Just wait until Apple starts including specialized proprietary co-processors to all its line. Then even the Hackintosh pressure release valve will be closed.
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Looks like the end of the road for mac pro
- Thread starter pat500000
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Just wait until Apple starts including specialized proprietary co-processors to all its line. Then even the Hackintosh pressure release valve will be closed.
Wait? They've started - that's what the iMac Pro has, and I'm sure every significant re-design of a model from now on will have them. You'll only have to wait until all the Macs without those chips are old enough to be cut off from the latest OS.
The main issue for many creatives is that Adobe software is optimized so poorly. To perform well it needs machines with single core screamers and multicore beasts. Xeons have always been slower on the single core side and the i machines have always been faster on single.
Many pros simply dont need server grade hardware. These machines are 9-5 and the i series are excelent these days. Ive had more ECC memory fail than non ECC and havent had trouble with error correction anyway.
This is where PCs are currently a better option, a mid range tower with an 8700k for around £1300 and 1080 can keep up and surpass the iMac pro is quite a few areas. Even the i7 iMac is 3x more expensive and again doesn't perform as well. The only areas the iMac pro outperforms is in specifically designed apple software but it doesnt cover the whole spectrum anymore.
On the 8700K single core for example its about 25% faster with it being able to be overclocked to 5ghz as a Conservative overclock. Where you can add liquid cooling or have much larger area to increase cooling. The macs cant come close because they are already struggling with base clocks and temperatures.
Obviously you get the screen, but that in itself is still a problem as every time you make an edit in seemingly low power creative areas like photography the screen has to refresh 15mp at 60fps, try it with 50mp raw files its like watching paint dry. This basically makes the machine so slugish, zooming to 100% etc Put the same hardware on a 2k or 1080 screen and its like butter in comparison.
The other thing is that you can get a CUDA card and get optimal performance with many CC programs.
The obvious thing with macs in the day was that the horsepower didn't really matter too much and in some aspects still doesnt like final cut, performs fantastically on every mac in the lineup even a macbook can comfortably edit 4k, on premier... forget it. Apple were always very proud to offer well optimized software but where is it now?
The main issue is where does the compromise stop... its easy to say just ditch CC but its extremely difficult because another cohesive suite of products that are industry standard dont exist. Adobe have the monopoly. Apple has given up making all software bar logic and Final Cut.
So you ditch the platform for the software as with enough power you can get the whole suite to work well. With software all being cloud based it doesn't really matter what platform your using if the software looks and behaves the same... The other thing is that most creatives today are like swiss army knives using multiple different creative programs and its great that they all work together, instead of using stand alone products with completely different UIs.
I ditched the mac for work 2-3 years ago. I still have my 2010 mac pro because I like it... and I have a macbook for media consumption because I enjoy the OS but now use windows for work and I managed to get what I needed to improve speeds, not what apple wanted to offer me.
I firstly built an i7 PC system that was capable of being hackintoshed. I thought best of both worlds, wrong. A hackintosh for work was just a ball ache, every update was a pain and i spent too much time sorting issues. The whole point of a work machine is to be able to get work done quicker so you get more time to spend with the family, messing about in my free time was not ideal.
After that I used windows 10 and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was, my last windows OS was XP which I always found buggy and frustrating which is why I moved to the mac when they moved to intel.
My most recent machine is a twin xeon dell with a quadro and 128gbs of ram which just blazes through everything I throw at it. It has 6 internal bays, space for pci ssds, more ports than I need, more PCIX ports than I can fill and everything is in a box.
There is no BS, no spending £1000 on two external raid enclosures to back up data, no need to spend 3-400 on an EGPU enclosure when I need a new one...
It all goes in the case... which is what I want. I dont want to spend nearly as much on the machine on external options that were always internal. Its solving problems to issues that were never issues.
What I find more mind boggling is apple arent actually making these options themselves so they arent capitalizing by making these options external anyway. So you end up with buggy drivers and products.
Just unacceptable. This is not the apple I grew to rely on. So I moved.
Its going to take a hell of a product to make me want to come back.
Many pros simply dont need server grade hardware. These machines are 9-5 and the i series are excelent these days. Ive had more ECC memory fail than non ECC and havent had trouble with error correction anyway.
This is where PCs are currently a better option, a mid range tower with an 8700k for around £1300 and 1080 can keep up and surpass the iMac pro is quite a few areas. Even the i7 iMac is 3x more expensive and again doesn't perform as well. The only areas the iMac pro outperforms is in specifically designed apple software but it doesnt cover the whole spectrum anymore.
On the 8700K single core for example its about 25% faster with it being able to be overclocked to 5ghz as a Conservative overclock. Where you can add liquid cooling or have much larger area to increase cooling. The macs cant come close because they are already struggling with base clocks and temperatures.
