will the iMac 5K Retina’s AMD Radeon graphics card be a problem for Premiere Pro CC and AE???

[Steve Connor]

I don’t know about the iMac but PPro works very well with the Radeon card in my 2008 Mac Pro

[Tal Mor]

Thanks Steve. I’m more interested in either the new MacPro or the iMac27 5k Retina.
However, I keep reading in forums that pro users are experiencing crashes and performance issues, mainly due to the AMD GPU. However, most of what I read is from several months ago (including this thread), and I’m interested in hearing fresh experiences from a pro user (AE, Pr cc2014, 4k, Effects etc..) Thanks.

[Keith Golinski]

Well we just received our 5K iMac two weeks ago and use CC and I can tell you that I am completely underwhelmed by the performance. Coming from my 17″ Macbook Pro I’ve noticed only minor improvement in rendering and performance. The screen looks amazing. The color representation is beautiful. I feel confident color grading from this screen but the overall performance is way slower than expected. Pro Res 4K 422 with 2 layers of color effects needs to render forever. Not something I wanted to see and not happy with the length of time Adobe is taking to address this issue as I know I’m not the only one that expected the software to just work. It takes over ten minutes to render a 30sec spot and we’re planning on cutting our next feature on this thing shot in 4K.

I’ve tried every configuration even using only software render and that just doesn’t work at all.
Am I missing something here? I’m not editing in h.264 but it sure feels like it.

Not holding my breath for El Capitain either. 10X render improvements, should have just stuck with my laptop.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB

keith@fulvew.com

[Jon Huseby]

Keith, I´ve had the exact same problem with CC on that machine. Only that I was editing in 1080p!!! Ridiculously slow and poor performance.

I spoke to the Adobe customer service, they said in mid June that a patch from Adobe would solve this problem / bug. Nothing yet from them, I´m concidering returning the Retina and get the iMac 27″ with NVIDIA graphic card.

What kind of graphic card did your laptop have?

Jon

[Chris Theriault]

I am looking at this computer

27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display
Hardware

4.0GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz
32GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 4x8GB
1TB Flash Storage
AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB GDDR5

and would like to know if any of the issues have been resolved. I’m a bit concerned by what I’ve read, but see it’s a pretty old thread! Thanks

[Bernard Mann]

Hi there.

With all the discussion about the slowness of the 5k iMac, or that it works fine, which would you say to go with of these two if you have only these two to choose from – the 5k 27″ iMac (The AMD is 2 or 4), or the regular 27″ iMac w/NVIDIA, but only 1gig of GPU.

Thanks

Bmann

[Karen Yarosky]

I have been struggling with the decision on what to buy to start editing an indie doc I am making and this forum seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel. I do not think I will be doing any fancy graphics but want to buy a machine that will work efficiently and not choke on my material. I have been talking with many editors, Apple retailers and post production folks and everyone has a different answer for me. Basically my question is this: Will this iMac be powerful enough for me: (21,5 inch iMac) 3.1GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz , 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2X8GB , 256GB Flash Storage , NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1GB GDDR5 OR do I really need to boost up to a stronger graphics card and buy the 27″ retina iMac: 4.0GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz , 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x8GB , 256GB Flash Storage , AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2GB GDDR5. I actually do not care about the retina screen but you are forced to buy this if you want i7 (otherwise you only get i5). Do you think NVIDIA 1GB will do the trick? Cutting on Premiere Pro …. Thanks …

[Andrew Kimery]

I would definitely go with the 2gig card as it will give the machine a much longer life (I think 1gig is the minimum right now).

[Karen Yarosky]

Thanks so much for your info – excuse my ignorance – but when you say 1 gig is the minimum .. the minimum for what?

[Andrew Kimery]

[Karen Yarosky] “Thanks so much for your info – excuse my ignorance – but when you say 1 gig is the minimum .. the minimum for what?”

A GPU with only 1gig of RAM is the minimum Adobe recommends using with its products.