How well will AE run/render on the 27-inch Core i5 & i7 iMac?

[Pat Bray]

Thanks for the quick reply. Do you have to switch AE into multiprocessing mode? If I did on my laptop, would using PS on the side slow it down?

I’m not really a hardware know-all (obviously), its just with HD becoming more popular in graphics, I’m wondering what the best option would be with limited resources! Would you consider using an imac i7 over a mac pro?

cheers,

P

[Pat Bray]

…but with an imac with up to 16GB RAM capacity, it would be beneficial, yes? (I try math but it doesn’t compute 😛 )

[Kevin Camp]

in ae, if you enable multiprocessing and give ae all the resources, then yes running ps will effect the performance. if you limit the resources that ae can use form multiprocessing then you will see fewer problems, but in general i would not plan on using your machine too much while rendering.

as for a difference in processing power between a newer macpro (core i7) and a 2008 8-core one (which i have compared), i found little difference in ae.

the 2009 macpro is 2.26ghz with 16gb of ram, the 2008 is 2.8ghz with 12gb of ram… so clock speed goes to the 2008, but with hyperthreading the 2009 has more theoretical processing power (8×2.8=22.4; 16×2.26=36.16)… however rendering the same comps, i found that the times were the same…

so somewhere along the line, ae is losing about 33% of the potential processing power available to the core i7 mac. and i was finding this on any cpu/ram configuration i could set in the multiprocessing settings… i’m hoping to get more ram to see if 32gb will make a difference, but i really don’t think that 32gb will make up 33% that i seem to be loosing….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW