[Vasim Shaikh]

Thanks Manish!

That looks like a really good system. Have you worked on a lower spec machine before? Did you see viewport performance gains after upgrading?

[Vasim Shaikh]

Thanks so much for the insight Kevin.

[Kevin Camp] “the *new* Mac Pros are from 2013”

That’s amazing, not in a good way of course.

[Kevin Camp] “Another negative of Macs, is as Adobe make further use of GPU acceleration, your’e stuck with the current GPU in your machine, so i a couple years, a $400 video card might be able to significantly enhance performance, but your stuck with the a built in GPU… only the GPUs on the pre 2013 Mac Pro tower can be upgraded — technically the *new* Mac Pros can be upgraded, but there are no new cards available for it.”

Another big surprise. I always expected modularity to be a standard for any workstation class machine.

I was wrongfully quick to dismiss the iMac Pro based on the GPU they listed, a Radeon Pro Vega GPU, which I’m familiar with as a gaming GPU. The iMac pro does look really good otherwise. Honestly however, I felt that the difference in price was not worth it, it felt over glorified with it’s 5k display which I felt is not something that’s crucial to us.

I guess I did not do a thorough enough job researching this as I thought I did. Thank you so much for the insight.

As things stand now, I guess Macs are not an option at all.

With that sorted, Do you think just maxing out everything(CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD) as much as you can, would be the best way to go?

Also, I’m kind of doubting any upgrade to my current system would improve viewport performance at all, I would love for someone to prove me wrong on this. Do you have any experience with After Effects on Macbooks or other standard consumer grade laptops? Do you think I would see significant enough improvement in viewport performance once I’ve upgraded?

Thanks again so much for your input.

[Vasim Shaikh]

Thanks so much for the response Richard!

[Richard Garabedain] “For one person…macs are great. But for a team of people…macs get too pricy too fast”

Totally see how this can be the case, for now though, I’m the sole After Effects user. I do however understand that that isn’t long term thinking.

[Richard Garabedain] “But sadly no one will really have much information for you…we all always trying to upgrade all the time and no one really knows what is best right now.”

Very understandable. I did extensive research on this matter, and as things stand currently, everything just seemed so vague and muddy. Do you think just maxing out everything(CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD) as much as you can, would be the best way to go? My biggest fear is if it would all be worth it.