CADD16 Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 I'm just wanting to know if there are any users out there currently using either the newer Mac Pro or the new iMac 5k display. I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro maxed out and it icon stanly runs out of memory (RAM). So I am looking to upgrade to something more powerful and would like some opinions. I had heard the Chief was testing the new Mac pro's but never found out any results. Any feedback would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Electromen Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro maxed out and it icon stanly runs out of memory (RAM). Can you clarify that? "icon stanly" How much RAM does it have? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug_Park Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 The new Mac Pros run fine, but are not as fast as we expected. They are a good solid machine, but the price/performance ratio is not as good as I would like. I don't have any personal knowledge about the 5K iMacs. I don't have a reason to think that they would have any problems. Someone else may have more information than I do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CADD16 Posted April 14, 2015 Author Share Posted April 14, 2015 Can you clarify that? "icon stanly" How much RAM does it have? Sorry, typo. it runs out of memory a lot. It has 16gb of Ram, 512gb ssd, and Nvidia GeForce GT750m 2048 gb. 2.6 ghz core i7. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CADD16 Posted April 14, 2015 Author Share Posted April 14, 2015 The new Mac Pros run fine, but are not as fast as we expected. They are a good solid machine, but the price/performance ratio is not as good as I would like. I don't have any personal knowledge about the 5K iMacs. I don't have a reason to think that they would have any problems. Someone else may have more information than I do. How do the Mac Pro's run compared to the standard iMac's Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug_Park Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 Look here for CPU performance comparisons. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html The video cards are a bit tricky to get good benchmark comparisons on. You first need to figure out what the D300, D500 and D700 match in terms of the FirePro cards. This site gives some clues: http://architosh.com/2013/10/the-mac-pro-so-whats-a-d300-d500-and-d700-anyway-we-have-answers/ They seem to fall in the range of W7000 to W9000. Which are sadly not really much better than the high end iMac video cards. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html This results in a kind of a difficult call in terms of what is faster. A low end MacPro may handily outperform an iMac in ray tracing but may be more of a wash or fall behind some of the iMacs when it comes to OpenGL 3d graphics. I don't really have any definitive answers other than for the price the performance of the MacPro is disappointing to me. There may be additional value for running applications other than Chief that would make the price more justifiable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JMorelli Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 I use the 5k mac. Works well enough. Only question I have for the chief team is if CA supports the high resolution? I've found that I had to turn the crosshair off as it was too laggy even with a fully up-spec'd mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill_Emery Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 JMorelli, I suspect the problem may not be with Chief. l'm running three monitors, a 50"4K, a 30" 2560 x 1600 and a 19" 1980 x 1080, on a mid range windows laptop with no lag or performance problems. This is the equivalent of a 9K monitor. I'm just driving a prescribed number of pixels, regardless of how they are configured. I used to run the 2560 x 1600 (4K) on a NVIDIA card with only a half gig with no problems. As a casual observer, the graphics cards in Macs are the weak link until I look at the dedicated graphic work stations (Where they tend to be superb.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug_Park Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 Cross hair lag is potentially a problem with super high resolution displays. Using smaller windows can help. Unfortunately the rich feedback that we provide while you move the mouse pushes the computational capabilities of computers when the size of a window gets large enough. There are also other factors in play as well. Some people are much more sensitive to things like this than others. Also the refresh rate of the display can be an issue. I know that when we did tests internally of 4K displays on Windows some people reported a cross hair lag that others didn't notice. This was because of the 30 hz refresh rate. A lot of this computation is done on the CPU so a faster video card may not help. Unfortunately, the push toward higher DPI displays is happening a bit quicker than the hardware can really support. I think 4K displays are fine with most modern hardware but 5K displays probably need a bit more processor power. This may be where the Mac Pro would actually be a better choice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JMorelli Posted April 16, 2015 Share Posted April 16, 2015 Cross hair lag is potentially a problem with super high resolution displays. Using smaller windows can help. Unfortunately the rich feedback that we provide while you move the mouse pushes the computational capabilities of computers when the size of a window gets large enough. There are also other factors in play as well. Some people are much more sensitive to things like this than others. Also the refresh rate of the display can be an issue. I know that when we did tests internally of 4K displays on Windows some people reported a cross hair lag that others didn't notice. This was because of the 30 hz refresh rate. A lot of this computation is done on the CPU so a faster video card may not help. Unfortunately, the push toward higher DPI displays is happening a bit quicker than the hardware can really support. I think 4K displays are fine with most modern hardware but 5K displays probably need a bit more processor power. This may be where the Mac Pro would actually be a better choice. That makes sense Doug. I had noticed that if I scaled down the resolution the lag would go away. But that defeated the purpose of having a 5k monitor... a larger workspace. I'll just have to live with out the crosshair I've been finding it hard to believe that the video card could be at fault Bill, especially seeing as I use it heavily for photo & video editing without any slow down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CADD16 Posted April 16, 2015 Author Share Posted April 16, 2015 Could anyone out there who is currently using the new Mac Pro chime in on how it performs? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Designers_Edge Posted April 25, 2015 Share Posted April 25, 2015 You did ask about the iMacs too--probably getting more of that feedback because more can afford the iMac vs Mac Pro. I just bought an iMac 27" Retina with the 4 GHz intel 7 core, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and the AMD Radeon R9 with 2 GB video memory. The issue with the super high resolution is that when you use it everything gets VERY small and I mean small with font size equal to a 4pt or 6pt. I had to change the default display option to 2043 x 1200 so that text displayed and icons could be read/seen. This is still a sharp screen image, but it certainly is not the 3000 x 1800 setting at the highest range. However, one can certainly change to that if you are doing something that might require the power of that resolution like photo editing, streaming video etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheKitchenAbode Posted April 25, 2015 Share Posted April 25, 2015 That's one of the drawbacks with these extremely high resolution screens in combination with smaller monitor sizes. Not sure with IOS but windows has a scaling setting that can help at times if you wish to keep the native resolution. Only drawback is it does not handle dialog boxes that cannot be moved or resized very well, it can scale them so portions of the box are off of the screen. The real benefit of going super high resolution is on larger screens, say 40" an up. Graham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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