Shawn Miller
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Joe Marler] “The GTX-660 GPU while a few years old is a big PCIE-bus card that pulls about 240 watts — more than my entire iMac. The GTX-780m in the iMac is essentially a laptop GPU. It is the “m” version. In AnandTech’s test, they found “the GeForce GTX 780M…ends up delivering performance that falls roughly half way between the GTX 660 and GTX 760”. So the PC GPU is faster overall than the 2013 iMac GPU: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7287/analyzing-the-price-of-mobility-desktops...”
Fair enough, Cinebench OpenGL scores seem to bear this out as well, with the 780m performing about the same as the GTX 660.
[Joe Marler] “As a sanity check I installed and ran Premiere CC 2015 on my 2015 iMac which has a 4Ghz Skylake CPU, M395X GPU and 32GB RAM. It didn’t make much difference. It was a little faster but the overall situation was roughly the same.”
So, Premiere PPro performed roughly the same on both platforms, while FCPX was generally more responsive dealing with 4K H.264. Overall, how responsive would you say a project like that is (in FCPX)… good enough to get by while editing remotely for a day or two, or good enough to carry through a long(ish) project. Say, maybe a month of 8 hour edit sessions? At what point would you make the decision to transcode for better perfromance?
Shawn
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[Joe Marler] “This guy had a super machine and he was forced to externally transcode for A7RII 4k material: https://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/18574-a-story-about-4k-xavc-s-premiere-...”
That was Andrew Reid’s recommendation as well.
“Meanwhile on a Mac I recommend to simply use EditReady, transcode to ProRes 422 LT and you will be able to playback full quality full res 4K on a laptop. There’s no quality loss from XAVC-S.”
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[Joe Marler] “The Windows machine has a 4Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, GTX-660 and 7200 rpm media drive. The iMac is a 2013 model with 3.5Ghz i7, 32GB RAM, GTX-780m”
Your PC has half the RAM and a slower GPU…
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[John Rofrano] “That has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with how efficient Mac OS X is and how tuned it is to using the hardware.”
I think that may have had more to do with how VMWARE was written for Windows. I can recount many cross platform applications that ran great on one platform but not very well on another; ZBrush, Cinem4D, Maxwell, Realflow, etc.
[John Rofrano] “That’s really the problem with Windows. It’s bloated with drivers to support an infinite combination of parts where no two PC’s are exactly alike which reduces the chances that everything will work”
That’s kind of an odd statement. You make it sound as if Windows installs a bunch of drivers for hardware that isn’t on the system…
some companies write great drivers, some don’t. I don’t think that’s a platform specific issue.[John Rofrano] “When the new Mac Pro came out, there were no SSD’s for PC’s that could come close to the performance of the ones Apple was using in the Mac Pro.”
Are you talking about PCIeFlash drives? FusionIO and OZC had been been shipping those for some time before the nMP…
[John Rofrano] “Same is true for Thunderbolt. It simply didn’t exist on PC’s until they caught up.”
That’s because Apple bought exclusivity rights to Thunderbolt… the “catching up” was other vendors gaining access to Intel’s technology after the agreement expired.
[John Rofrano] “I’m reminded of the Extreme Tech article: Apple’s new ‘overpriced’ $10,000 Mac Pro is $2,000 cheaper than the e… where if you bought the same quality parts that Apple uses, PC’s really aren’t cheaper. This is especially true for the new Mac Pro where the equivalent GPU’s are very expensive if you were to buy them as external cards instead of built in.”
I didn’t say anything about cost…
Shawn
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[Tom Sefton] “I’d love to hear what performance can be achieved in a similar PC rig that has thunderbolt connectivity. If we dropped £6k on a Mac Pro – what could a PC achieve with the same budget?”
I imagine running the same hardware will yield similar performance. It’s funny, I’ve been having this conversation with a few coworkers for the past few weeks. They are designers who are moving into motion graphics and 3D animation, so they’re looking to upgrade their hardware. They are CONVINCED that an identically speced Mac Pro will be faster than a PC. I’m sort of left scratching my head, as nothing will move them from this notion, not Cinebech scores, not logic, nothing. It reminds me of the thread about DIY PC performance vs the nMP: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/63665#63705
[Phil Hoppes] “…and while you can build a 12 Core Xenon PC with dual Radeon cards I doubt very seriously that it’s performance would even come close to what the current raft of benchmarks are delivering for the MacPro.”[Oliver Peters] “If you look at the pricing for HP’s best machine, the Z820, and compare equivalent specs to the Mac Pro, the Z820 is more expensive. Yes, it is more expandable, but otherwise is actually a less capable machine based on the internal parts.”
[Shawn Miller] My only question is why you think this. I’m even willing to concede the cost argument (pitting DYI and HP against Apple). 🙂
Shawn
EDIT: I meant to add that you can see for yourself, what sort of machine you can build for 6k US. This will be my integrator of choice for my next computer.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/genesis/II/customize.php
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[Jim Wiseman] “[Shawn Miller] “How is AE a monopoly? It’ the most popular application in its tiny little niche… but so is Mocha. It’s not like Adobe bought competing products and then dropped them off the market. ”
Anyone remember Freehand. Better than Illustrator. Bought by Adobe and dumped.”
I thought we were talking about After Effects. My point was that Adobe didn’t buy and then kill applications like Combustion, or Commotion or Hitfilm to gain market dominance for After Effects… which you called a monopoly.
We can discuss the practice of companies buying other companies for specific applications or technologies, and then subsequently dumping those applications or their user base to increase market share if you’d like though. No one’s hands are clean on that account.
Shawn
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[Jim Wiseman] “Not with monopolies like AE.”
How is AE a monopoly? It’ the most popular application in its tiny little niche… but so is Mocha. It’s not like Adobe bought competing products and then dropped them off the market.
Shawn
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[Ronny Courtens] “Mamba is very cheap for what it does. And its power is unrivaled.”
I agree that Mamba is very powerful, but what in your mind makes it better than Nuke, Fusion or Blender?
Shawn
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[Charlie Austin] “True, but neither is Resolve if you want any of the “advanced” features or the control surfaces. It’s another option, and the software (Mamba) really isn’t that expensive compared to the other players…”
Sorry, my comment was more or less tongue in cheek… people really like free. I think Mamba FX is a tremendous value… but the free version of Fusion pretty much does the same thing.
Shawn
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[Charlie Austin] “Supposedly, this company will be adding fcpxml support to Mamba/Mistika. Looks pretty cool.
Great software… not exactly free though.
Shawn