Obviously you get the screen, but that in itself is still a problem as every time you make an edit in seemingly low power creative areas like photography the screen has to refresh 15mp at 60fps, try it with 50mp raw files its like watching paint dry. This basically makes the machine so slugish, zooming to 100% etc Put the same hardware on a 2k or 1080 screen and its like butter in comparison.
The other thing is that you can get a CUDA card and get optimal performance with many CC programs.
The obvious thing with macs in the day was that the horsepower didn't really matter too much and in some aspects still doesnt like final cut, performs fantastically on every mac in the lineup even a macbook can comfortably edit 4k, on premier... forget it. Apple were always very proud to offer well optimized software but where is it now?
The main issue is where does the compromise stop... its easy to say just ditch CC but its extremely difficult because another cohesive suite of products that are industry standard dont exist. Adobe have the monopoly. Apple has given up making all software bar logic and Final Cut.
So you ditch the platform for the software as with enough power you can get the whole suite to work well. With software all being cloud based it doesn't really matter what platform your using if the software looks and behaves the same... The other thing is that most creatives today are like swiss army knives using multiple different creative programs and its great that they all work together, instead of using stand alone products with completely different UIs.
I ditched the mac for work 2-3 years ago. I still have my 2010 mac pro because I like it... and I have a macbook for media consumption because I enjoy the OS but now use windows for work and I managed to get what I needed to improve speeds, not what apple wanted to offer me.
I firstly built an i7 PC system that was capable of being hackintoshed. I thought best of both worlds, wrong. A hackintosh for work was just a ball ache, every update was a pain and i spent too much time sorting issues. The whole point of a work machine is to be able to get work done quicker so you get more time to spend with the family, messing about in my free time was not ideal.
After that I used windows 10 and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was, my last windows OS was XP which I always found buggy and frustrating which is why I moved to the mac when they moved to intel.
My most recent machine is a twin xeon dell with a quadro and 128gbs of ram which just blazes through everything I throw at it. It has 6 internal bays, space for pci ssds, more ports than I need, more PCIX ports than I can fill and everything is in a box.
There is no BS, no spending £1000 on two external raid enclosures to back up data, no need to spend 3-400 on an EGPU enclosure when I need a new one...
It all goes in the case... which is what I want. I dont want to spend nearly as much on the machine on external options that were always internal. Its solving problems to issues that were never issues.
What I find more mind boggling is apple arent actually making these options themselves so they arent capitalizing by making these options external anyway. So you end up with buggy drivers and products.
Just unacceptable. This is not the apple I grew to rely on. So I moved.
Its going to take a hell of a product to make me want to come back.
It could be even worse. They could also make it modular and then "forget" to make any optional modules available.
But we must not have any complaint, it will be a "modular" system...
Might as well just go native Window OS so your hardware choice doesn't get bricked by an Apple update or something. Keeping a Hackintosh running by hacked driver updates to remain compatible takes time and effort. As a small home based business, I don't have the time/money to waste doing those custom mods at each update turn to keep my system running. I'm afraid my real only choice is to go to Windows OS permanently. I'm not leaving Apple, Apple left me years back. They knew they were walking away from the Pro Market.
Im not really sure why but my 2010 mac pro running HS with the 3.46ghz hex with 48gbs ram and a 512 raid 0 PCI SSD benches at 3200 15000, so on paper not bad.
I also have a dell workstation from 2013 rocking W10 2.6ghz hex 48gbs 1tb ssd it benches 2600 15000
https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-precision-t7610-mdt-xeon-e5-2630v2-2-6-ghz-32-gb-1-tb/specs/
You can see here the W3690 is quicker than the E5-2630
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-W3690-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2630-v2
The dell is noticeably faster than the pro in pretty much all aspects of Adobe CC especially programs like lightroom.
I used an RX580 8gb in both and were running on 27" ACD.
Put the mac pro on a 23" ACD and it runs really smooth... 1920x1200 resolution.
Although the dell has a newer generation processor on paper the mac pro shouldn't be slower? Is this a mac OS vs Windows issue? Lightroom seems to run really badly on the mac, tbh ive never had lightroom work smoothly on any mac. All the usual settings have been optimized, previews set to 2048/medium and never to discard 1:1 previews.
Using sliders are very laggy on the pro even moving the exposure slider is like watching paint dry. Zooming to 1:1 is super laggy too.
It used to be the case that there wasnt really much difference between similar machines... but I dont know my experience so far is that CC is faster on windows but not as stable, more crashes.
I also have a newer dell twin xeon which is has no issues at all.
From reading through the threads I thought I would boot up the older back up machines to see what they were like. The dell is acceptable for use today. The mac is very frustrating indeed.
I purchased a base line 5k imac for my dad and that was also a frustrating experience in lightroom I would say its because its having to render 15mp of that display at 60fps every time you move a slider. Yet the 2017 15" macbook pro 2.9 i7 seemed to play pretty well but again a retina is about 2k so probably screen resolution.
