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eGPU and Vectorworks Testing


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4 hours ago, Jim Wilson said:


That would be affected very minimally by the addition of an eGPU. At the moment, all of our Renderworks modes are CPU based renderings, which means the processor and not the GPU would speed up render times. 

Thank You. After years of being stuck a a desk I was dreaming of a laptop that could free my creative spirit. Since I tried to open the steve kitchen 3d on my present Mac Pro I have come to realize how much I have missed holding on to old technology. The Youtube videos of the 2018 MacBook Pro with the vega20 chip look promising but there is no way to test Vectorworks previews unless I spend $5500 at the Apple store and I feel guilty returning. It’s a lot like buying showes on line except at crazy dollars.

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1 hour ago, rjtiedeman said:

Thank You. After years of being stuck a a desk I was dreaming of a laptop that could free my creative spirit. Since I tried to open the steve kitchen 3d on my present Mac Pro I have come to realize how much I have missed holding on to old technology. The Youtube videos of the 2018 MacBook Pro with the vega20 chip look promising but there is no way to test Vectorworks previews unless I spend $5500 at the Apple store and I feel guilty returning. It’s a lot like buying showes on line except at crazy dollars.

 

Even with a 10-core iMac Pro, it can still take hours to render using Renderworks, so the hardware isn't really the issue.

Edited by Mark Aceto
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4 minutes ago, Mark Aceto said:

 

Even with a 10-core iMac Pro, it can still take hours to render using Renderworks, so the hardware isn't really the issue.

 

Right,   I don’t know that I would use  Renderworks as the hardware performance bar. As already noted by others Corona (which I use) and other solutions, can be worlds faster,  even using the same hardware.    

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3 hours ago, Wesley Burrows said:

 

Right,   I don’t know that I would use  Renderworks as the hardware performance bar. As already noted by others Corona (which I use) and other solutions, can be worlds faster,  even using the same hardware.    

So that means switching to a PC or hackentosh won’t help either. Just switch to Corona and CD4.

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21 hours ago, rjtiedeman said:

Just switch to Corona and CD4.

 

I'm not familiar with Corona but Renderworks aka "CineRender" is just a watered down port of Cinema which is also a CPU hog, and will use every core you throw at it. The issue isn't Mac vs PC. It's laptop vs workstation. That said, GPU-biased plugins like Redshift help speed up Cinema. Plus Cinema isn't bogged down by VW, so it's natively faster but still nothing compared to apps that render in real time using Unreal or Unity engines. It's all about tradeoffs... 

Edited by Mark Aceto
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  • 1 month later...

Hi JIm

I was wondering if you had any comments about improving Open GL performance for a MacBook Pro 17  Early 2011 i7-2820 QM CPU  2.3 GHz   and dedicated AM HD 6750 1 GB GDDR using a   Sonnet Puck with a RX 570 eGPU given that I only have Thunderbolt 1 and no external Monitor.

I’m aware of about 50% drop in performance after reading about the topic on egpu.io,  but not sure if I can improve the average 35 FPS  Open GL Cinebench R15 to 50+

Thank you.

Regards

 

Sebastiano

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13 hours ago, Sebastiano B. said:

Hi JIm

I was wondering if you had any comments about improving Open GL performance for a MacBook Pro 17  Early 2011 i7-2820 QM CPU  2.3 GHz   and dedicated AM HD 6750 1 GB GDDR using a   Sonnet Puck with a RX 570 eGPU given that I only have Thunderbolt 1 and no external Monitor.

I’m aware of about 50% drop in performance after reading about the topic on egpu.io,  but not sure if I can improve the average 35 FPS  Open GL Cinebench R15 to 50+

Thank you.

Regards

 

Sebastiano


I highly doubt it since it's only Thunderbolt 1. I am fairly certain the speed of that port is low enough that no matter what eGPU you tried to use through it, it would be slower than the built in solution. Also, Apple has been very restrictive about which devices will even work by default and with which OS, with lots of very tedious manual editing of things to get around these limitations.

One of the sad realities of eGPU tech at least on the Mac side, is that a lot of the use cases for it are in older machines like that one where they aren't compatible because of their thunderbolt ports. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 11/20/2018 at 10:23 AM, Jim Wilson said:

Correct, which is what is very odd. I would have expected perfectly fine performance with the Macbook > eGPU > Display configuration, though I'm going to try it lid shut today and see if thats enough to disable the internal display being the primary.

Supposedly when you move the menu bar to another menu in the Arrangement pane of the Display preferences it is supposed to do this, but the performance results I'm getting disagree. More poking.

Jim, Hi are these MacBook tests with a 2018 Macbook?  It would make  sense to me that the Mac mini tests work best with the output running from egpu to the monitor rather than trying to reroute the output through the Mac mini to the external monitor . Thanks! 

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  • 4 weeks later...

 

Would be interested in a similar test specific to VW (and adding the late-2018 MBP with Vega 20 GPU, and also an eGPU). Whether testing video editing or 3D modeling/drafting, the takeaway seems to be how each system performs in relation to the others. In other words, the test wouldn't require the perfect prototype file to interpret results (system A is n% faster at doing this test than systems B, C, D). That's basically what we're trying to figure out here: which system should I buy for my needs (and then factor in how many years it takes Apple to upgrade it, user upgradeability, modularity, built in display or not.. )

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