Grant Petty on the new MP

[Herb Sevush]

[Andrew Kimery] “Is Apple changing its standars or have some users, over time, moved beyond what Apple likes to offer?”

I like what I like, sometimes Apple has something that fits, sometimes they don’t – it has nothing to do with moving beyond, it’s always been that way for me.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Rick Lang]

Andrew, BMD have already indicated they are getting Resolve 10 tuned for the new Mac Pro via it’s latest iteration of OpenCL. Of course Resolve will run on other systems, but it sounds like it may run best on the new Mac Pro.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Rick Lang]

BMD is certainly stepping up to 4K beginning with content creation in 4K on the BMPC4K camera due to ship in a month or so. That includes 6G SDI 10bit one a single port. Several of their other products have been revealed to already include support for 4K or have recently been announced to offer 4K. I think in the next year or less, several of the key suppliers of video gear will ensure they have their devices handle 4K either through 6G SDI or TB2, I just read the other post that indicates Apple may finally be supporting 10bit natively so that is very good news too. Ten years is a very long time for an architecture, but I believe Apple will stay with their Tube for ten years while continually improving the performance of the guts and interfaces (and likely new calibrated 10bit retina monitors) while third parties feast on providing the plethora of external gear.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Walter Soyka]

[Rick Lang] “Andrew, BMD have already indicated they are getting Resolve 10 tuned for the new Mac Pro via it’s latest iteration of OpenCL. Of course Resolve will run on other systems, but it sounds like it may run best on the new Mac Pro.”

I think you’re reading too much into the Grant Petty quote. I didn’t get the sense that they are actually tuning Resolve for the new Mac Pro, but rather that the new Mac Pro has features that Resolve was already built to use.

Resolve is written to exploit multiple GPUs. Since the new Mac Pro will have multiple GPUs, it will run Resolve well.

A system with more GPU compute ability (better GPUs, more GPUs, or both) will run it better.

Of course, perhaps this could still be a Mac Pro with additional GPUs attached via Son of Thunderbolt, but it could also be, for example, a Windows box stuffed with NVIDIAs.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Rick Lang] “I just read the other post that indicates Apple may finally be supporting 10bit natively so that is very good news too.”

This is how rumors get started!

Lance and I were hoping for 10-bit support in another thread, but if I had been holding my breath for it, I would have passed out years ago.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Rick Lang]

Walter, you are right about the impact of the GPUs. You may be right I am reading too much into his comments but this is the quote from Grant that made me think the tuning to the latest OpenCL was important:
“there is a whole new OpenCL and DaVinci Resolve 10 has had a lot of performance work done to integrate it…”

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Andrew Kimery]

[Rick Lang] “Andrew, BMD have already indicated they are getting Resolve 10 tuned for the new Mac Pro via it’s latest iteration of OpenCL. Of course Resolve will run on other systems, but it sounds like it may run best on the new Mac Pro.”

Better than on a Linux box running 8 top end GPUs? I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Mac Pro will run Resolve better than any other Mac, but Mac performance has always been weaker compared to Windows and Linux installs because of limited GPU options, hasn’t it?

For an off-the-shelf solution the new Mac Pro might be the best option depending on price, of course, and It’s possible that the Mac Pro Tube + Resolve/Resolve Lite represents the sweet spot of performance and accessibility. They won’t be the most screaming fast machines, but screaming fast is already a niche w/in a niche.

[Rick Lang]

Andrew, yes I meant Resolve 10 would run better on the Mac Pro Tube AMD FirePro with the latest OpenCL than any other Mac! Certainly it may not keep up with other platforms but as you suggest, it may be a good option nonetheless. Will be fascinating when the benchmarks appear in about four months.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB