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Hitting the limits

jayducharme

jayducharme

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 22, 2006
4,661
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The thick of it
This is the year my 2013 MacPro becomes “obsolete”. I’ve really enjoyed its speed and it’s small footprint. I upgraded it to 64gb RAM and a 1 tb SSD, and I have an 8 tb TBolt drive attached. The system has been a real workhorse.

But now that I’m regularly editing 4K video, the MacPro has met its match. Rendering takes about two to four times longer than the clip length. The machine gets really hot. I had opted for the low-end 4 gb graphic cards, and I think that’s where the bottleneck happening. Since those cards are non-replaceable, I guess I’ll once again be looking to upgrade. Each time I think it’ll be my last desktop computer. But then tech marches forward.
 
Sounds like that stallion Mac Pro needs to return to the original OSX, rather than upgrade to a newer one.
 
I guess I grew up thinking that products should work forever, if they power on.
And you could always get a part to make that work.
That is one reason the igloo g4 downstairs needs to be repaired.

Hopefully we are decades away from 5k film editing
 
jayducharme said:
As long as there’s a machine that makes quick work of 4K video (which is mostly what I’m doing now), that would be an upgrade path for me. At this point if a machine can handle 4K video, it can handle pretty much anything.
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Wasn't the one strength of the 6,1 Mac Pro supposed to be 4K video editing? As for an upgrade path I'd recommend investigating HP's Z series systems.
 
pl1984 said:
Wasn't the one strength of the 6,1 Mac Pro supposed to be 4K video editing? As for an upgrade path I'd recommend investigating HP's Z series systems.
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If the MacPro was fully tricked out. I wasn't willing to spend $8k on a computer at that time.
 
jayducharme said:
If the MacPro was fully tricked out. I wasn't willing to spend $8k on a computer at that time.
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Is an eGPU an option? I haven’t researched how much this upgrade would cost, but an RX 580 or Vega 56/64 in an external enclosure has got to be less expensive than upgrading your internal GPUs (which are old tech anyway and rediculously expensive for what they are) or purchasing a whole new unit, such as the HP Z series.
 
tpivette89 said:
Is an eGPU an option? I haven’t researched how much this upgrade would cost, but an RX 580 or Vega 56/64 in an external enclosure has got to be less expensive than upgrading your internal GPUs (which are old tech anyway and rediculously expensive for what they are) or purchasing a whole new unit, such as the HP Z series.
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That’s an interesting thought and might be worth exploring. My only concern would be that those MacPros came with Thunderbolt 2, which can stutter playing back 4K from an external drive. It handles standard HD just fine. But 4K chokes it.
 
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get a 12 core xeon on ebay, slap it in it , get a egpu with a cheap 4k capable such as the 580rx or a gtx1060, and a true editing raid storage such as a promise or areca 8 drive.

OR

sale your macpro for 2500$, buy a 4.1 2,26 for 500$ slap 2 x5690 and 128gb of ram for 700$ get a areca 1880 and 8 cheap 2.5 » ssd of ebay for 500$ and a gtx 980 or a vega56 for 500$ finally buy a samsung 960 pro ssd and make it bootable folowing the tread on this forum, and call it a day.

from my experience (I edit very huge timelapses, and phantom flex 4k ciné-DNG file) either a 12 core cylinder with a good egpu and a fast storage array or a 12 core cMP with a pcie ssd, a raid storage and a good gpu perform about tbe same.

most of the heavy lifting is done by the processor and GPU as long as they can play 4k are just fine on première or fcpx.

actually i found out that storage, ram and processor are by far what make the machine fast.

GPU only help in resolve with very heavy files such as 4k/6k/8k redcode or canon raw files
 
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I did a little more research and discovered that Mac OS supports eGPUs only through Thunderbolt 3. So that eliminates that option for me.
 
either if you are using a t1/t2/3
you are using a pcie expender over thuderbolt. T3 gives you a 4X link in gen3 and T1 and T2 gives you a 2xgen 2 and a 4xgen2 .
therefore you understand tha even if a classic macpro is obsolete you still get 2x16 lanes gen2 and 2x4lane gen2 like on any modern PC...

dont focus too much on gpu unless you do blender or octane render...

as i say most of the work is done by the cpu ... so having a very fast single core cpu is realy the best setup. invest money in storage and ssd, as this is truelly where the bottleneck is.

you can have the fastest machine on earth, if your media are on a 150mb/s external drive it will be slow.
the trick is to launch a export and see if all the core of your processor are always at 100%... if not you have a bottleneck
 
I think before you upgrade anything you should figure out what your bottleneck is. Maybe the GPUs are suffering hardware failure but there’s not really any innate reason why it would struggle to edit 4K video when it once did it well. Sounds more like storage not keeping up or needing a clean install to check.

