Is the nMP worth it if you DON'T work in video/animation?

[cnstoll]

I ended up upgrading my Mac Pro instead and I'm pretty glad I did. I got a pretty solid boost just from adding a super fast SSD, and I'm imagining that the video card upgrade I plan on adding soon will be an even bigger boost. I'm a developer/photographer, and I'd say the new Mac Pro isn't worth it for me.

I wrote about it here in more detail:
http://conradstoll.com/blog/2013/12/27/building-my-own-new-mac-pro-part-1-storage

 

[jav6454]

Wow, so Apple built this computer solely for FCPX, which is a totally worthless piece of software?

No wonder no one is ordering it...

Not true. Right now, FCPX is the only thing that takes advantage of all its processing power. However, as developers get to use it and leverage its muscle, I am sure more professional applications will start supporting it. Thus, it will make the Mac Pro much suited for everyone than a select few like right now.

Also, if you need a good server power, this can deliver. Want to run Windows on it for some extra scientific applications? You bet the Mac Pro will deliver.

Please, just don't use a Mac Pro for casual gaming. This is not a gaming PC/Mac.

 

[prfrma]

This machine is a pretty terrible deal for anyone who doesn't use FCP at the moment. Give me an overclocked i7 4930k, dual Nvidia GTX cards over all of this proprietary junk any day. Or better yet, a smaller dual socket MP!

 

[wildmac]

Not true. Right now, FCPX is the only thing that takes advantage of all its processing power. However, as developers get to use it and leverage its muscle, I am sure more professional applications will start supporting it. Thus, it will make the Mac Pro much suited for everyone than a select few like right now.

Also, if you need a good server power, this can deliver. Want to run Windows on it for some extra scientific applications? You bet the Mac Pro will deliver.

Please, just don't use a Mac Pro for casual gaming. This is not a gaming PC/Mac.

I think perhaps, you missed my sarcasm....

However, I also think you are underestimating how some other software may run on the system. But yes, Adobe will need to tune their software to make full use of it.

So, I can't install WoW on this? I need to buy a separate PC just to do that, and just have Adobe stuff on the nMP? That's a bit silly.

I think you should say "don't buy this system as a dedicated gaming rig", that I might agree with (pending further benchmarks, of course).

 

[echoout]

Nope. Maybe. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Those are fairly prominent animation packages from various industries. To what are you referring? I use half of those applications to animate and my workstations (that are as fast or faster than the nMP) struggle with a variety of common procedures. In most of what I do, animating and rendering can't effectively be separated, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

 

[Derpage]

Those are fairly prominent animation packages from various industries. To what are you referring? I use half of those applications to animate and my workstations (that are as fast or faster than the nMP) struggle with a variety of common procedures. In most of what I do, animating and rendering can't effectively be separated, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I'm referring to the fact not many of those packages take advantage of the dual gpu set ups for anything but rendering and probably won't ever go beyond rendering use. This new Mac Pro was designed to be an open cl beast. Open cl isn't being adopted very fast in ANY of the packages you mention besides After Effects, and that's just for the rendering engine.

 

[beaker7]

GPU processing is the future as proved within the rendering industry, GPU rendering being 20+ times faster than top end CPUs. As this machine has two high end GPU cards in it then software that can use the GPU will be updated to use it, if they want to stay competitive. imo.

GPU may indeed be the future in rendering, but it is not anywhere near there now. It is not in use in any major production renderer, and the almost all of the smaller packages that do use it use CUDA.

 

[Derpage]

I'm referring to the fact not many of those packages take advantage of the dual gpu set ups for anything but rendering and probably won't ever go beyond rendering use. This new Mac Pro was designed to be an open cl beast. Open cl isn't being adopted very fast in ANY of the packages you mention besides After Effects, and that's just for the rendering engine.

Basically, Apple is Kevin Costner and this Mac Pro is the field of dreams.

 

[prowlmedia]

Video: It's gonna be awesome!....as long as you are a FCP user
Animation: You don't need this much computer to animate.
Everybody else: ??? ??? A lot of people are saying IF YOU BUILD IT THE SOFTWARE WILL COME. But ask how well that worked out for companies like DEC (lol).

Video: Premiere and After Effects support Open CL. So do other video Apps - Will probably need optimising over time I m sure.

Animation. Er what?! Animation is massively compute intensive. You can never have enough horsepower.

