Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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

Ray Palin said:
Hey Jeff, how's that Pegasus 2 going, would you recommend the 6 bay over the 4 bay version? Enjoy reading about how well the Mac Pro handles Epic material... any more revelations? Thanks
Click to expand...

No new revelations just yet. I plan to dig into Resolve on the new Mac Pro and do some more real world work / testings with FCPX and Premiere with R3D footage. I have time over the next day or two. As for the Pegasus2, it performs about as I expected, just shy of 800MB/s reads in RAID-5 mode. Pretty much the same as the original Pegasus R6 performs as we are limited by the overall speed of the drives. The 8-drive is faster with the couple extra drives. Yes, I would recommend the 6 bay over the 4 bay for the extra speed and more space. Although, I do understand the budget concerns. I chose the R6 over the R8 model because the speed of the R6 is fine for my needs on this particular system and 6 x 3TB gives enough storage as well.
 
Cheers Jeff, I'll be keenly following your testing results!
 
jimhare said:
Is VAT/GST/TAX included in the $11,065? Remember that US prices are quoted ex tax, usually about 8%-10%. So if you have 20% tax that's already incuded in the price, it gets much closer very quickly.

In Australia we have 10% GST, included in the price, which makes the price difference look larger than it is.
Click to expand...

Very true! Throughout my whole temper fit I totally forgot about that. That leaves a difference of about $1.200 (sans the 19% tax in Germany) which is not as bad anymore... Not worth the hassle to import it myself and probably not cheaper either. Thanks Jim, for the reminder!
 
Does anybody have just the quad core base model? I can get it for 2800 with the edu discount and was wondering how dramatic of a difference it would be from my 2012 MBP (2.3ghz, 16gb ram, nvidia 650m 512mb, 750gb samsung 840 evo SSD) when exporting stuff in FCP X and resolve. I know the I/O options are way more robust and of course the pci-e storage interface is way faster though

I was thinking of starting with the base model and then upgrading the cpu/ram/etc over time as I need it.
 
Saumene Mehrdady said:
Does anybody have just the quad core base model? I can get it for 2800 with the edu discount and was wondering how dramatic of a difference it would be from my 2012 MBP (2.3ghz, 16gb ram, nvidia 650m 512mb, 750gb samsung 840 evo SSD) when exporting stuff in FCP X and resolve. I know the I/O options are way more robust and of course the pci-e storage interface is way faster though

I was thinking of starting with the base model and then upgrading the cpu/ram/etc over time as I need it.
Click to expand...

I have the same basic question. Since apparently it will be possible to upgrade the processor with just a snap in of the new one and the prices of the processors tend to come down drastically after six months to a year and typically ram is cheaper from other sources, it seems to me the sweet spot if you don't need the power right away is to get the base quad core and spend the extra $1000 on the 700 GPUs
.
(since there is no guarantee that there will be any aftermarket versions of the GPU boards at least for quite a while if at all and it also seems that FCPX is highly optimized for GPU and that is probably happening with resolve - and maybe RCX)
 
Eric B - Thanks for your earlier view on ultimate 'GPU processing performance' being determined by number of efficiently split threads & data decode rates.

Shame there isn't a simple 'best' option.

I am now moving full circle to Jeff's initial view the 10 core may be the best compromise.
It behaves like the stock 8c in the Turbo stakes... but has an additional 2 cores.
It is also as fast as the 12c with 11c running flat out.

OWC has also just tested the 12c :
http://blog.macsales.com/22458-owc-tests-mac-pro-2013-with-12-core-processor#more-22458

AJ
 
Bob Gundu said:
Who wants to explain whats going on in this video? He's talking external GPU's over thunderbolt at one point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RTkNJDMzug
Click to expand...


Havent watched your linked video the whole way through yet but my understanding is that Thunderbolt connected external GPU's are no problem on windows machines - windows does not require any special drivers and just see's the GPU as a PCIe card and has done since day1 but on OSX and even EFI boot camp Windows on apple machines this doesn't work and for OSX manufacturers have to program specific Thunderbolt aware drivers for their products and none have done so for GPU's yet! It seems a crazy situation that Apples as the big drivers behind Thunderbolt adoption should have an OS architecture that specific requires Thunderbolt aware drivers be developed to get anything to work but there you go. I guess it forces some kind of compliance so PCIe cards connected over thunderbolt don't trip over themselves due to not being aware of their connection over the limitations of a thunderbolt bus (a complete speculation as to why on my part).

