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MP All Models What is stopping you from using Windows?
- Thread starter Konvictz
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After 20 years on a Mac, I am past thinking about it, I am switching. Unlike a LOT of folks here, I don't have an emotional attachment to my Mac Pro. It is a tool, and nothing more. I jumped from OS/2 to OSX because I needed a new system and it was head and shoulders above Windows XP. That isn't the case in 2019.
Software issues:
I don't have any OSX specific software, so the "walled garden" is more like a fence with multiple doors on each wall. Especially since Tim whacked hardware products that helped build that walled garden (Displays, Time Capsule, Air Express, etc)
Windows 10 is not Windows XP. For that matter, OSX 10.15 isn't 10.6.8, so reliability is a wash. I set up a test Windows 10 box in June. Took me about the same time to learn the ins and outs of Windows 10 that it took me to learn OSX.
I still have 32-bit applications. From what I can tell, there are a LOT of folks here that weren't around for the PowerPC to Intel transition. It took YEARS to make that move, and was a major reason that 10.6.8 hung around as long as it did. If you don't have a lot of software, that may not be a problem, but I do.
By shifting platforms, I don't actually have to replace a lot of what I refer to as "helper" apps. They only do 1 thing, but they do it well. An example is my RSR converter. It converts .rsr files to .png files so a current version of Poser can read them. It is the very definition of 'niche' software. Now, in a perfect world, vendors would have stopped making .rsr files in 2009 or so. Alas, we don't live in a perfect world (and I have way too many digital assets).
I have a bunch of small apps that do what I need. They are not going to be rewritten. Using the software is already in muscle memory, so I don't actually have to waste time learning a multitude of new apps. Sorry, but my time is valuable.
Added bonus: I have access to a LOT more software for my workflow (and what software I already have tends to run better than the OSX version.)
And then there is APFS......
Hardware issues:
Apple no longer sells a reasonably priced HEDT. The problem isn't the price, it is how little you get for the money. The base 7,1 has a $4,500 Apple Tax.
The PowerMacs were reasonably priced (My 1st was a B&W G3), in comparison to it's AMD & Intel bretheren at the time. The 1st 5 generations of the Mac Pro were reasonably priced. The trashcan was judged and found wanting. No internal capacity, and 2 year old video cards on launch day. The price for the 6,1 wasn't an issue - the issue was having to drop almost 50% of the cost of the box on replacing the missing functionality.
The 7,1 is an overpriced and under performing box. It is a collection of obsolete and obsolescent technologies that were DOA on launch day. Specifically:
The CPU is on a dying socket, not to mention that it's IPC is already 10% lower than AMD, today. That number will double this summer with the release of Zen 3.
There are some edge cases where the W-3200 series makes sense (lots o' ram, not too much in the way of cores, high clock speed over IPC - Hi Adobe!). Reminder for folks - take a look at the clock speed of those Xeons when doing AVX-512 encoding/decoding. You are losing, what, 30%?
People who think they are going to get a reasonably priced CPU upgrade via the used market a couple of years from no are kidding themselves. See: 4,1 compatible CPUs on e-bay for the past decade. In addition, The 7,1 socket isn't going to see a 2nd generation of CPUs, so what you see on ARK today is all you will ever see.
The GPUs are on an architecture that is currently 1 generation back (just like the 6,1). As an added bonus, it will be 2 generations back by summer. How much more do you think you will have to pay for an MPX version of NAVI? Not that AMD GPUs are all that much to write home about. OTOH, on windows, I now have access to the Adrenaline drivers (better performance), and I can take advantage of AMD's "Fine Wine" software development. On the Third Hand (as Lt. Arex would say), if I need CUDA, I can just slap an Nvidia card in, and bob's your uncle.
The I/O has already been superseded. It doesn't matter for video cards, but for internal storage, the difference between 3Gb and 5Gb is, well 40%. And keep in mind, PCIe 5.0 will be arriving in 2020 (AMD), and Intel (2021).
The MPX system is much like Thunderbolt - a solution in search of a problem.
The less said about T2, the better.
New hardware just works in windows. Isn't that something.
Software issues:
I don't have any OSX specific software, so the "walled garden" is more like a fence with multiple doors on each wall. Especially since Tim whacked hardware products that helped build that walled garden (Displays, Time Capsule, Air Express, etc)
Windows 10 is not Windows XP. For that matter, OSX 10.15 isn't 10.6.8, so reliability is a wash. I set up a test Windows 10 box in June. Took me about the same time to learn the ins and outs of Windows 10 that it took me to learn OSX.
I still have 32-bit applications. From what I can tell, there are a LOT of folks here that weren't around for the PowerPC to Intel transition. It took YEARS to make that move, and was a major reason that 10.6.8 hung around as long as it did. If you don't have a lot of software, that may not be a problem, but I do.