The iMac pro even lagged a bit with sliders when I tried it at an apple store... That 5k display has a lot to answer for in terms of performance. Thats the frustrating thing apple dont sell a desktop thats relatively new that you can put your own display on...
Dont know if its a metal/open cl issue or the fact that CC isnt as well optimized for the mac... either way I dont think rocking the 2010 mac pro is feasible anymore.
I also have a dell workstation from 2013 rocking W10 2.6ghz hex 48gbs 1tb ssd it benches 2600 15000
https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-precision-t7610-mdt-xeon-e5-2630v2-2-6-ghz-32-gb-1-tb/specs/
You can see here the W3690 is quicker than the E5-2630
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-W3690-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2630-v2
The dell is noticeably faster than the pro in pretty much all aspects of Adobe CC especially programs like lightroom.
I used an RX580 8gb in both and were running on 27" ACD.
Put the mac pro on a 23" ACD and it runs really smooth... 1920x1200 resolution.
Although the dell has a newer generation processor on paper the mac pro shouldn't be slower? Is this a mac OS vs Windows issue? Lightroom seems to run really badly on the mac, tbh ive never had lightroom work smoothly on any mac. All the usual settings have been optimized, previews set to 2048/medium and never to discard 1:1 previews.
Using sliders are very laggy on the pro even moving the exposure slider is like watching paint dry. Zooming to 1:1 is super laggy too.
It used to be the case that there wasnt really much difference between similar machines... but I dont know my experience so far is that CC is faster on windows but not as stable, more crashes.
I also have a newer dell twin xeon which is has no issues at all.
From reading through the threads I thought I would boot up the older back up machines to see what they were like. The dell is acceptable for use today. The mac is very frustrating indeed.
I purchased a base line 5k imac for my dad and that was also a frustrating experience in lightroom I would say its because its having to render 15mp of that display at 60fps every time you move a slider. Yet the 2017 15" macbook pro 2.9 i7 seemed to play pretty well but again a retina is about 2k so probably screen resolution.
The iMac pro even lagged a bit with sliders when I tried it at an apple store... That 5k display has a lot to answer for in terms of performance. Thats the frustrating thing apple dont sell a desktop thats relatively new that you can put your own display on...
Dont know if its a metal/open cl issue or the fact that CC isnt as well optimized for the mac... either way I dont think rocking the 2010 mac pro is feasible anymore.
Install a windows partition on the same speed drive as macOS on the Mac Pro, and eliminate the newer hardware as the source? If the question means enough to warrant the effort, that is.
Note that the E5 has four memory channels instead of three, with 51 GBps vs 32 GBps. It also has a larger cache (15MiB vs 12MiB) and the AVX instruction extensions. https://ark.intel.com/compare/75790,52586
All this means more "zoom" per Hz, especially for programs that use AVX.
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Take a look at this article and make the right decisions when buying "tools".
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-Classic-CC-Version-7-2-Performance-1110/
That’s the issue of the Mac generally tho isn’t it. Not one of those cpu options are available through Apple. You can only buy what Apple deems satisfactory. On top of that with the thermal envelopes they implement many machines throttle back.
The problem with that article is lightrooms speed is highly dependant on screen resolution and it’s doesnt say what they are using... if it’s a 1080 panel then ye that should be like lightening.
Plus who uses a canon T3I and spends 5k on an editing machine. Grab a 5DSR or a D850 with 50mp and that will give a better idea on what sort of performance we’re talking as they are the two highest pixel dense sensors available is full frame DSLRs.
It’s also all well and good the differences in import and export, making a panos or HDR. The first two are easy to plan around the other two well how many panos does the average user make and HDR although useful isn’t something I would class as a normal image process. In my workflow 1 in 20 might be a hdr.
My main point is the speed of adjustments and the feel of the programe itself. If it’s not fluid and smooth it’s a painful experience. I don’t find the speed of the pro importing exporting difficult it’s the develop module that is.
For example if you zoom to 100% and it take 2 seconds to render the preview and you zoom in only three times per image per edit (which is a very low estimate) and your editing a wedding 500-600 images... that’s an extra hour on your workflow just waiting for a 100% preview to render and be visable.
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If Apple thinks that not offering a modular desktop computer is acceptable in this day and age of incoming AR/VR gaming, they are sadly mistaken. 2019 is a long time to give the market away to the competition.
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In an ironic coincidence, I happened to walk by one of my guys talking with one of our gaming developer contractors, who had just mentioning that he was looking at bringing his personal development PC into work to copy some stuff over; what I heard of their hardware conversation included:
i9 CPU
dual 1TB M.2 SSDs
dual 4K monitors
Reportedly $10K and compiles his Unreal stuff in ~15 minutes while his prior (and work-issued) PC took 80+ minutes. He did note that the R/W cycles on the compiles are rough on the SSDs and that he burns through the provisioning on them, so he replaces them every 12 months.
And of course, when I mentioned Apple, he literally just laughed.