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Mac Pro for Renderworks


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Not really.

You need a lot of cores with a fast clock speed to speed up rendering time.
While Macbook Pro and iMac may be limited to their i7's with 4 Cores + Hyperthreading,
the max. 12 Core Mac Pro is really expensive, 8 core may be the sweet spot Mac Pro.

The current Mac Pro is 3 years old, outdated and therefore too expensive.
If you think of these wait a few months if Apple will really upgrade these at a reasonable
time, just let them die, by bringing something like an iMac Pro with desktop CPU+GPU
or just force us to switch to Windows Machines soon.

You can look for Render Speed Comparisons of different CPU's using C4D Cinebench like this :

http://www.cbscores.com/index.php?sort=os

So maxed out iMac at the time I ordered my Mac Pro, would have been faster than the 4 Core nMP.
And my 6 Core nMP is not so much faster as you can see in the Benchmark link.
It was at least 2 x as fast as my old 2007 Mac Pro 2.1 I had before :) 

 

Edited by zoomer
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Allow me to answer that question with a hammer:

This is the current best MacBook Pro (I use one, love it) Cinebench score: 603

Apple MacBook Pro 11,1 OS X 10.10.4 Core i7 4870HQ @ 2.5Ghz 4c / 8t

603

This is the current best Mac Pro Cinebench score: 965

Apple Mac Pro 6,1 OS X 10.9.2 Xeon E5-1650 v2 @ 3.5Ghz 6c / 12t

965

This effectively means that the Mac Pro above would render about 60% faster than the Macbook Pro above. However, with the pricing difference, the "Is it worth it?" part depends on your budget.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Yes, I was only addressing rendering speed. For OpenGL and 3D graphics (and soon, Top/Plan as well) the performance increase would only be about 20% and then you would only notice it if the GPU was what was limiting your speed on the Macbook Pro. Again, it would be faster, but it comes down to cost.

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Cost + Cost over Time.  I would think that one of the biggest reasons to get a desktop workstation would be that it is upgradable.  That you will be able to throw in that new GPU when it comes out and for a couple hundred bucks extend the useful life by a couple years.  I loved the look of the form factor when they released the Mac Pro - but it seems hard to upgrade yourself - which actually inflates the cost over time.  mac-pro-2012-vs-2013-spoof.jpg

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
3 minutes ago, Tom Klaber said:

Cost + Cost over Time.  I would think that one of the biggest reasons to get a desktop workstation would be that it is upgradable.  That you will be able to throw in that new GPU when it comes out and for a couple hundred bucks extend the useful life by a couple years.  I loved the look of the form factor when they released the Mac Pro - but it seems hard to upgrade yourself - which actually inflates the cost over time.  mac-pro-2012-vs-2013-spoof.jpg

 

 

Very true. I forgot: it also matters a lot how much of your computer's life is spent rendering. If you render all day every day for an entire year on a regular basis, 60% is months of "extra" freed up time. If you are only trying to shave a few minutes off of an hour or two rendering each day it becomes a very pricey convenience.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
2 minutes ago, Altivec said:

I had a 2010 MacPro with 12 cores but it recently died (loved that machine).  It was the middle tier at that time and I paid around 5k for it.   The current 3 year old Mac Pro costs about 10k to get 12 cores so there is no way I am going to spend that kind of money on 3 year old tech.  I borrowed my wife's 2013 MacPro (6 cores at 3.5 ghz) as I wait for Apple to update the MacPro.   It runs VW and renders pretty decently, but I estimate my old 12 core MacPro to be around 75% faster at rendering.  But I find working in vectorworks is faster on the newer machine.  I think that's due to the graphics cards being much superior.  Open GL on large models is as smooth as silk.

So depending what you do,  graphic card and ram are important for working in vectorworks.  Cores are important for rendering.

As zoomed mentioned,  Apple will be either upgrading the MacPro in the next month or so (which will be a huge upgrade) or they will discontinue it, in which you should start looking at window machines for pro level work.  I don't really want to switch but if Apple discontinues the Pro, I have no choice.

I would be stunned if they killed off the Mac Pro... Well, stunned and pretty furious. I REALLY want them to roll out some pro level hardware again and forcing people to always buy a new monitor when they upgrade their machine seems wasteful.

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I used to be in the "Buy as much computer as you can afford"  camp - but I have completely changed my tune.  

I think spending $2500 and upgrading every 2/3 years is better than spending 5K and upgrading every 4 to 6 years.  The technology changes so fast that upgrading more often for the good stuff is way better than stretching your budget for the top of the line. Maybe it is slightly different on the Mac side since they do not refresh their line that often.  

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