CS6 on Macbook pro

[Shane Ross]

A MacBook Pro doesn’t have a graphics card that will enable the Mercury Engine in PPro. And really, you need that to unlock the power of the app. Without it, editing native formats will be… sluggish. Not as smooth as it can be. HP Laptops with video cards that enable the Engine are much better bets.

[Jason Finnigan] “eventually switch my desktop from my custom bulid six core to a mac pro.. any suggestions?”

The Mac Pro is overdue for an update. Nearly a year. I believe that the writing is on the wall and the Mac Pro will not be updated. In fact, I believe it will be discontinued altogether. I have heard from many reliable sources that have inside information, who are certain the MP will be discontinued. NAB was full of high end apps (Resolve, Smoke) running on iMacs and MacBook Pros. NOT MacPros. So the clues are there. Too many hardware makers embracing Thunderbolt and pushing forward with that format. And that is the connection offered on new iMacs and laptops.

Shane
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[Nevin Styre]

the newly introduced premiere mercury engine support for CS6 on some macbook pros is apparently pretty lousy & doesn’t compare to running it with a CUDA card. Right now windows machines are much cheaper to get good performance out of than mac for CS6 and have way more hardware options.

[Jason Finnigan]

oh, I was under the impression that the opencl performance was suppose to be the same or close to that of CUDA. guess thats adobe marketing

my desktops preformace is great. but my laptop isn’t always..
it’s an Asus G51jx with a unofficially supported NVIDIA GTS 360M (96 Cuda Cores) and a Core i7 Quad core 1.73ghz and 12GB DDR3 ram. I’m not sure if it’s the video card or the slower clock speed on the cpu slowing it down. a HP workstation laptop or a IBM Workstation would be nice, but there expensive.

Thanks,
Jason

[Nevin Styre]

Yeah I was hoping that OpenCL would be just as good as CUDA as I was eventually get a new macbook pro to go alongside my windows tower & replace my aging 2006 MBP, but apparently it’s worse than using just the CPU with just “software” mercury playback(which I wouldn’t want to be stuck with after dropping $2.5k+ on a new laptop).

Considering the price of a decent MBP, HP workstation laptops aren’t priced a whole lot differently, spec wise you probably get more per dollar considering quadro GPU vs ati midrange gaming GPU, looks-wise and formfactor… well yeah they aren’t macbooks.

[Chris Harlan]

[Nevin Styre] “Yeah I was hoping that OpenCL would be just as good as CUDA as I was eventually get a new macbook pro to go alongside my windows tower & replace my aging 2006 MBP, but apparently it’s worse than using just the CPU with just “software” mercury playback(which I wouldn’t want to be stuck with after dropping $2.5k+ on a new laptop).

Considering the price of a decent MBP, HP workstation laptops aren’t priced a whole lot differently, spec wise you probably get more per dollar considering quadro GPU vs ati midrange gaming GPU, looks-wise and formfactor… well yeah they aren’t macbooks.”

FWIW, my Macbook Pro OpenCL playback seems to be improving, and I know they are working hard to get the rest of the bugs out. But even with Software only playback, I’m getting very decent results. I’m happily cutting away with ProResHQ 1080@25. I was a bit worried, but playback seems just fine. Very snappy response.

I’ll install it on my 8 Core tomorrow and see where that leads.