Everyone else... Like what?
Audio can support openCL and these GPUs can easily take on the power of Audio
Developers: always like quick compiles
Games: well that's up to the developers.

Given The Open CL libraries are built right into xCode and other dev tools, it's not actually hard to optimise.

As for DECs... massively popular at the time. worked out pretty well for a long time.

 

[Derpage]

Video: Premiere and After Effects support Open CL. So do other video Apps - Will probably need optimising over time I m sure.

Animation. Er what?! Animation is massively compute intensive. You can never have enough horsepower.

Everyone else... Like what?
Audio can support openCL and these GPUs can easily take on the power of Audio
Developers: always like quick compiles
Games: well that's up to the developers.

Given The Open CL libraries are built right into xCode and other dev tools, it's not actually hard to optimise.

As for DECs... massively popular at the time. worked out pretty well for a long time.

My reply is posted above. Basically, these machines are open cl beasts. You are asking devs to be not lazy and see enough money in the limited market which is within OSX to create unique versions of software that already exist. I see rendering engines getting rewritten, but honestly, am I going to use a dual gpu mac in that instance or a pc with quad firepro's....hmmmm decisions decisions.

 

[prowlmedia]

Originally Posted by echo out:
Flash? After Effects? ToonBoom? Maya? Dragon? Flame? Cinema? Photoshop?

Nope. Maybe. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Er or to correctly answer this...
Flash - ToonBoom - Nope: support high end 3D presentations now - admittedly geared towards a games engine - But still never going to tax the lowest Mac Pro.

DragonFrame - Probably not as it's technically just taking single frames via a camera.

Flame - Er well it's not an OSX App... but in every way Yes you need tonnes of horsepower for it. Smoke which has elements of Flame Does need all the power you can through at it.

Photoshop Depends how much you use on it. It has 3D capabilities which will only be faster... but my air runs Photoshop with 600mb file quite happily.

Maya - Cinema 4d Here's where you are Utterly wrong. The cards and CPU are INCREDIBLY important and the very reason these cards exist. the 4K/Video capabilities are happy side consequence. These cards will handle millions of polygons and 10s of millions of particles.

 

[Derpage]

Originally Posted by echo out:
Flash? After Effects? ToonBoom? Maya? Dragon? Flame? Cinema? Photoshop?



Er or to correctly answer this...
Flash - ToonBoom - Nope: support high end 3D presentations now - admittedly geared towards a games engine - But still never going to tax the lowest Mac Pro.

DragonFrame - Probably not as it's technically just taking single frames via a camera.

Flame - Er well it's not an OSX App... but in every way Yes you need tonnes of horsepower for it. Smoke which has elements of Flame Does need all the power you can through at it.

Photoshop Depends how much you use on it. It has 3D capabilities which will only be faster... but my air runs Photoshop with 600mb file quite happily.

Maya - Cinema 4d Here's where you are Utterly wrong. The cards and CPU are INCREDIBLY important and the very reason these cards exist. the 4K/Video capabilities are happy side consequence. These cards will handle millions of polygons and 10s of millions of particles.

All sorts of cards handle a **** ton of poly's and particles. You don't even need a pro level card for that. Let alone 2. There will be no advantage to multiple cards when it comes to Viewport or rendering scenes real time in whatever Cinema 4D uses.

 

[prowlmedia]

My reply is posted above. Basically, these machines are open cl beasts. You are asking devs to be not lazy and see enough money in the limited market which is within OSX to create unique versions of software that already exist. I see rendering engines getting rewritten, but honestly, am I going to use a dual gpu mac in that instance or a pc with quad firepro's....hmmmm decisions decisions.

Er again wrong. OpenCl is just that... OpenCL and supported by Nvida and ATI/AMD. It's cuda that needs to be depreciated.

Given that if you could get quad firerpro W9000s, 4 are going to cost you $12,000... or buy another 2 Mac Pros. Hmm... decisions decisions

There is another thread on here where someone has multi stacked Titans, 6 I think, in a big Windows box just rendering using the Octane renderer - but still does the actual work in OSX.

 

[Derpage]

Er again wrong. OpenCl is just that... OpenCL and supported by Nvida and ATI/AMD. It's cuda that needs to be depreciated.

Given that if you could get quad firerpro W9000s, 4 are going to cost you $12,000... or buy another 2 Mac Pros. Hmm... decisions decisions

There is another thread on here where someone has multi stacked Titans, 6 I think, in a big Windows box just rendering using the Octane renderer - but still does the actual work in OSX.

