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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 :)

pc with geforce vs mac pro

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Florin Danilov

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Hello guys,

I have this strange situation. I made a comparison between 2 computers to render the same file in the same condition/settings in RCX. I want buy a Mac Pro, to replace my 2 years old computer.
My current computer is an i7 Ivy Bridge 3.5Ghz and 32 RAM with GeForce GTX680 and the test mac, was a Mac Pro 3.7GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon E5, 16 RAM, 2x AMD FirePro D300/2 GB GDDR5 VRAM

However, my computer did the render in 3 minutes, and on the newly MacPro the render took 4 minutes.

I know I have a Cuda in my video card, and on the macpro there isn’t, but I thought that the Mac Pro somehow would be much better than my cheaper computer.

Apparently if I buy a Titan video card will blow even the most powerful mac pro. This can be true?

Thanks,
Florin
 
I'm researching similar things at the moment, and the answer seems to be "It's complicated" some things, like GPU intensive transcoding may indeed be faster on an older box with a beefy GPU, especially if it's got lots of CUDA cores, but try to get the same performance doing realtime playback and you'll find the Trashcan may do better. However I do suspect if you went with the higher spec D500 or D700 GPU you'd see better performance.
 
From my experience its not about the speed but about your workflow comfort level.

I have a BOXX for Maya at work that blows away the new Mac Pro D700 in some processes such as rendering and dynamic particle testing but that PC is dead slow in all Adobe CC 2014 software as well as Fusion and Resolve.

If you need brute force speed for rendering out of RCX then you need a kick ass PC which will bring price up and over any D300 Mac Pro options.

IMHO anything lower than a D500 Mac Pro is a waste of money.

Id replace that with the new iMac just for workspace reasons.
 
The PC world is a lot more complicated than it used to be in the single core past... these days it's very likely you'll find completely opposite performance when you test "those 2 key apps" critical to your productivity. It comes down to how the apps are designed... modern apps that support heavy parallelization will put up insane processing numbers on expensive multi-processor/multi-core machines like the Z820/Z840... but an app that doesn't scale to multiple cores may be TWICE as fast (as that $15,000 beast) on a cheap as hell commodity Best Buy POS that just happens to have a fast clock. Then there's the whole GPU factor - which again is heavily dependent on the code design (but at least is usually something you can upgrade as needed).

So these days you have to spend a lot of time understanding the performance of your demanding apps and how to optimize it... and often your purchase is based on a compromise if you have multiple apps with different configuration needs.
 
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Well said David.

In my case Ive all but given up and work with the lowest to mid common denominator which is the new Mac Pro D700 8/12-Core for DIT/Grading/Motion and heavy Graphics.

For Maya and Renderman, I have an old Dell/BOXX combo that does the job.
 
the answer ..yes... "it's complicated" :)

Maybe I'll have to test also the Adobe CC suite, because I didn't have the time to do that. My workflow is more or less RCX, premiere/after effects and export to davinci.

What I understand, mac pro will do better in the "working progress", than the render itslef. Maybe is a good ideea to keep the old computer for render stuff (also I do some 3dsmax) and to buy a new mac pro (with better inside) to keep up with a good worflow/playback/etc...

thanks.
 
Plus loving the Thunderbolt 2 options trickling out for new Mac Pro and the fact that you can view 4K right out of the tube :)
 
Just throwing in my 2 cents. My experience with the new Mac Pro has been a nightmare so far. Constant crashes, and rendering errors with the dual d700 cards. I'd highly suggest building a PC.
 
All with Premiere. The rest of CC and Resolve work fine, but premiere for some reason does not like my mac pro. I have a PC at home which runs the exact same version perfectly fine.
 
Eric Santiago said:
I have a BOXX for Maya at work that blows away the new Mac Pro D700 in some processes such as rendering and dynamic particle testing but that PC is dead slow in all Adobe CC 2014 software as well as Fusion and Resolve.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you are comparing performance of Fusion with....as there is no mac version

The new Mac pro has had epic teething problems with resolve
 
Mike Harrington said:
Not sure what you are comparing performance of Fusion with....as there is no mac version

The new Mac pro has had epic teething problems with resolve
Click to expand...


The PC in question is an old BOXX that I run Maya on.

I run the same version of Maya on a new Mac Pro and thats what Im reffering too.

I find Adobe CC, Fusion and Resolve on that said BOXX system compared to the new Dell I use for a Digital Signage manager.
 
I thinks its a fair a assumption that across the board the native windows machine running native software with outrun a mac of similar or same specs. I've used real macs , fake macs. Again its a non discussion, hardware expansion, use of clockspeeds, driver support, cpu updates always favor Windows boxes. An apple purchase will always make you feel incredibly warm and fuzzy, but will leave you with blue balls at some point along the way.
 
Eric Santiago said:
The PC in question is an old BOXX that I run Maya on.

I run the same version of Maya on a new Mac Pro and thats what Im reffering too.

I find Adobe CC, Fusion and Resolve on that said BOXX system compared to the new Dell I use for a Digital Signage manager.
Click to expand...

understood

thanks
 
Florin Danilov said:
Hello guys,

I have this strange situation. I made a comparison between 2 computers to render the same file in the same condition/settings in RCX. I want buy a Mac Pro, to replace my 2 years old computer.
My current computer is an i7 Ivy Bridge 3.5Ghz and 32 RAM with GeForce GTX680 and the test mac, was a Mac Pro 3.7GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon E5, 16 RAM, 2x AMD FirePro D300/2 GB GDDR5 VRAM
Click to expand...

I'm running a 2012 and a 2011 MacPro with a GTX 680 Card, OS X 10.8.6 and fast raids connected. I'm pleased with their performance and reliability. No issues with Resolve, RCX, PP and Smoke. I'll keep things this way until I upgrade to the next gen. MacPro. If reliability is you aim and not tinkering stay at a stable system, trusty hardware and don't upgrade. Never buy a 1st gen. system if it is a complete re-design. R&D is nowadays done publicly and the user is the guinea pig. I let others do that tedious testing and meanwhile earn some money. Ok... haha.

Apples usually run equally reliably as Z8xx family systems on Windows or RedHat. Win7 is as stable as OSX 10.8.x Used to run both system at my place. If connected to the Web OS X is less prone to become sticky. Overall, at least for me, the maintenance is easier with OS X. But this is a thing of personal taste and experiences.

The GTX 680 is a pretty fast card. The FirePro 300 is the smallest config. on the new Mac Pro, plus most applications don't support dual GPU rendering. So probably in your test the single GTX 680 outperformed the dual FirePro 300. A proper New Mac Pro workstation has min. 32Gb Ram and the fast FirePro 900 cards installed. Different performance level.

Hans
 
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