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Mac Pro – arstechnica Review
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[Frank Gothmann] “It used to work just fine. Not anymore. Previous versions of Qmaster could hand AE render jobs to clusters and other machines. In the latest version of Compressor (and Qmaster) Apple have killed all that functionality. It’s gone. You now would need a seperate render manager (such as Squid etc.).”
Did you actually have Qmaster driving Ae? I’ve seen lots of people talk about it in theory, but I haven’t seen anyone ever actually do it in practice.
You’d have to write quite a lot of support for Qmaster yourself to compete with a commercial render manager anyway: in-app submission, progress reporting, dynamic load adjustment, scheduling, prioritization, notifications…
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] “[Frank Gothmann] “It used to work just fine. Not anymore. Previous versions of Qmaster could hand AE render jobs to clusters and other machines. In the latest version of Compressor (and Qmaster) Apple have killed all that functionality. It’s gone. You now would need a seperate render manager (such as Squid etc.).”
Did you actually have Qmaster driving Ae? I’ve seen lots of people talk about it in theory, but I haven’t seen anyone ever actually do it in practice.
You’d have to write quite a lot of support for Qmaster yourself to compete with a commercial render manager anyway: in-app submission, progress reporting, dynamic load adjustment, scheduling, prioritization, notifications…
“I have done it quite often in the past for certain jobs that were simple but render intensive. eg. 90 Minute feature with certain filters applied that needed to go out as DPX.
It wasn’t as full-featured a render manager and as advanced as other solutions but it was helpful on certain jobs, especially if one doesn’t have the need for a full-on render farm (which doesn’t make sense on Mac hardware anyway).——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
On the GPUs, there’s a good comment (first, I think), from user InfernoBlade challenging the popular characterization of Apple’s D-branded GPUs as FirePros; he claims they’re better described as Radeons (cheaper by almost an order of magnitude):
“Apple’s D-branded FirePros are actually Radeons, not FirePros. They don’t have the ECC memory enabled that is fairly key to FirePro vs Radeon with extra RAM, and oddly enough, they do have CFX support which the FirePros don’t.
6 GB GDDR5 Radeon 7970s don’t actually exist, but that’s what a FirePro D700 actually is, and the 3 GB variants are $300 cards now (well, when the miners haven’t bought all of them).
I don’t actually think the Mac Pro is an expensive unit, not with the PCIe SSD and Xeon E5 CPU stuffed in it. But pointing at $3400 GPUs that have ECC memory and top-end qualification isn’t really fair, not when Apple’s shipping $400-500 GPUs with the wrong label on them since OS X’s drivers have never actually cared about the ECC RAM and other FirePro/Quadro features. The W9000 is a very expensive part because of the niche features like ECC RAM in it.”
I don’t have enough knowledge to follow the comparison (thus posting here for comment), but if accurate it’s another bit of interesting marketing.
Franz.
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We have discussed the ECC RAM thing a bit here. Here’s a reference from back in June:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/55178The Radeon HD 7990 is spec’ed for 6GB of RAM:
https://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7990/pages/radeon-7990.aspxI guess they’re FirePros if AMD says they are, whether or not the match the specs of the other FirePros. The certfied drivers and the capabilities they bring are probably a bigger differentiator of pro vs. consumer GPU than the RAM is.
However, I’d argue that in this context, the name is just marketing anyway. Using these systems for GPGPU instead of traditional graphics processing blurs the pro/consumer line considerably.
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 -
I think they are identified as Radeon 7970’s or R9280X under Windows which is normal consumer grade cards, given they do have 6GB VRAM. It’s a marketing gimmick I’d say. And it’s a bit sad the MacPro got stuck with a 2 year old card even if they boosted it with 6GB VRAM. The R2 290X would be quite a bit more powerful but they might be running on the hot side for the small case.
Not bad cards but lower-high end consumer cards with boosted VRAM.
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[Walter Soyka] “I guess they’re FirePros if AMD says they are, whether or not the match the specs of the other FirePros. … However, I’d argue that in this context, the name is just marketing anyway.”
Walter,
Yes, it’s just interesting to me that they’ve successfully generated a certain perception of the hardware, centred around the “FirePro” branding (before any specs were even known), and continuing even now.
June speculation:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/55178December effect:
[Nicholas Zimmerman] “The new rumors seem to be pointing to only $600 for the D700 upgrade, which assuming this meant both cards would be only $300 per card. The PC equivalent of this card is $3,500 and Tim Cook really focused on how good of a deal Apple got from AMD on these cards.”
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/62694#62694Another topic: did you read (at arstechnica) the discussion of OpenCL and Apple’s support?
Franz.
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I gotta say I’m getting more and more disappointed with the new Mac Pro, I was playing with one at the Apple Store the other day, my first impression was WOW!!!, a minute after I was meh…
I’m starting to get really pissed at Apple’s design over function direction, I can’t believe I got to a point where a HP Z820 looks incredible sexy to me, if only they’d open OS X…
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[Erik Lindahl] “I think they are identified as Radeon 7970’s or R9280X under Windows which is normal consumer grade cards, given they do have 6GB VRAM. It’s a marketing gimmick I’d say. And it’s a bit sad the MacPro got stuck with a 2 year old card even if they boosted it with 6GB VRAM. The R2 290X would be quite a bit more powerful but they might be running on the hot side for the small case.
Not bad cards but lower-high end consumer cards with boosted VRAM.”
What is even more weird is if you look at the iFixit teardown the 2 D300 cards were different in that they were manufactured in two different East Asian countries. Seemingly, part of this is due to the SSD connection.
I don’t really care if it’s labeled Pro or has sizzle juice, or whatever. I have read enough Barefeats reports to know that marketing, in the GPU sense, bends the rules even more so than Apple.
You can pay a lot of money for a “professional level” card, or buy a “gamer” level card for pennies on the dollar and get just as good, if not better performance.
Does the MacPro work well against a myriad of uses? That’s the only thing I really need to know.
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[Gustavo Bermudas] “I gotta say I’m getting more and more disappointed with the new Mac Pro, I was playing with one at the Apple Store the other day, my first impression was WOW!!!, a minute after I was meh…”
What did you expect and how were those expectations not met? How do you go from wow to meh in 60 seconds? Just curious.
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Which is why I want to see someone do a Red Cine X export out of both an iMac with the 780M 4GB vs these.
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