5K iMac Render Speeds
- Thread starter TimD
- Start date
Not envious at all! ;-)
Welcome back Tim - nice to have you back. Been well ?
2008 Mac Pro 3GHz 8 core - 29.60 secs for our little porcine friend at 4800x4800.
I need a new machine.
EDIT : running Cheetah 6.3.2 and 10.6.8 Snow Leopard
On my son's 2009 iMac, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Yosemite 10.9.5, Cheetah 6.3.2.
- 77.67 secs.
2008 Mac Pro 3GHz 8 core - 29.60 secs for our little porcine friend at 4800x4800.
I need a new machine.
EDIT : running Cheetah 6.3.2 and 10.6.8 Snow Leopard
On my son's 2009 iMac, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Yosemite 10.9.5, Cheetah 6.3.2.
- 77.67 secs.
Last edited:
It's interesting to note that Geekbench shows 2010 MBP's having a multicore benchmark of over 10,000, versus about 15,000 for the top-of-the-line iMac, and yet my — completely maxed out — 2010 MBP takes 72s to render the pig at 4800x4800, so apparently Geekbench's scores are absolutely useless for predicting relative render time (which is about as close to a pure multicore performance test as there is).
I seriously struggle to choose between the full spec iMac Retina 5k with 4 core 4ghz and the 6 core 3.5ghz Mac Pro.... I know the last one uses very little power / watts (keep my macs on 24/7 for many tasks like backup, streaming, bla bla) + Mac Pro can also function as a portable (seen a gig back etc) if you have two locations of work.. It also are dead silent in all operations which I value a lot..
YET you have the brilliant 5k move by Apple. I feel they are cannibalizing their own market somehow and making it very hard to choose. Will by one of them in January so if anyone has a thumbs up on either one please let me know ;-)
YET you have the brilliant 5k move by Apple. I feel they are cannibalizing their own market somehow and making it very hard to choose. Will by one of them in January so if anyone has a thumbs up on either one please let me know ;-)
On version 6.3.2, when you launch Cheetah, go to help, then Cheetah3D samples, then rendering. It's in there. Don't forget to adjust the image resolution.
iMacs are very power efficient too and they're using mobile CPUs (vs. Xeons). And unlike the Mac Pro, they definitely power off the display intelligently (whereas the Mac Pro depends on the monitor to not be stupid). The base 5K configuration has a fusion drive, so it won't be spinning its hard disk on idle much either.
I'd suggest that rather than get a Mac Pro — unless you know you need one — get a Macbook (or iMac + Macbook) and a thunderbolt expansion chassis such as:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/
or
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpress3d.html
Note that you can daisy-chain six of these suckers.
I've never used either; this is not an endorsement. But, this is why Thunderbolt exists. Even if you do need a Mac Pro, you probably want to use some of these to fully exploit its capabilities (it's not like you can stick more GPUs, PCIe SSD storage, NAS controllers, or whatever into a Mac Pro).
A MacBook is a lot more "portable" than a Mac Pro, and the thunderbolt chassis can give you pretty much everything you get out of a Mac Pro (except the so-far-underutilized Radeon GPUs) including PCIe-based SSDs. If you aren't going to be editing 4K video in the field, you can leave the box at home.
Here's a link to Tom's Hardware showing the performance of GPUs installed in a thunderbolt (I) expansion chassis. The worst case scenario is that the GPU performed 14% worse in the expansion chassis than plugged straight into a motherboard, but note that this is a not a mobile GPU (Apple only uses mobile GPUs in everything except the Mac Pro) and it's the old version of Thunderbolt (and the old expansion chassis). You can stick the latest, craziest gaming GPU into the thing and get a noodge less than max performance out of it plugged into a Macbook Air or a Mac Mini. Chances are, it won't be as good as a brand new, recently released Mac Pro, but a year down the line when Apple hasn't hinted at a replacement GPU, you can swap in a newer card with a fraction of the money you saved.
Oh yeah, and unless your time is worthless and you don't care about breaking the law, this seems to me to be a far superior option to messing with Hackintoshes too.
And if you want to render efficiently (and don't want to use a cloud service) your best bet is a pile of old Mac Minis (the current generation doesn't include the 4-core option), or, better yet, a pile of cheap Linux boxes.
Apple usually doesn't care about cannibalization (probably the biggest exception is the iPod Touch — they're definitely worried about it cannibalizing iPhone sales, which is why they let it languish 2-3 generations behind — it's also proof Apple could make a profit on iPhones at $200).
Last edited:
The Mac Pro would be my choice.
Late 2014 Mac Mini dual-core i7 w 16GB RAM
4800x4800 pig took ~38.7s
4800x4800 pig took ~35.2s (consistently 3 seconds faster with render manager closed)
