about to buy new Nehalem mac pro 8 core 16g for AE – any performance issues?

[Kevin Camp]

you might want to check out these benchmarks and the commentary just after the graphs which talks about is it worth it….

according to these benchmarks (and apple’s graphs too) the 8-core 2.26 with 12gb of ram is faster than the older 8-core 2.8 with 16gb of ram, but by less than 15% on the ae benchmark, but you may be able to find an older 2.8 for half the price.

the rumors are that the next version of osx will work even better with hyper threading so that may push the newer macs further above the previous models, but that os isn’t due until late summer.

as far as using all your ram for previews… ae is only a 32-bit application. as such it can only address 3gb of ram (4gb with a 64-bit windows os). so you may not get much longer ram previews until ae goes 64-bit. but ae can use more ram for rendering with multiprocessing turned on (up to 3.5gb per core on a mac, nearly 4gb per core on windows).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

also, about the disk cache… the main thing you want when you enable disk caching, is that the disk cache is on a separate drive bus than your media. so if you have an external drive for your media, then you can set you main (boot) drive for the disk cache.

you could try to improve performance further by choosing a drive that has better performance with small random reads/writes as your bot drive. check out some recent benchmarks here.

one other thing i just saw, you can get 8gb of free ram if you order your mac by clicking the march 19 quicklink here.

(i honestly don’t work for barefeats.com… i just find his testing useful)

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Howard Rush]

Thanks for your response. I have read a lot of your threads/posts on these forums and they have been very helpful!

Anyways, I have couple questions again. First, I thought I read here on this forum that AE only uses half the memory of the computer when processing RAM Previews opposed to most of the memory when rendering to final output for clips/movies. So if I have 2gigs of ram on my 32 bit or 64 bit OS, AE only uses 1gig of memory to process the frames when doing a RAM preview? Does AE treat RAM Previews and Rendering to final output for clips differently when it comes to using the computers memory?

Secondly, can you explain what the difference is between normal drives and drives that have better performance with small random reads/writes? Also, for the performance to improve using these drives, the drive has to be used as the boot drive where my OS is stored in correct? Im talking about improving AE’s performance.

Last question, what monitors do you use when doing AE work? I didnt buy the apple displays because it was the reflective glass panel. why doesnt apple make the matted ones anymore??? anyways, I have been looking everywhere on the net, and I cant seem to find anything that stands out when doing work on AE.

Thanks,
Howard

[Kevin Camp]

[howard rush] ” AE only uses half the memory of the computer when processing RAM Previews opposed to most of the memory when rendering to final output for clips/movies. So if I have 2gigs of ram on my 32 bit or 64 bit OS, AE only uses 1gig of memory to process the frames when doing a RAM preview?”

how much ram is used for previews vs rendering in cs3 is determined by the max ram cache setting… the cache size % is basically the amount of ram that ae will use for the ram preview. the default is 60%, so if you have 2gb of ram, 1.2gb will be used for the ram preview. the max amount of ram that ae can use for the foreground application on a mac is 3gb, regardless of how much ram may be installed in your machine. so your ram previews may not get much longer with more than 3gb of ram…

[howard rush] “can you explain what the difference is between normal drives and drives that have better performance with small random reads/writes? Also, for the performance to improve using these drives, the drive has to be used as the boot drive where my OS is stored in correct?”

some drives just have better sustained read speeds, some have better sustained write speeds, others have better small random read/write speeds… it just based on designs of the drives by different manufactures. generally speaking, if you had a choice, a drive that had good small read/write speeds will make a better boot drive and cache drive, since it will be making lots of smaller reads/writes quite often. where as a drive that performs better for sustained reads/writes would be better for capturing/playing media files.

i wouldn’t say that real world performance is night and day between drives, but if you were trying to decide between a couple of different drive options you could try to use data on the read/write speeds to help make a decision.

but you’ll get much better performance in ae if you can keep your media on a separate drive bus than your disk cache… so typically, you’ll want your media on an external drive (using an external sata2 card and drive, or even a firewire drive) and then use the internal sata2 drive and bus for your cache drive. you could have a separate internal drive for the cache, but i don’t think you’ll see that big of a performance increase compared to using just the boot drive (main drive with os and applications).

[howard rush] “what monitors do you use when doing AE work? I didnt buy the apple displays because it was the reflective glass panel. why doesnt apple make the matted ones anymore???”

i can’t help a lot on that one… i have older matte aluminum apple displays, i like ’em just fine but i haven’t used any of the glossy displays… i have heard good things about some of the dell displays. you might search for some info on dell monitors to get feedback on use for video effects/editing….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW