Cinema 4D with new Mac Pro (Cylindrical design) vs. older Mac Pro – both 12 core

[Brian Jones]

curious, don’t have one yet but followed some of the thread on CGTalk, where some voices I trust were talking impressive performance, more info please – what is the speed of the ’09 machine and does it support hyperthereading? For the new Mac Pro is it 12 cores physical/24 hyrperthreaded (therefore 2.7 Ghz) or 6 physical cores/12 core hyperthreaded (therefore 3.5 Ghz)?
Is the render something that has extensive single-core calculations first?

[Brian Murphy]

Thanks for the response Brian. Afraid you’re ahead of me on some of these variables.

I can provide this information to you – does this help?…

My 2009-ish 12 Core:

2 x 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
16 GB RAM 1333 MHz DDR3

New Cylindrical Mac Pro:
2.7 Ghz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5
16 GB RAM 1867 MHz DDR3

Both machines show 24 buckets when rendering.

Beyond this, I’ve left the preferences alone for both machines within C4D.

[Brian Jones]

hmm so the old machine is 8.5% faster in Ghz and both are 12 core hyperthreaded. It’s hard to know without knowledge of your test file if it’s likely to get optimal results. Have you run Cinebench on both machines?

[Ryan Paterson]

So you’re running the test on basically 2 identical systems… why would you expect it to be faster? The speed is in the GHZ, not in the model of the chip. Also just a side note you should probably get more RAM. Mac Pro’s are capable of 64GB, there is absolutely no good reason you shouldn’t be taking advantage of that, esp if using for high-end graphics.

Your new mac pro should offer significant speed increases while working within Cinema too, due to the graphics card (depending on which one you opted for). I have a maxed-out cylinder at work, and that thing flies

[Manel Menano]

Actually the new Mac Pro goes to 128gb RAM, but I have 16 and C4D won’t touch more than 3

[Brian Jones]

you are not running a Mac (or you are still running on a 32 bit version of C4D). It’s all 64 bit now so you are running a 32 bit PC OS or an _old_ Mac. 64 bit can take as much memory as you have available.

[Manel Menano]

I am running R16 on Yosemite, indeed it’s 64bit. Maybe I am doing something wrong, I am not experienced. I have tinkered with the memory options but seemed to change nothing..

[Brian Jones]

hmmm…. with 16 and Yosemite you can’t even run C4D in 32 bit mode (which was possible in earlier OS’s). Perhaps you just have not needed more than 3GB? If you take a sphere, make it editable, do a Matrix Extrude (in poly mode), then do a matrix extrude on that, then put the result in a Subdivision Surface that should take something like 2GB copy/paste it 3 times and you should be taking over 4GB (don’t ask me why it’s not linear) or paste it more just for fun.

[Manel Menano]

Thank you! I did as you suggested, pasted it 5 times, got to use a bit over 5gb. It’s better, but there’s still room to improve. Maybe the tasks I have been doing don’t require much ram. The processor is always maxed out though, that’s a good sign.

I have a new Mac Pro with 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory and dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM each. I would upgrade the RAM but I haven’t even tapped to the 16gb I have so it wouldn’t make sense now.

Is there anything wrong with my memory configuration? Maybe it can improve if I tweak it, I’m not sure I understand these settings properly (if I render to picture viewer should I have more RAM for the renderer or for picture viewer?