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New Xeons for next year
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[Craig Seeman] “This is where I expect Jonathan Ive and Apple engineering to do their miracle work. My prognostication but only geeks will get what they’ve done when they release the box. Their approach to cooling will be the kicker.”
Then they better step up their game because their current approach to cooling in the is seriously flawed and problematic.
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“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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Apple was not selling eight-year-old processors six years ago. Until this year, hasn’t Appe offered the best of the current generation of Intel CPUs at each Mac Pro refresh?”
True. I think they have offered the best, I don’t know for sure. They might have offered only an 8 core when a 12 core was available at one time. We can get in to the Apple-not-being-concerned-with-the-speediest-procs-on-the-market conversation again, if you’d like? 😉
For the most part, they offer the newest proc technology until now.
[Walter Soyka] “Apple chose to sit this round out, and I don’t think it’s hard to see why people — long-time customers — who were hoping to upgrade this year might be upset about their options.”
I’m a long time customer. When we buy machines, we buy big, usually fully maxed out. To do that right now, even with cheaper third party updates (RAM hard drives, etc), your’e looking at approaching 10 thousand bucks, times two machines.
The way I look at it, Apple just told me to save 20 grand by not releasing the latest processor. They didn’t kill the MacPro line, so they are keeping that channel open. Tim Cook said something is coming. Without coming out saying that I should wait, they have told me to wait.
[Walter Soyka] “GPU matters way more now to editors than than they did in 2006. GPGPU (general purpose computing on graphics cards) didn’t exist before, so if Apple only offered crummy cards, the only folks who would really notice were 3D artists who could actually benefit from better OpenGL performance. There were a handful of GPU-processing systems in 2006 (this was one of the things I liked best about Motion!), but the majority of video processing was happening on the CPU (and Apple offered competitive CPUs).”
Yes, it matters more if you use certain programs. Not all applications are so dependent on ultra fast and expensive GPUs.
[Walter Soyka] “After Effects does need RAM. Gobs of it. 2-4 GB per CPU core. Without a load of RAM, Ae can’t feed all those sizzle cores fast enough.”
I didn’t say more RAM wouldn’t help, I just said it’s not going to significantly speed up Ae renders. More RAM make Ae run longer (longer RAM previews, et al) not faster.
[Walter Soyka] “You are absolutely right that Ae itself is still largely CPU-oriented, but if you do use the ray-tracer, the speed difference between CPU and GPU is enormous. Also, there are a few really important plugins that leverage the GPU: GenArts Sapphire (CUDA), Video Copilot Optical Flares & Element 3D (OpenGL), Mettle ShapeShifter AE and FreeForm Pro (OpenGL & OpenCL). I have been advising Ae artists to ignore their GPUs for years, but that’s shifting now and I think the importance of the GPU in this context will continue to grow over foreseeable future.”
Yes I pointed out where Ae uses the GPU. The other plugins you mention are GPU enabled, true, but those are plugins, and a few them are almost applications in their own right. If you use those plugins, you’ll want a decent GPU.
We are now reliant on a specific hardware if your application relies on Nvidia.
[Walter Soyka] “You do have additional options available on the PC side, like faster components and better support, but technology change is cross-platform, and your hardware “investments” will depreciate fast no matter what you buy.”
Better support?
Yes, PCs have ALWAYS offered more. Always for ever and ever, that’s what I was saying.
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[Walter Soyka] “With 16 GB for a quad-core, Clint is in fine shape. However, as he adds more CPU cores, he also needs to add more RAM.”
What am I doing wrong? With multiple layers and FX, my playback slows to a crawl in AE. I assumed this was because I was pushing the RAM.
Oh Jeremy, when I purchased the imac I was working mainly in FCP7 with occasional side trips to Color and Motion. I figured an unexpandable system would work fine. However, things have changed (especially when I was able to get the Adobe Production Suite at half price). So stupid me on that one.
P.S. And now –two years after the purchase–I get this scary email from Apple telling me I need to get in and have them replace the faulty seagate hard drive they installed asap. Thank god for time machine.
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[Clint Wardlow] “So stupid me on that one.”
You made the right purchase for the time. That’s not stupid.
[Clint Wardlow] “What am I doing wrong? With multiple layers and FX, my playback slows to a crawl in AE. I assumed this was because I was pushing the RAM.”
This is how Ae works. It is not a real time playback application. What helps is to drop previews to half resolution, or set it to auto resolution and put your canvas at 50% (which effectively halves the resolution). You also need to RAM preview and not “playback”.
This is what I was saying, more RAM here will not make the machine suddenly go faster.
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Thanks Jeremy.
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[Clint Wardlow] “What am I doing wrong? With multiple layers and FX, my playback slows to a crawl in AE. I assumed this was because I was pushing the RAM.”
Ae doesn’t do real-time. You have to do a RAM preview (where Ae renders frames to RAM, then reads them back from RAM for playback). Press the 0 key on your numeric keypad.
The best way to make Ae render faster is to use multi-processing, where Ae takes advantage of multi-core systems by launching multiple instances of the renderer to render multiple frames at the same time. Each instance of the renderer requires its own RAM — and this is what pushes RAM requirements up so high, and why everyone says that RAM is critical to Ae performance. However, Jeremy is correct to note that blindly adding RAM may not improve performance, because RAM usage may not actually be the bottleneck. More on that in a moment.
If you have not already, enable multiprocessing and choose some good settings [link] as a starting point. Optimal settings on the same hardware can actually vary by comp, so I think it’s generally most important to get some decent all-around settings.
Once multi-processing is on, you can watch Activity Monitor while you render to see if there’s a bottleneck. If your CPU usage is high, then you are bottlenecked by the CPU. If your CPU usage is not high, but your RAM usage is high and disk access is low, then you are bottlenecked by RAM. If your CPU usage is not high and your RAM usage is also not high, but your disk access is, you are bottlenecked at I/O.
Adobe has a great page in the help system on improving performance [link], and we field a lot of performance questions over on the COW’s After Effects forum [link]. Bring this topic over that way if you want some more detail.
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
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