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Mac Pro – arstechnica Review
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[Jeremy Garchow] “What did you expect and how were those expectations not met? How do you go from wow to meh in 60 seconds? Just curious.”
Form factor, of course you can’t get a good test in the Apple Store, I guess I bought into the new form hype, but after a minute next to it, it really felt like a trash can, hard to explain…
But I’ve been following up the reviews, specially the one that did the guys at liftgammagain, and the conclusion seems to be that it barely outperform a 2012 12 core, if it does at all, and RED 4K debayering in real time is a myth, you still a RED Rocket card, and good luck with this new mac, PCI-e over thunderbolt has a cap on the speed as well, so it’s not the perfect solution, or the “Most expandable Mac ever” as Tim Cook said. -
More discussion of GPUs, commenter Haravikk (page 4 of arstech):
“Re: Apple’s D-branded FirePros are actually Radeons, not FirePros
I’m not sure this is true; just because they don’t have ECC enabled doesn’t mean they’re not FirePros. … and besides which it’s not really a feature that most people need anyway.
I don’t know if anyone’s actually looked to see if the Apple FirePros have other FirePro specific features yet? Anandtech don’t go into things like 30-bit colour output (10-bit per channel, consumer cards can process this but won’t output it), Order Independent Transparency under OpenGL, ECC for onboard cache memory, EDC for memory bus protection, and various other FirePro only features.
Even if feature wise these cards are closer to Radeons than FirePros, they should still be rated for 24/7 workloads, which is most important of all.”
(Note this is mostly out of my league of understanding, so again, posting for comment)
But as a general perspective, there’s also this on Anantech, which seems to concur (though in less harsh terms) with the arstechnica conclusions:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/9“Since Final Cut Pro 10.1 appears to be a flagship app for the Mac Pro’s CPU + GPU configuration, … Final Cut Pro’s division of labor between CPU and GPUs exemplifies what you’ll need to see happen across the board if you want big performance gains going forward. … your applications will have to take advantage of GPU computing to get significant speedups. … A huge portion of my workflow in Final Cut Pro is still CPU bound, the GPU is used to accelerate certain components within the application. You need the best of both to build good, high performance systems going forward.”
Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “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.”
Yes, true — but this goes far beyond the GPU. The reality distortion field is very strong. The 4K marketing has lead many people who ought to know better that the Mac Pro hardware has some kind of “special sauce” that makes it superior to offerings on the PC side due to hardware alone.
Notably, Grant Petty’s comment “this is the Mac we’ve been waiting for” has been taken by many as “this is the computer we’ve been waiting for,” suggesting that the 2013 Mac Pro is the pinnacle of Resolve performance (which it is not).
Further, The Foundry’s Jack Greasly’s comment that the Mac Pro is the best “out of the box” computer they’ve seen for Mari has also been twisted, with folks thinking that the Mac Pro is the best system available for Mari performance and further extending this to include NUKE (of which I don’t believe any mention has been made).
I think the Mac Pro is notable for three things:
1) Form factor. That thing is small.
2) PCIe flash storage standard.
3) Dual GPUs standard.
Items 2 and 3 from my list have been options on other systems for years, but the fact that they come standard (and in fact, that there are no mechanical HDD or single-GPU configs) is a big deal.
I think it’s a pretty promising system — especially for its form factor — but people are buying into the marketing and falsely assuming that the Mac Pro hardware is unparalleled.
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 -
Looking at the whole system, Mac Pro + FCPX, is important and worthwhile. Replying to myself, I will add that FCPX’s raw performance (not counting workflow strengths or weaknesses, which vary according to situation and which may be significant) is impressive. Curiously, though, the Barefeats benchmarks suggest that FCPX is leaving a lot of performance capability on the table.
But again, a lot of this is marketing. Premiere has impressive performance, too. And if you really want to see a system fly, Mistika and/or Mamba FX is most impressive as well. Motion estimation-driven effects in real time have to be seen to be believed.
Bringing this back to the Mac Pro, recent tests and articles like these show that what was true a year ago is still true today: balanced systems are important. Having one or two outrageously overpowered subsystems will be a waste when the system as a whole bottlenecks on the relatively underpowered subsystem.
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 -
[Gustavo Bermudas] “But I’ve been following up the reviews, specially the one that did the guys at liftgammagain, and the conclusion seems to be that it barely outperform a 2012 12 core,”
In what sense?
[Gustavo Bermudas] ” and RED 4K debayering in real time is a myth, you still a RED Rocket card, and good luck with this new mac, PCI-e over thunderbolt has a cap on the speed as well, so it’s not the perfect solution, or the “Most expandable Mac ever” as Tim Cook said.”
So, the verdict is that on older MacPros you needed a RedRocket card, and the same is true on new MacPros? What PC’s can debayer Red 4k in real time, and how much do they cost? Do they cost more than a Tube with a Rocket card? How about a laptop and a Rocket card? How about the lowest end Tube and a rocket card?
I can playback RedOne material, in real time (lower quality selected), on my laptop that is running off battery, and send an image an sound via AppleTV. Granted, I am not doing anything critical in terms of quality, but I am editing and making decisions which is not trivial. So, performance and capability is subjective. If you need a QuadGPU real time machine, the MacPro Tube isn’t for you, and arguably neither was the old MacPro.
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “So, the verdict is that on older MacPros you needed a RedRocket card, and the same is true on new MacPros? What PC’s can debayer Red 4k in real time, and how much do they cost? Do they cost more than a Tube with a Rocket card? How about a laptop and a Rocket card? How about the lowest end Tube and a rocket card”
Where are you going to plug that card, specially the new Red Recket X coming? You need a computer with PCI-e x16 slots…, and if you think you can get a thunderbolt to pci-e adapter you can, but thunderbolt 2 speed limit is 20 gbps, PCI-e x16 is 80, so with a thunderbolt 2 to pci-e you can use but at a quarter of its capabilities
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[Gustavo Bermudas] “Where are you going to plug that card, specially the new Red Recket X coming? You need a computer with PCI-e x16 slots…, and if you think you can get a thunderbolt to pci-e adapter you can, but thunderbolt 2 speed limit is 20 gbps, PCI-e x16 is 80, so with a thunderbolt 2 to pci-e you can use but at a quarter of its capabilities”
A thunderbolt based PCIe extender, just like all PCIe cards.
Or something like this: https://www.maxxdigital.com/mobile-thunderbolt-redrocket.html
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[Jeremy Garchow] “A thunderbolt based PCIe extender, just like all PCIe cards.”
Serioulsy??? Didn’t you read anything I just said? Thunderbolt is 4X slower than PCI-e X16!!! You cant plug high performance cards like a RED Rocket X in it
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I did. You will see from that link that a red rocket card can debayer 4k in real time over thunderbolt one.
Look, I know a thunderbolt is not the end-all-be-all. It’s not.
But I do think that we have to take a look at what is truly possible instead of spouting theoretical speed stats.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “But I do think that we have to take a look at what is truly possible instead of spouting theoretical speed stats.”
It’s not theoretical stats, it’s math, you have a device that requires a transfer speed of 80gbps and you put it on one that transfers at 10. Now,I don’t know of the top of my head the speed of the Red Rocket, but with 5K and Dragon, Red Rocket X is what’s going to be, and that needs speed. The only way I can see that working in a TB environment is if someone figures out how to raid TB ports, meaning you get 4 TB2 ports to act as one giving you 80gpbs.
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