[Gary Huff]

What are you rendering to? What is the format, biterate, settings, ect.

[Gary Huff]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “GeForce GTX-680 Mac Edition”

Seconded. Worth the cost, excellent graphics card.

[Gary Huff]

[Michael Garber] “The local Apple Store got a 4-core Mac Pro today. Had a chance to check it out as most of the reviews I’ve seen have been on the 6, 8, and 12-core models. I ran Geekbench in 64-bit mode and Cinebench on the system. This was on the low-end 4-core with the D300.”

Did you have to install it yourself? I’m thinking about putting the current GPU beta of RedCineX on the display model here (if they have one) and running my typical test of a particular REDcode clip render from that. That’s the metric most important to me.

[Gary Huff]

[Shane Ross] “When Murch cut COLD MOUNTAIN with FCP 3, Apple advised him NOT TO attempt it. And it was fraught with issues, but it was done.”

Actually, if it wasn’t for a studio totally putting their NDA at risk with Apple, Murch would have been screwed. He made it by the seat of his pants, with some help from people willing to break the rules.

[Gary Huff]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “windows is kind of moronic everywhere and a bit awful.”

Yes, the fact that merging folders actually works and that you can get a nice box giving you the size of a file and the last time it was modified before overwriting it is so moronic.

[Gary Huff]

[Oliver Peters] “. You aren’t going to get any specifics on what optimization means, because Apple tends to keep that to themselves. Some of that comes in Mavericks changes, such as how background OS functions are now cached, in order to make more CPU cycles available to open programs while they are working. That’s an under-the-hood OS change.”

I was referring specifically to optimization on the hardware level versus what you would get with the same motherboard architecture and CPU configuration on a homebrew system.

[Oliver Peters] “Along those same lines, FCP X 10.1 loads faster and performs “more fluidly” on the same 2009 Mac Pro with 10.9.1 than FCP X 10.0.9 under 10.8.5. Can I quantity it? No. Is it real? Yes.”

Can also be confirmation bias, which is why I tend to discount all of it. It’s slower on Windows because, well, Windows. It’s faster on Mac because, well, Mac.

Completely pointless.

[Gary Huff]

[Oliver Peters] ”
Oh, I completely agree, which is why I think there IS a “secret sauce” as it applies to the Mac Pros and Apple software, particularly the ProApps tools. I doubt you’ll see a similar edge with Adobe or Avid. There, a comparably-spec’ed machine will likely yield similar results.”

The “secret sauce” is that Apple engineers apparently spend time making sure the GUI elements are optimized in clever ways. Kind of like how in iOS, when you swipe the home screen, it animates a screenshot of the icons as opposed to actually moving the actual icons.

In my experience, rendering times is an empirical benchmark of performance, not some hogwish “feels more fluid” that can’t be expressed as a metric. And you said yourself that render times tended to either be equal to, or even favored by, Windows boxes.

[Gary Huff]

[Oliver Peters] “Based on what information?”

Based on the fact that people can only say it’s “optimized” without bringing out any specifics.

If you have specific information on how the actual hardware is faster, then it’s just noise.

[Gary Huff]

[Shawn Miller] ” don’t know the price, but I’ll check. I thought your point was about similar configurations and performance. That was actually my question to you… how can the similarly spec’d Mac Pro outperform it’s PC counterpart?”

There is no reason why it should, outside of some optimized coding on FCPX vs either AVID or FCPX or Edius or Lightworks. And that’s just a programming issue.

There’s nothing particularly “optimized” about the hardware itself in the Mac Pro, just design changes to fit the case.

[Gary Huff]

[Shawn Miller] “Now I’m sort of wondering why Apple opted to put a Xeon processor in the Mac pro instead of an i7… why go with the more expensive Xeon if you can only put one in the machine?”

The 1150 socket maxes out with i7s at 4-cores…you have to go socket 2011 for the 6-core varieties, and there aren’t any boards with that socket that have TB2 ports that I am aware of.