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The Cheese Grater is back
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A bit more PC vs Mac Pro analysis.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-much-mac-pro-cost-as-pc/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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Thanks, Oliver.
After reading the reviews, this workstation is overkill for most.
I’ve been waiting on this to refresh my (day job) departments 2013 Mac Pros.
Most of them for graphics design with some minor stints in MoGraph.
Now for myself, it’s perfect.
Would love to have that for Maya, Resolve, Pro Tools and all NLEs.
But sadly, my day job, the graphics team comes first.
I am hoping there is an in-between model in a tower case next year.
Our nMPs are hanging on for dear life 🙂 -
Loaded iMac Pro or PC. The iMac Pros or even a loaded iMac would be perfect for graphic design. If you want the best performance for AE without breaking the bank, then $4-6K (plus displays) will get you a PC that will outperform the iMP because of Nvidia/CUDA options. We are using iMPs, but a PC with a 2080 card will benchmark much faster.
Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Loaded iMac Pro or PC”
I considered the iMac Pro but the designers gave up one of their Apple displays for a 32″ Dell due to reflection issues.
I don’t think I can convince them to switch to PC at their level.
I for one can use the power but my config would piss off everyone ☺
I def will buy one for my own company but that’ll have to wait till after my renos 😛 -
Get them a loaded Mini with an eGPU Pro ????
Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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I’m happy that Redshift and Octane (primarily used in the motion gfx world) are supporting Metal. But I worry that the new Arnold GPU renderer will become the industry standard in the future for a couple of reasons …
– Arnold’s use is growing rapidly in vfx houses (the heir apparent to V-Ray). Redshift is popping up in a couple of tv vfx shops, but Octane has almost zero presence in vfx. When ramping up for bigger gigs gfx shops often need to hire vfx artists and knowing/using different renderers is often a big, expensive problem. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen an Art Director’s eyes roll back into his head when a freelancer tells him you can’t render a good looking metal logo unless you use V-Ray.)
– The Arnold GPU renderer will have a CPU renderer counterpart – this is actually a more important reason. (Redshift and Octane do not have CPU versions). This limitation has been a big reason VFX houses have been hesitant to incorporate GPU renders. GPU renderers are great at the beginning of a job (look dev, design, refinement, etc.) but typically cause a bottleneck in the last phase of the job when renders need to be at full, final quality. At that point being able to send the render to a massive farm (local or cloud) is often a big deal.
(WETA is a notable exception to this, they wrote a GPU version of their in house CPU renderer to get the best of both worlds a couple of years ago.) -
[Stevan del George] “I’m happy that Redshift and Octane (primarily used in the motion gfx world) are supporting Metal. But I worry that the new Arnold GPU renderer will become the industry standard in the future for a couple of reasons …”
I wouldn’t be so sure. I agree with most of your points regarding the final quality of GPU renders, adoption by large VFX houses and all, but let’s not forget Renderman XPU (using CUDA and Optix). ☺ It’s already one of the most heavily used renderers in the industry, and it has a GPU/CPU workflow that gives artists fast previews while allowing for high quality output to CPU based render farms. I also think that Arnold will face more competition from Redshift (when and if) all of those Solid Angle perpetual licenses expire. For those like me who are not 3DSMax or Maya users, the thought of maintaining an Autodesk subscription for Arnold seems unattractive.
But getting back to the subject of the thread, I plan to keep a close eye on the performance of the new Mac pro. If Redshift using Metal is a LOT faster than Redshift using CUDA, then I’ll have to give Apple serious consideration when looking at my next hardware refresh in three or four years. If OTOH, Arnold is still (mostly) CPU bound and I can still keep my perpetual license current via maintenance, then a Windows based PC will still be the stronger option.
Shawn
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Apple going with Xeon W line bring clear delineation to its product line but at the expense of flexibility. i7/i9 and Gold/Platinum lines clearly compete with the W in terms of performance, often better.
The downside to going with the i9 is lack of ECC memory and 4 less PCIe lanes. I don’t think this is a deal breaker for most unless you are planning a fully loaded 2019 MP to begin with.
2019 MP is about the same price as HP z8G4 but less flexibility.
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[Herb Sevush] “There’s nothing possible about that, it’s definitely the reason. That’s why I spent 1K on my chair, and it’s why hammock breaks are part of my working day. I’ve spent too long working in situations we’re I’m fighting my own gear as I’m fighting the clock, it leads to sleeping on facility couches and rising bleary eyed to unproductive outcomes. I’ve often said that an editor’s best, most creative tool is time spent away from a project, to that I will add a positive working environment.”
I too spent about that on a chair (though used I got it for $600). My chair has lasted 20 years though and will continue to do its job until I retire. Depending of course on the media you’re working with, I just don’t see that the 2019 iMac versus the new Mac Pro will be a definitive difference in life. Sure, if you’re editing RAW multicam. But drive speed is really going to hit you there. And don’t render breaks do exactly what you want? Time away from the machine.
If I look at what frustrates my workflow the most, it’s not processing power. It’s disk speed, it’s NAS weirdness, it’s the machine not doing what it has handled easily previously, it’s software bugs, it’s OS bugs. Maybe when the machine ships and I see what it can actually do, I’ll be convinced otherwise.
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[Herb Sevush] “Which is why I bought the much cheaper UVW line …” what noise, I don’t see any noise.””
Now you can get DVW decks for about the same price as a UVW deck! I know I bought like 3 of them recently for an archiving project. If the deck stopped working, I just plunked down $300 for a different one. I think people are just happy that you paid the shipping to get it out of their house.
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