Tagged with imacpro - Personal View Talks https://personal-view.com/talks/discussions/tagged/imacpro/feed.rss Fri, 22 Nov 24 05:31:40 +0000 Tagged with imacpro - Personal View Talks en-CA Comparing the iMac Pro to the iMac5K https://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/20257/comparing-the-imac-pro-to-the-imac5k Sat, 18 Aug 2018 04:18:48 +0000 andyharris 20257@/talks/discussions Virtually all the video I produce is in 4K and started as 4.6K RAW. I do a fair bit of 3D modelling and therefore many renders. Some scenes were taking up to 18 days to render out and so I hoped that the iMac Pro would deliver better performance than my previous system:

iMac5K (2017)

  • 4 Ghz i7
  • 32GB Memory

This presents as an 8 core system.

The new system:

Model Name: iMac Pro

  • Model Identifier: iMacPro1,1
  • Processor Name: Intel Xeon W
  • Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
  • Number of Processors: 1
  • Total Number of Cores: 18
  • L2 Cache (per Core): 1 MB
  • L3 Cache: 24.8 MB
  • Memory: 128 GB
  • Boot ROM Version: 15.16.6059.0.0,0

Presents as 18 cores and has significantly more memory at 128GB. I set out to do a couple of tests that I could measure and then sum up how the two systems feel.

image

Blender Render (Cycles)

Old iMac 5K 1:16:41 H:M:S
IMac Pro 15:58 H:M:S

Cheetah 3D Render

Old iMac 5K 28167 S
iMac Pro 12082 S

Conclusions

So, Blender has a 5 times speed up and Cheetah3D has just over twice. I checked the activity monitor and both were using pretty much all the CPU.

The installation of the iMac Pro was painful, many painful. In the background the audio and Lacie RAID drivers were disabled. The trouble is that Lacie didn't write the drivers so it's not obvious which drivers should be enabled. I basically re-installed all the audio and RAID drivers and got to thinking that the Thunderbolt 3-2 adapters didn't work because the Lacie and Focusrite kit are Thunderbolt 1. Five hours of forum hunting later and all was running.

In truth I'm underwhelmed with the performance improvements compared to the three year difference and the eye-watering £10K price tag.

What is useful though is the ability to comfortably run other programs whilst Blender/Cheetah3D/Fusion/Resolve are thrashing through renders.

Of note is that the Radeon card supports the RadeonProRender plugin for blender, this can offload the render work to the graphics card. However you need to be aware that materials used by the Cycles render engine don't work with ProRender, and that the tool that converts between the two silently barfs on stuff like hair. I run the app from the terminal so that I can see the debug messages - this led me to changing enough materials to get the renders going.

It can even run FCPx and Blender (whilst rendering an animation). My guess is that this is a function of memory as well as the number of available cores.

So, perhaps the real joy of ownership is that the editing/grading interface is more responsive.

In the meantime, I've been looking at the cost of online render farms, which for me will work out at 3$ per frame -- so that's another ouch moment.

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