By shifting platforms, I don't actually have to replace a lot of what I refer to as "helper" apps. They only do 1 thing, but they do it well. An example is my RSR converter. It converts .rsr files to .png files so a current version of Poser can read them. It is the very definition of 'niche' software. Now, in a perfect world, vendors would have stopped making .rsr files in 2009 or so. Alas, we don't live in a perfect world (and I have way too many digital assets).
I have a bunch of small apps that do what I need. They are not going to be rewritten. Using the software is already in muscle memory, so I don't actually have to waste time learning a multitude of new apps. Sorry, but my time is valuable.
Added bonus: I have access to a LOT more software for my workflow (and what software I already have tends to run better than the OSX version.)
And then there is APFS......
Hardware issues:
Apple no longer sells a reasonably priced HEDT. The problem isn't the price, it is how little you get for the money. The base 7,1 has a $4,500 Apple Tax.
The PowerMacs were reasonably priced (My 1st was a B&W G3), in comparison to it's AMD & Intel bretheren at the time. The 1st 5 generations of the Mac Pro were reasonably priced. The trashcan was judged and found wanting. No internal capacity, and 2 year old video cards on launch day. The price for the 6,1 wasn't an issue - the issue was having to drop almost 50% of the cost of the box on replacing the missing functionality.
The 7,1 is an overpriced and under performing box. It is a collection of obsolete and obsolescent technologies that were DOA on launch day. Specifically:
The CPU is on a dying socket, not to mention that it's IPC is already 10% lower than AMD, today. That number will double this summer with the release of Zen 3.
There are some edge cases where the W-3200 series makes sense (lots o' ram, not too much in the way of cores, high clock speed over IPC - Hi Adobe!). Reminder for folks - take a look at the clock speed of those Xeons when doing AVX-512 encoding/decoding. You are losing, what, 30%?
People who think they are going to get a reasonably priced CPU upgrade via the used market a couple of years from no are kidding themselves. See: 4,1 compatible CPUs on e-bay for the past decade. In addition, The 7,1 socket isn't going to see a 2nd generation of CPUs, so what you see on ARK today is all you will ever see.
The GPUs are on an architecture that is currently 1 generation back (just like the 6,1). As an added bonus, it will be 2 generations back by summer. How much more do you think you will have to pay for an MPX version of NAVI? Not that AMD GPUs are all that much to write home about. OTOH, on windows, I now have access to the Adrenaline drivers (better performance), and I can take advantage of AMD's "Fine Wine" software development. On the Third Hand (as Lt. Arex would say), if I need CUDA, I can just slap an Nvidia card in, and bob's your uncle.
The I/O has already been superseded. It doesn't matter for video cards, but for internal storage, the difference between 3Gb and 5Gb is, well 40%. And keep in mind, PCIe 5.0 will be arriving in 2020 (AMD), and Intel (2021).
The MPX system is much like Thunderbolt - a solution in search of a problem.
The less said about T2, the better.
New hardware just works in windows. Isn't that something.
Apple wasn't the first with T2; it's all online forum user hysterics. Windows had it long before, as a combination of Secure Boot and TPM. Apple merely copied these features along with HP's Endpoint Security Controller in a proprietary manner.
NTFS is showing its age and Microsoft seems unable to push ReFS to a consumer level. Linux tried three times for a replacement to the aging ext4, but failed (ReiserFS, ZFS, Btrfs). You make nonspecific complaints about APFS, but Apple is the only company to successfully and transparently deploy a flash-optimized filesystem to general users.
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And it still is a solution in search of a problem. It is great for folks that feel that they need it. For those of us that have no use for it, it is a problem.
Completely disagree. If you know about security, Apple was way behind on firmware security. Apple is behind in security in general.
Firmware attacks have been demonstrated and exploited regularly. PCs have had secure boot for 7 years and hardware-backed encryption via TPM for 10. Even scarier was that Apple has Thunderbolt which was a source of external firmware attacks since day 1.
While Windows was locking keys with hardware encryption and TPM from 2009, Apple leaked entire disk encryption keys in logs from Lion in 2012. It's these types of dumb mistakes that hardware encryption defends against.
Computer security is like having a lock on your front door. Just because nobody tried to open your door doesn't mean the lock isn't needed.
Windows is light-years ahead of Mac security at this point with features like virtualization-based security, lightweight containers, advanced threat protection built-in, etc. These features are Apple's catch-up.
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Even though I'm receiving a Mac Pro 7,1 tomorrow, I actually agree with most of what you said. If you don't need Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro X, or UNIX (WSL on Windows doesn't quite do it for me), I don't really see these machines as being particularly compelling. And having used a Windows 10 workstation for the past three years, I can affirm that the platform has a lot going for it.