There is a hack published by MediaPros in the UK that is for the Quadro4000 to run over Thunderbolt though. It is a hack and driver specific so you are limited to a single model of card and a specific driver which means your particular application may have issues especially as software is updated and requires newer drivers. It does show that it can be done though.

I have yet to hook up a windows machine to a Thunderbolt box or a Mac to a Quadro 4000 to try this for myself yet - these tidbits are just word of mouth from people on the net - mostly from a while back when I first wanted to try and get an eGPU on my Tbolt 1 equipped MBP.
 
There was a "kit" being sold by an overseas vendor that was simply a thunderbolt PCIe card and a PCIe host board with a single slot screwed onto a box that could handle GPU's over Thunderbolt under limited conditions (particular GPU's, OS version, and limited speed obviously) but did work. I saw a video of them running a GTX 680 on a rMBP 2012 last year but the project quickly evaporated after they sold a few. It was purely a tuner/programmer type deal with really only suited for people like Dave at MacVidCards because the system was in such infancy. I'll try and dig it up. For now, I just assume no GPU until Mac or Intel unlocks it.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
No new revelations just yet. I plan to dig into Resolve on the new Mac Pro and do some more real world work / testings with FCPX and Premiere with R3D footage. I have time over the next day or two. As for the Pegasus2, it performs about as I expected, just shy of 800MB/s reads in RAID-5 mode. Pretty much the same as the original Pegasus R6 performs as we are limited by the overall speed of the drives. The 8-drive is faster with the couple extra drives. Yes, I would recommend the 6 bay over the 4 bay for the extra speed and more space. Although, I do understand the budget concerns. I chose the R6 over the R8 model because the speed of the R6 is fine for my needs on this particular system and 6 x 3TB gives enough storage as well.
Click to expand...
i am kicking myself that i don't remember the link but i read a review of the TB2 R6 and they were saying that after being on the phone with tech support they squeezed R/W of 1350?mb/sec out? i don't remember the specifics but that seemed incredible with just HDs...maybe they were running striped?
 
paul schefz said:
i am kicking myself that i don't remember the link but i read a review of the TB2 R6 and they were saying that after being on the phone with tech support they squeezed R/W of 1350?mb/sec out? i don't remember the specifics but that seemed incredible with just HDs...maybe they were running striped?
Click to expand...

It will do that in a plain RAID-0 stripe set and a large block size format, then transferring large video files or continuous data stream only. ;)

I'm getting a consistent 800MB/s out of mine, or just slightly shy of that. BMD speed test reports over 800MB/s, AJA reports just under. It will occasionally burst a bit faster and it's super fast for small occasional writes where nothing overruns the drive caches. All things considered, it's about 8 to 10 % faster than the original 18TB Pegasus R6. Thunderbolt 2 allows for plenty of headroom whereas the older model was scratching at the ceiling.

The 8 x 3TB 24TB model seems to be the fastest. I haven't used one myself, but I"m starting to wonder if I shouldn't have ordered it instead for the extra bit of speed. I'm seeing consistent reports of it running solid at over 1GB/s in RAID-5 model. Or maybe I should buy a second R6 and then stripe the two of them together. Even putting them on the same TB2 header, I should get 1500MB/s. I really don't need 30TB of storage on this one system though… heh.
 
Jason Osterday said:
There was a "kit" being sold by an overseas vendor that was simply a thunderbolt PCIe card and a PCIe host board with a single slot screwed onto a box that could handle GPU's over Thunderbolt under limited conditions (particular GPU's, OS version, and limited speed obviously) but did work. I saw a video of them running a GTX 680 on a rMBP 2012 last year but the project quickly evaporated after they sold a few. It was purely a tuner/programmer type deal with really only suited for people like Dave at MacVidCards because the system was in such infancy. I'll try and dig it up. For now, I just assume no GPU until Mac or Intel unlocks it.
Click to expand...

