Upcoming 4k gigs – can a tower mac pro & usb3 or esata cut it or is it only TB land?

[Bryan Roberts]

Thank you so much for your response – then perhaps it’s a CPU upgrade I should be eying since the real benefit to getting a 2013 Mac Pro is TB2 which I don’t really foresee myself needing over an eSata or USB3 raid which would cut it 99.9% of the time. I could upgrade to a 12 core 3.06Ghz setup in my tower for around $1,750 installed with a geekbench score of 28,000. Should that be enough grunt to playback R3D 4K at full res with my gtx 780? Or perhaps at that pricepoint, it’d make more sense to look around for a used RedRocket ~$2k

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[Ericbowen]

None of the software out currently can handle Red 4K at full resolution preview yet. There is just to much latency in the decoding processing for that. The Redcine Pro X version with GPU Debayer can handle it but that’s the only 1 right now. And the Geek bench scores you use don’t completely reflect GPU acceleration and the pipeline. There is still a considerable difference between the 12 Core upgrade you can get with the 2x Xeons and the Xeon E5 2697 V2 12 core. That will still far outperform the platform you have especially with the ram bandwidth which is critical to GPU acceleration. Also there is far more bandwidth available in PCI-E Gen 3 which the 780GTX can use but just is rarely pushed to.

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