nMP for After Effects and CD4

[Sinx2oic]

It's finally released!

Seems like I have been waiting for this day for ages. My girlfriend thinks I'm so geeky to get excited about a computer but it's the tool
that earns a lot of the money we live off!. I usually upgrade every 3/4 years and have always bought the top spec model. I currently
run a (2009) 2.93 8 core with solid state drives and a superclocked 680 with two 27" NEC monitors.

Even though I have had a long time to decide which nMP to invest in I still can't make up my mind. I am mainly a After Effects animator
with a bit of Cinema 4D. You can see what kind of work I do here www.stusinclair.com I am lucky enough to have enough cash saved
up to get the 12 core with all the bells and whistles, but does that make the most sense?

When people receive these machines I cant wait to see the benchmarks for After Effects! I'm trying to decide between:

6 core = Hi clock speed, much cheaper, but going backwards in core count to what I have.
8 core = Quite a bit more money for 2 cores and a considerably slower clock speed but still turbo boost of 3.9
12 core = Would be great for CD4 and would be good for multiple processor in AE but even slower clock / slower Turbo boost and expensive.

I think its between the 6 or 12 core, I guess I'm wondering what will be more beneficial, fast clock speed or more cores. As AE likes both!

I'm not worried about CUDA in AE as I never found it useful at all except Element 3D. AE CC already supports open CL also I do game,
so will def get the D700 and it will be great for CD4.

If you use AE a lot which nMP will you get and why?

 

[DJenkins]

The 12 core mac pro will be about 1.85x better than you current rig.

That's quite a decent improvement in your case, however your machine and the 2012 mac pro can be upgraded to provide almost the same rendering results - (swapping for 2x 6 core X5690 CPUs).

As far as after effects goes there's barely any improvement on CPU based rendering. Now Adobe may choose to integrate GPU rendering further down the line but who knows - they took up nvidia CUDA based rendering not that long ago and the new mac pro uses AMD GPUs.

Adobe and Apple as companies don't play incredibly nice together and as far as I can remember in all Adobe marketing material in the last few years they have focused around PCs.

You know AE soaks up CPU cores - for a bit more money you can configure a 16 core HP workstation with similar specs and get about 30% more CPU power than the maxed 12 core mac pro.

It can be a lot to think about and the new mac pro really is quite impressive but there may be smarter ways to spend your big $$

 

[Sinx2oic]

Yea to be honest I had not considered "swapping for 2x 6 core X5690 CPUs"
Definitely worth a thinking about. I am aware that adobe and Apple are not best friends but was thinking the D700 would be good for CD4 and gaming and fingers crossed in the future AE. As for the '16 core HP workstation" I know I could get better value for money with some PC's but I really can't stand windows. I will have a good think and wait for AE benchmarks. I got a lot of freelance jobs on at the mo and I reckon the 12 core could pay for itself in about a months worth of work. Do you think the next mac pro after this one would go to a 16 core because my other option would be to wait another year (I have gotten quite use to it!)

In the Uk a maxed out 12 core come to £7,779.00 which is a lot of cash then I would also need to buy a raid set up so.

Anyway thanks for the response, I will keep thinking about it

 

[DJenkins]

Do you think the next mac pro after this one would go to a 16 core because my other option would be to wait another year (I have gotten quite use to it!)

Well this new mac pro has cut the number of actual CPUs inside back to just one. All other workstations are holding two CPUs in there - hence the capability of 16 and even up to 24 cores. It's possible to have a PC with TWO of the exact same CPUs as in the new mac pro - yes that's double the CPU performance of the new mac pro - but at quite a cost to your wallet

Anyway you've obviously stated you wanna stick with mac and that's fine. You've got real work to carry on with so I wouldn't recommend building a hackintosh unless you're really interested in learning things of that nature as a new skillset.

You could jump on the new mac pro, but keep your old mac pro maybe upgrade the processors, then pair it up as a net render machine for a killer C4D rig