Try to have some heavy duty thing like a raytracer and some video encoder running on macOS, using all cores. The UI is still responsive while on Windows it’ll slow down. On Mac I can repeatedly have something Ike Maya open in the background, rendering while I can be fully productive, while on windows you need to make sure that you’re doing nothing else while rendering.
That's odd as Windows remains very responsive when I run compute heavy tasks. I don't see any difference between Windows and macOS.
If anything, I generally find Windows a bit snappier/more responsive than macOS, though the latter seems to be getting better (maybe Metal has something to do with this?).
If a memory blade dies in your shiny 7,1 - what do you do?
If you need more memory on your boot drive - what do you do?
My issue is with putting the NAND controller on the T2 chip.
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you really have a ton of automation freedom and capabilities on windows, automator is largely a kids tool in comparison, personally i like autohotkey.
I did and corrected my post, thank you.
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I think you intended to quote someone else as I did not make the statement you quoted.
Same on any enterprise computer. You bought a service contract for the life of the product, so the vendor ships or shows up the next day on-site with the parts. Enterprise PCs always come with 3 year warranties, the standard life of the product.
Now compare that to getting hit by a ransomware attack. Somebody installs a keylogger, takes your banking info and transfers all the money in your account out. How much does that cost you? Or the film you were working on was taken and uploaded to Bittorrent? How do you fix that by the next business day?
Using Windows 10 for my main computer with AutoCAD and a 2018 Mini as my back up. Been on a Mac since System 7 and Windows since 3.11. Either is fine but I find Windows more productive with Office. Using Mailbird for my email client since I use an iCloud mail address. I think I get a lot more performance for the money spent on the PC side of the world and the OS has been rock solid. YMMV. Ed
I support Windows 10 all day at work. The last thing I want to look at when I’m home is the Windows UI.
who cares what each other thinks, this isn’t even related to Mac’s, go post in the under 15’s forums eh
Same here. I can make the mouse cursor stutter with background rendering. Video playback is affected too in these cases. GPU render tasks also lock up the interface completely in one application until they're done. It's something you can deal with but feels unpolished as hell. Good to have a second machine around in these instances or I might contract a serious coffee addiction instead of continuing to work.
I suspect it has to do with task priority scheduling with Windows's approach slowing down the foreground task too much.
If it's a scheduler problem normally adjusting the process priority works for me on both MacOs and windows
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I suspect it's a resource issue. I regularly transcode files and have no issues doing other tasks at the same time.
Try to figure out why the heck my boot drive is able to access RAM
I second this. I've been using heavy duty 3D and 2D software for Visual Effects on all three major platforms for a total of 23 years. While Linux is popular with the big studios, one thing I constantly run up against is the dreaded death-lock of simply filling up all usable Ram. When that happens you might as well turn off your machine and restart it as it simply stops responding to any user input. (Had this with Fedora at Framestore, CentOS at my current employer and god knows what flavour I was using at Weta and MPC.)
I frequently work on multiple shots at once, running individual instances of Maya, Nuke, a proprietary frame buffer to check render sequences, all separated in multiple workspaces. I constantly have to monitor my Ram usage to make sure its poor memory management doesn't throw me into a bind.
Windows fares better here in that your machine doesn't freeze up for minutes on end, but it still slows down frustratingly when you're have too much on the go running Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop. And don't get me started on the horrible way in which Windows hotkeys work, triggering all sorts of unintended behaviour when you're trying to paint. (That Windows Meta key is infuriating when all you're trying to do is tumble around your 3D model.)
macOS however is leagues ahead. I can just keep throwing stuff at the OS and the system just handles it beautifully. I just don't have to worry about the OS at all, as it should be.
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Just like with Substance Painter and the lovely Windows 10 TDR issue. Windows kills the GPU driver if it thinks your render takes too long, bringing down your Substance Painter session right along with it. Bye bye data. I constantly ran into this on a current project for which I was creating textures in Painter for a large landscape. It was a terrible user experience that ended up costing me a lot of extra time due to having to reload the scene data (10 minutes easily) after another crash.
There is a work-around, but it involves hacking registry keys. Good lord!
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Your experience sounds horrible - especially the Linux one. Didn't realise it had shortcomings like that. Thankfully not something I'd be likely to encounter in my line of work.
Windows Meta Key = I used to remove those from the keyboard. Nowadays I simply remap them to ALT so they don't interfere with viewport nav.
The problem is not the operating system but rather the lack of physical resources required to perform the work. In your example you need more RAM. No OS, not even macOS, can make up for insufficient RAM
