17" MBP to handle a lot of small data wrangling and transcoding DIT jobs that don't require the extra grunt of a fully loaded MacPro and it works very well paired with my Areca ARC1882IX-16 Raid controller running a 12TB RAID 5, a Sonnet tango 3 for connecting client provided USB3 drives and daisy chained to a Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K and on to a Sonnet Echo Expresscard Pro. Occasionally I even combine it with an ATTO Thunderlink SH1068 powering a Codex SAS dual dock on the Thunderbolt chain in between! (I can fully recommend the Netstor enclosure by the way - it is slightly more affordable than the magma and Sonnet equivalents, works just as well, is highly compatible, has a good power supply for more power hungry cards and will soon have a Thunderbolt 2 upgrade available for it. The LD version also has built in space for mounting 4x 2.5" Hard drives or SSD's so you can build a high speed raid SSD scratch disk with lots of space onboard.)

Gosh that ended up being a long post - I must get out more. ;-)
 
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