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Home built PC but not really quite equivalent to new Mac Pro
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[Shawn Miller] “I think you’re pointing more to software optimization”
Oh, I completely agree, which is why I think there IS a “secret sauce” as it applies to the Mac Pros and Apple software, particularly the ProApps tools. I doubt you’ll see a similar edge with Adobe or Avid. There, a comparably-spec’ed machine will likely yield similar results.
[Shawn Miller] ” It might also be worth noting that many VFX and 3D artists prefer PCs for the same reason.”
Agreed.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Herb Sevush] “The main thing keeping me on the Mac side of the fence is the ubiquity of ProRes deliverables. Many editors I’ve talked with working with either PPro or Adobe claim that they work better on the PC side.”
I totally understand. FWIW – I just spent a week working PPro CS6 on brand new, high-end Dells. Overall, it felt like performance was better on my 4-year-old Mac Pro with either CS6 or CC.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Herb Sevush] ” all they have to do is whistle.”
I heard the new MacPros were actually very quiet
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
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[Steve Connor] “Well it appears the CPU CAN be upgraded https://www.macrumors.com/2013/12/27/new-mac-pro-confirmed-to-have-removable...”
The CPUs on Mac Pros have always been replaceable, AFAIK, but it’s a very rare bird that actually voids their warranty, drops the money for a new CPU and does it. I used to built PCs as a hobby but I never seriously tinkered with my Macs because if you screw up, the spare parts are either insanely expensive or difficult to come by.
If you mess up replacing the CPU and damage the board on a PC it’s not a big deal. Just buy a new mobo and drop it in. Do that on a Mac, especially a Tube that’s all non-standard parts, and yer hosed.
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[Andrew Kimery] “The CPUs on Mac Pros have always been replaceable, “
I recently had my 2009 MP in the shop. The Genius techs inadvertantly damaged one of the Xeons during the diagnostics. They owned up to it and ate the repair cost. You basically swap one of the Xeons in the mobo socket. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it, but had it been it charged, that would have run about $400 (parts). The hitch was quick availability, especially at a time when the repair stock for MP towers is most likely being diminished in favor or MP “tube” parts.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Herb Sevush] “I’m not monogamous when it comes to operating systems – I can be had, all they have to do is whistle.”
To steal from Lauren Bacall, “You know how to whistle don’t you. You just put your GPUs together and blow”
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[Oliver Peters] “You basically swap one of the Xeons in the mobo socket. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it, but had it been it charged, that would have run about $400 (parts). The hitch was quick availability, especially at a time when the repair stock for MP towers is most likely being diminished in favor or MP “tube” parts.”
Since the CPUs are regular Intel parts (as opposed to the MP’s daughter card, for example) I’m sure that helps keep the costs down, but that’s still $400 for 4 year old CPU.
I guess I just don’t see many people saving money now by buying a quad-core Tube w/the intention of upgrading it to an 8 or 12 core 2 to 4 years down the road. You also never know what little tweaks here and customer firmware there Apple is going to do each revision that could throw a monkey wrench in your upgrade plans. The use of standardized parts plus the pretty much open book roadmap of parts suppliers makes tinkering and future upgrade planning much easier on the PC side of things than on the Mac.
Aside from the standard upgrades like RAM, HDD and occasionally a GFX card I pretty much treat my Macs as appliances. I depend on them for income on a daily basis and don’t want to deal with the trial and error that’s inherent in getting under the hood. On a hobby machine? Sure, but not on my work machines.
If I used PCs for work I’d probably approach it the same way though it would be easier to build a pair of matching (or close enough to matching) PCs and have one for work and the other for testing than it would be have a pair of matching Mac Pros.
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[Oliver Peters] “Based on what information?”
Based on the fact that people can only say it’s “optimized” without bringing out any specifics.
If you have specific information on how the actual hardware is faster, then it’s just noise.
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[Oliver Peters] ”
Oh, I completely agree, which is why I think there IS a “secret sauce” as it applies to the Mac Pros and Apple software, particularly the ProApps tools. I doubt you’ll see a similar edge with Adobe or Avid. There, a comparably-spec’ed machine will likely yield similar results.”The “secret sauce” is that Apple engineers apparently spend time making sure the GUI elements are optimized in clever ways. Kind of like how in iOS, when you swipe the home screen, it animates a screenshot of the icons as opposed to actually moving the actual icons.
In my experience, rendering times is an empirical benchmark of performance, not some hogwish “feels more fluid” that can’t be expressed as a metric. And you said yourself that render times tended to either be equal to, or even favored by, Windows boxes.
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[Gary Huff] “In my experience, rendering times is an empirical benchmark of performance, not some hogwish “feels more fluid” that can’t be expressed as a metric. And you said yourself that render times tended to either be equal to, or even favored by, Windows boxes.”
True about renders, when you look at some cross-platform apps, like AE, Media Composer or Premiere. Yet, I can set up equal render situations in AE and Motion, and the latter blows away AE for render performance.
However, very little that I care about in editing has anything to do with rendering times. Part of a fast and efficient edit session is how the system “feels” to the editor. That’s the same sort of intangible as how a swipe feels on an iPad versus an Android tablet. Very hard to quantify. Bothers some folks and not others, but it does translate into why one machine or OS is better than another to a user.
Along those same lines, FCP X 10.1 loads faster and performs “more fluidly” on the same 2009 Mac Pro with 10.9.1 than FCP X 10.0.9 under 10.8.5. Can I quantity it? No. Is it real? Yes.
I’m not sure why you are challenging the concept of optimization. You aren’t going to get any specifics on what optimization means, because Apple tends to keep that to themselves. Some of that comes in Mavericks changes, such as how background OS functions are now cached, in order to make more CPU cycles available to open programs while they are working. That’s an under-the-hood OS change. For that matter, we also don’t have any specifics about what all goes into Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine optimization, but it’s sure far more than just CUDA or OpenCL acceleration.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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