But CUDA isn't being depreciated, it's being used more and more! The machine is the field of dreams, if people start building software packages around this machine's features, that is awesome. But right now, there is nothing that utilizes the machines strengths in a practical manner outside of Apple's own products.

 

[prowlmedia]

All sorts of cards handle a **** ton of poly's and particles. You don't even need a pro level card for that. Let alone 2. There will be no advantage to multiple cards when it comes to Viewport or rendering scenes real time in whatever Cinema 4D uses.

Absolutely and utterly wrong. So wrong I am writing to the wrong police and telling on you.

What do you think these cards are for?!

Massive amounts of polygon handling in Maya/C4D.

Huge Textures in Mari / Mudbox - as proven with the pixar demo at the WWDC which was insane. Never seen any machine handle Scenes like that.

And Of course there will be advantage of dual cards... x2 infact!?! What do you think they are doing in there? They still have 4400 Stream cores 7teraflops pf throughput and all 3d packages in OSX can and do take advantage of that. My 285gtx 2gb in a 2008 mac pro - balks at about 10fps at about 100k Polys untextured. I saw a test on the new 8 core mac pro D700 running at 90fps with 3million polys fully animated with 7 lights and muti layers textures with shadows all realtime. How is that not view port enhancement?

 

[prowlmedia]

But CUDA isn't being depreciated, it's being used more and more! The machine is the field of dreams, if people start building software packages around this machine's features, that is awesome. But right now, there is nothing that utilizes the machines strengths in a practical manner outside of Apple's own products.

You are confusing the issue talking about OpenCL - the GPUs are massively powerful on their own.

OpenCL has nothing to do with the already well integrated OpenGL which is used in Maya, Cinema 4D, Mari, Nuke and every other 3D and every other 3d or Compositing packages.

OpenCL SHOULD be used as it's platform independent - that's what I am saying. Cuda as it stands is more developed. But there is no reason that OpenCL can't be as good.

You said nothing outside apples own products - But I've already stated that all adobe packages use OpenCL for rendering and OpenGL in viewports. What sort of thing are you referring to? Music apps for example could use an OpenCL plug in to process music - I am sure that is the way that will go. But given my 2008 mac pro could handle 99 Raw audio files layered with ease with no cards I don't know what specialist audio guys need. Crazy realtime plugins probably?

 

[Derpage]

You are confusing the issue talking about OpenCL - the GPUs are massively powerful on their own.

OpenCL has nothing to do with the already well integrated OpenGL which is used in Maya, Cinema 4D, Mari, Nuke and every other 3D and every other 3d or Compositing packages.

OpenCL SHOULD be used as it's platform independent - that's what I am saying. Cuda as it stands is more developed. But there is no reason that OpenCL can't be as good.

You said nothing outside apples own products - But I've already stated that all adobe packages use OpenCL for rendering and OpenGL in viewports. What sort of thing are you referring to? Music apps for example could use an OpenCL plug in to process music - I am sure that is the way that will go. But given my 2008 mac pro could handle 99 Raw audio files layered with ease with no cards I don't know what specialist audio guys need. Crazy realtime plugins probably?

I see what you are saying as far as the open gl stuff and viewport. I was a bit confused when comparing a gtx285 vs the d700s when it would seem that a card such as the 7970 would be a more apt comparison. I mean, nvidia has only recently stepped up their open gl efforts. I am of the opinion that the d700s are great for scientific and engineering work (and as I've stated 4k which requires that huge pipe). I think you can find solutions that are just as good for media creation that aren't as powerful. Audio and open cl is up in the air. I don't know much about those people.

 

[Anim]

Absolutely and utterly wrong. So wrong I am writing to the wrong police and telling on you.

What do you think these cards are for?!

Massive amounts of polygon handling in Maya/C4D.

Huge Textures in Mari / Mudbox - as proven with the pixar demo at the WWDC which was insane. Never seen any machine handle Scenes like that.

And Of course there will be advantage of dual cards... x2 infact!?! What do you think they are doing in there? They still have 4400 Stream cores 7teraflops pf throughput and all 3d packages in OSX can and do take advantage of that. My 285gtx 2gb in a 2008 mac pro - balks at about 10fps at about 100k Polys untextured. I saw a test on the new 8 core mac pro D700 running at 90fps with 3million polys fully animated with 7 lights and muti layers textures with shadows all realtime. How is that not view port enhancement?

In addition to this.......3 million, that's nothing Did you see the maya link i posted earlier in this thread? that scene was OpenCL accelerated and had 600 million polygons in the viewport on a W9000 as he was spinning it about. GPU processing is a huge game changer for 3D artists, not just realtime render engines like Vray-RT but viewport too. Makes trying to animate anything extremely taxing on older cards with less cores/streams.

Edit: It was in a different thread somewhere that I posted the link. Probably didn't do it in here because the OP asked for non animation work.

 

[thekev]

GPU processing is the future as proved within the rendering industry, GPU rendering being 20+ times faster than top end CPUs. As this machine has two high end GPU cards in it then software that can use the GPU will be updated to use it, if they want to stay competitive. imo.

If the data that needs to be loaded won't fit on current framebuffers, the number of people who will use those solutions will remain limited. It may be generation 2 or 3 of such a machine before it will be a viable solution for such workflows for many of the studios that might benefit.

Flash? After Effects? ToonBoom? Maya? Dragon? Flame? Cinema? Photoshop?

These are weird comparisons. After Effects has some features that are still entirely CUDA dependent. Photoshop can run 2GB files on the current generation of integrated graphics. Flash doesn't make explicit use of the gpu. It's a strange list when the machine is explicitly built to accommodate dual gpus. Of course it would still be a nice machine for those applications. It's just not really aimed directly at them. I suspect Apple intends to further propagate OpenCL in their own applications, so this is probably aimed at their direction rather than other vendors where Macs may have not have such an overwhelming presence.

 

[prowlmedia]

I see what you are saying as far as the open gl stuff and viewport. I was a bit confused when comparing a gtx285 vs the d700s when it would seem that a card such as the 7970 would be a more apt comparison. I mean, nvidia has only recently stepped up their open gl efforts. I am of the opinion that the d700s are great for scientific and engineering work (and as I've stated 4k which requires that huge pipe). I think you can find solutions that are just as good for media creation that aren't as powerful. Audio and open cl is up in the air. I don't know much about those people.

Um well thats the card in my machine.... I don't have a 7970? The D700 is basically a ATI W9000.

The point is to compare how massively improved the new cards are.

----------

In addition to this.......3 million, that's nothing Did you see the maya link i posted earlier in this thread? that scene was OpenCL accelerated and had 600 million polygons in the viewport on a W9000 as he was spinning it about. GPU processing is a huge game changer for 3D artists, not just realtime render engines like Vray-RT but viewport too. Makes trying to animate anything extremely taxing on older cards with less cores/streams.

Edit: It was in a different thread somewhere that I posted the link. Probably didn't do it in here because the OP asked for non animation work.

Sure. But did that have 7 working lights with soft shadows and Dozens of textures with bump mapping / spec and everything else in viewport? It was better than most of my renders in realtime.

 

[Beta Particle]

In Windows, although programs crash less often, driver incompatibility, or indeed, drivers that just got up on the wrong side of the bed on a particular day, will take down the system. There's also the weird bugs that crop up in Windows for no apparent reason and then just go away. Bizarre.

That sounds like a problem specific to your machine. I've been building PCs all my life (in addition to buying Macs - people can like both!) and haven't had that problem since the move to Vista of all things. I think it's because the 64-bit version of Windows dropped a lot of legacy hardware support and required all new drivers and validation. Oh, and I only run WHQL certified drivers. Anything else and you are potentially compromising the stability of the system.

That said, I don't know what OEMs like Dell do with their systems. Any OEM PC I've ever used had a ton of crapware installed out of the box.

At least with Windows 8, there is an option built in to reset the OS to a completely stock version without any of that. (at least, that was my understanding from a friend that bought an XPS12 earlier in the year)

The irony is that I tested Windows 7 for a full year on a Mac Pro before switching hardware: rock stable. So, from a stability standpoint, whether in Windows or OS X, buy Mac hardware. The most powerful Mac? The nMP. Sure you can't build your own and customize it like crazy like with a PC (which can be a lot of fun), but at least it won't bug-out on you when least expected.

Honestly, I love the internal design of the Mac Pro (externally, I'm not a fan) but if you plan on running Windows on it, I'd build a PC for less.
The Mac Pro basically has no expansion options unless you are willing to invest a lot of money in external Thunderbolt or USB3 hardware.