Also, rendering video always takes longer than real time, and FCPX is way more optimized and faster on equivalent hardware than Premiere. So I’m not sure what standard you are benchmarking to.
 
edgerider said:
you can have the fastest machine on earth, if your media are on a 150mb/s external drive it will be slow. the trick is to launch a export and see if all the core of your processor are always at 100%... if not you have a bottleneck
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The OP stated he had upgraded to a 1TB SSD. I assume this was either internal or through TB.
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fuchsdh said:
I think before you upgrade anything you should figure out what your bottleneck is. Maybe the GPUs are suffering hardware failure but there’s not really any innate reason why it would struggle to edit 4K video when it once did it well. Sounds more like storage not keeping up or needing a clean install to check.
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I read the OPs post as he has been getting more and more involved with 4K (i.e. he didn't start out doing much, if any, 4K work).
 
pl1984 said:
The OP stated he had upgraded to a 1TB SSD. I assume this was either internal or through TB.
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I read the OPs post as he has been getting more and more involved with 4K (i.e. he didn't start out doing much, if any, 4K work).
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Yeah I suppose that's what he means. Given that I've never had issues on a nMP with 4K video and that's what they were built for I feel like there has to be some other factor, unless it's just "this was way faster with 1080p video and I disappointed the hardware isn't there to give me the same performance with 4K files."
 
pl1984 said:
Have you reached a point where you're leaning in a particular direction?
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Not yet. I’m still looking at options. Maybe Apple will surprise us with a decent new pro machine in the next year or so.

unless you do blender
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I do.

as I say most of the work is done by the cpu
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Is it? I have the 4-core version. When I’ve checked Activity Monitor during video processing, only one core is being used. That’s why I figured the much higher cost of the bigger multicore setups wasn’t worth it. At least I can upgrade the cpu if I really need to. I don’t understand why Apple made the GPU non-upgradable.

I read the OP’s post as he has been getting more and more involved with 4K
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That’s it. In 2013 I didn’t think I’d be shooting 4K so soon. I thought I’d get there in about a decade. But since my iPhone does a great job with it now and has plenty of storage, I figured why not? My Mac Pro still tears through regular HD like a champ. I could just stick with HD. But I definitely notice the difference in image quality with 4K. I’m spoiled now, and that’s my preferred format.

It’s not a huge problem, just an annoyance that cropped up only in the last few months. Final Cut still works, just much slower with 4K. It still shocks me that I’ve had this machine for nearly five years!
 
neither the cMP or the cylinder have avhcd/hvec engine built-in on cpu or on guenuine GPU . So the work is mainly (and poorly) done by the cpu like a traditional work , not like the new I9 ot i7 and the new GPU.
a quadro k6000 have more cuda core than a GTX 1060, but the 1060 as a dedicated 4k mjpeg/avhcd/h264 optimized engine built in and therefore can play smooth 4k h264 when the quadro will not : because the quadro wont help the computer decompressing the h264. but in blender the K6000 will absolutely smoke the 1060... more cuda core, more memory, more bandwith.
But ....
any 12 core xeon is still a very powerfull cpu and can crunch 4k quite easily.

convert your rush to prores422, and your computer will be very smoth even with 4k.
but send somthing to blender and a cMP with multiple gpu in an expander, will smoke it.

your 1tb ssd in your machine is fast but if you have everything (system/app/media/and scratch disk) on it even if it is fast , it is still a 4xpcie gen 2 drive to cpu... while a cMP can have a 4xgen2 ssd for system and 4x4gen2 on an 16x card for scratch disk and media .

and if you go all the way and use pcie expander like i do, you can run up to 3 very powerful GPU , and a very fast 24 drive array for media... then everything is on a 16x link and the pcie swich make a « queue » to alocate the 2x16x available link to the avalaible cpu.

so evry components individually is actually slower on a cMP but as they can be used all the way together at almost the same time, it is at the end faster if your software is designed to take avantage of it.

imagine a highway with 4 lane where you can drive up to 80 Mph (your machine) and a 50mph 32 lanes one (a cMP) whenever the trafic get very bad, the 32 lane highway will allow more car per second no matter what...
 
jayducharme said:
It’s not a huge problem, just an annoyance that cropped up only in the last few months. Final Cut still works, just much slower with 4K. It still shocks me that I’ve had this machine for nearly five years!
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Which version of Final Cut are you using? What version of Mac OS are you using? Have you sought information on a forum which specifically focuses on FCP? They may have some advice they can give you to help speed up your workflow with your existing Mac.
 
jayducharme said:
As long as there’s a machine that makes quick work of 4K video (which is mostly what I’m doing now), that would be an upgrade path for me. At this point if a machine can handle 4K video, it can handle pretty much anything.
Click to expand...
Presumably you're aware Apple has announced a new Mac Pro due in 2019. More importantly, many reviewers ( here's one ) indicate the new iMac Pro handles 8k raw quite quickly compared to their previous Macs. Not an inexpensive solution.
 
Give in and get an iMac Pro. Every review I have read and the kids that for final cut pro work, it just can’t be beat.
 
pertusis1 said:
Give in and get an iMac Pro. Every review I have read and the kids that for final cut pro work, it just can’t be beat.
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well,
as I say, no one know what apple will do with the 2019 « macpro » and buying an imac pro unless your company pay for it is dam stupid...

ANY 2009 cMP upgraded with 2xx5690, 128 gb of ram , a 4 ssd in raid 0, and a top of the line graphic card will do the same for 3000$ period.

and the ssd / GPU you buy for it will still probably work on the 2019 because they have no choice to embrace standard PCIe slot, otherwise they wont sale because people learned the lesson with the cylinder.

so sale your cylinder before it’s worth nothing, buy a cMP for cheap, built it for your need for 3000$ and call it a day...

you have to buy a 12core imac pro with the highest gpu option to equal this.

if you want to spend 10k buy a cyclone expander an slap 3 vega64
 
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