Quite a few companies are coming out with TB2 boxes for GPUs and other large cards towards the end of the year. If Apple does get it done any time soon, it will likely come next year at the earliest or maybe the holiday shopping season if things go really well.
 
Jeff, any resolve 10 tests with multi nodes of red r3d 4k videos? 8 core or 12 core new mac pro??
 
My new mac pro (8 core / 32 meg / dual d700) won't play back a raw 4k r3d without stuttering like mad in FCP X. Sure, it will playback on the "performance" setting but that is certainly not 4k playback. Am I missing something here? I've got around 900mb/s read and write speed. Im a bit disappointed.
 
Chris Vallier said:
My new mac pro (8 core / 32 meg / dual d700) won't play back a raw 4k r3d without stuttering like mad in FCP X. Sure, it will playback on the "performance" setting but that is certainly not 4k playback. Am I missing something here? I've got around 900mb/s read and write speed. Im a bit disappointed.
Click to expand...

Have you installed the latest updates? EFI, OSX 10.9.1, Redcine-X 22.1.whatever…? Have you enabled the OpenCL support and checked both GPUs in the preferences tab in RC-X?

Beyond that, I don't know, mine is silky smooth. I have seen over at the MacRumors forums that some users have reported stuttering with scrolling and other activity on their displays or with the systems in general. How are other things performing?
 
Yes on EFI, yes on OSX 10.9.91, Yes on all that I can think of. My 4k playback is great in RC-X, but in FCP X it stinks. Are you using FCP?
 
Hey Chris,

You're not going to get RED full quality debayer in FCP X on the new Mac Pro (without a Rocket card) today. "Better Performance" in the FCP X playback settings is roughly 1/4 debayer quality -- and fine for general editing (been doing this on a laptop for over a year now). I'm sure we'll see improvements in GPU based R3D playback in future updates of the RED FCP X plug-in. Looking forward to the next FCP X Plug-in update from RED.

You should be able to get full quality 4k playback on rendered Projects on that machine (ProRes HQ or even 4444) with fast TB2 drives. Rendering on that machine should be blazing fast too. So the general 4k workflow in FCP X when working R3D native is to cut via Better Performance with Background rendering turned off -- prior to doing the YUV to RGB conversion (ProRes render). I do like to edit native R3D for short-form projects -- and I do the proxy workflow for longer-form projects.
 
Last edited:
Chris Vallier said:
Yes on EFI, yes on OSX 10.9.91, Yes on all that I can think of. My 4k playback is great in RC-X, but in FCP X it stinks. Are you using FCP?
Click to expand...

Oh, I thought you meant in RedCine-X. Yeah, in FCPX and Premiere we have to work at lower resolutions. Things should improve as RED gets their GPU decoding support enabled in the SDK and rolled out to Adobe, Apple, etc.. I'm still not expecting to be able to actually edit with 5K+ R3D files at 4K+ resolutions… Maybe in a couple more hardware generations down the line.

As Logan points out, 4K playback from rendered material should (and does) work just fine. The big factor here is still the amount of computing power needed to decode R3D files and currently the software tools can't leverage the hardware as we'd like. REDCINE-X does a pretty good job using GPUs now and a relatively crappy job of using more than a single CPU core. Premiere goes the other way, it scales to multiple CPUs quite well and while it does use the GPU to accelerate many things, R3D decoding is not one of those things. FCPX is similar, but doesn't scale on CPUs quite as well as Premiere. It's tuned to Apple's hardware, including this new Mac Pro, quite well. Should really make a huge difference once R3D GPU support makes it into a future build of the software.

I don't much like talking in terms of if, when and should, but that's just the state of this technology right now.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
As far as I know, iOS doesn't support external GPUs - has that changed with Mavericks?
Click to expand...

Not yet so far as I know, but many companies are coming out with external PCIe boxes running off of TB and it works in Windows, so I can see Apple doing something with it at some point, even if they only set things up to use the OpenCL functionality of an external GPU card.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top