With a PC I can just buy an enterprise-level 4TB disk and put it in the case if I need extra storage.
Things like that are a major hassle with the new Mac Pro unless you buy something like those ridiculously expensive Promise Thunderbolt enclosures.
I can buy any number of off-the-shelf PCIe cards, and I don't need to worry about whether they're compatible with OS X or not.

The Mac Pro is basically for people that work in Final Cut Pro X, or people that are hitting the ceiling of what a quad-core i7 can do and need more CPU cores in OS X. (assuming their application can take proper advantage of the additional cores)
Don't forget that you are moving back a generation in performance with the Mac Pro CPU (it's using Ivy Bridge-E) so each individual core is slower than a Haswell i7 at the same clockspeed.

I suppose it's possible that some people have a use for that GPU power for things on OS X besides OpenCL, but I'm having a difficult time coming up with anything which requires OS X.

for audio - i'm more interested to know if latency numbers over this TB2 interface are better than they are… now.

Thunderbolt 2 is basically Thunderbolt 1, but they now send data over the second channel instead of it being dedicated to video. (so video now shares bandwidth with other devices)

If latency matters, you're still probably best with dedicated PCIe interfaces. (or hardware which bypasses the PC for monitoring)

Not true. Right now, FCPX is the only thing that takes advantage of all its processing power. However, as developers get to use it and leverage its muscle, I am sure more professional applications will start supporting it. Thus, it will make the Mac Pro much suited for everyone than a select few like right now.

OpenCL has been around for a number of years at this point, and very little has taken advantage of it.
It's a nice dream, but buy the machine for what it can do now, not what it might (or might not) be able to do in the future.

If that future arrives, the current GPUs may not cut it for OpenCL performance any more.

I know someone that does video mastering for films, and FCPX just doesn't cut it for his needs - none of the GPU accelerated encoding tools do.
He needs as much CPU performance as he can get. (which means a PC with two or more CPUs)

If Apple offered a system with a single GPU and dual CPUs, it's something he would be considering - but the ridiculous mark-up on the CPUs would probably just make him build a PC anyway.

 

[echoout]

These are weird comparisons. After Effects has some features that are still entirely CUDA dependent. Photoshop can run 2GB files on the current generation of integrated graphics. Flash doesn't make explicit use of the gpu. It's a strange list when the machine is explicitly built to accommodate dual gpus. Of course it would still be a nice machine for those applications. It's just not really aimed directly at them. I suspect Apple intends to further propagate OpenCL in their own applications, so this is probably aimed at their direction rather than other vendors where Macs may have not have such an overwhelming presence.

I don't disagree, I was just rattling off wildly popular animation programs that require lots of hardware resources, but agreed, not exactly what the nMP has lined up. That was sort of my point.

 

[Roykor]

i have read almost everything about the nMP, and the conclusion i can make so far is that a maxed out 2013 iMac destroys the nMP in cost/score (if you are not working with video edit programs) I was in the race for a nMP but i go for a new iMac (i7, 32gb, 780M 4gb, 512gb SSD)

 

[nateo200]

Originally Posted by echo out:
Flash? After Effects? ToonBoom? Maya? Dragon? Flame? Cinema? Photoshop?



Er or to correctly answer this...
Flash - ToonBoom - Nope: support high end 3D presentations now - admittedly geared towards a games engine - But still never going to tax the lowest Mac Pro.

DragonFrame - Probably not as it's technically just taking single frames via a camera.

Flame - Er well it's not an OSX App... but in every way Yes you need tonnes of horsepower for it. Smoke which has elements of Flame Does need all the power you can through at it.

Photoshop Depends how much you use on it. It has 3D capabilities which will only be faster... but my air runs Photoshop with 600mb file quite happily.

Maya - Cinema 4d Here's where you are Utterly wrong. The cards and CPU are INCREDIBLY important and the very reason these cards exist. the 4K/Video capabilities are happy side consequence. These cards will handle millions of polygons and 10s of millions of particles.

Maya/Cinema 4D is probably enough reason to need a Mac Pro with all the bells and whistles alone. Seriously those apps scare me on anything less than a beast computer.

 

[gugy]

I am mostly curious about Photoshop performance. I read on MacPerformanceGuide about the nMP 6 core being the sweet spot. That said I currently have a 12 core 2010 MP and I an not sure I will see major benefits jumping right on the nMP.
Probably will upgrade to OWC Accelsior SSD and add more RAM. That should keep me well of for at least another year or two. Anyone on similar situation?
Still, I am itching to get sooner than later one of these bad boys.