Architosh

The new Mac Pro – A Buyer’s Guide Through the Best Test Results

  • Anthony Frausto-Robledo, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP

    • The new Mac Pro went on sale in 2013 just as Apple promised, but it really just barely made the self-imposed deadline. Many users clamoring to get their hands on the new workstation class computer were not able to until this month. Yet others found the slight delays valuable as numerous media outlets began to run early units through a battery of scrutinizing performance benchmarks. Now, those who were possibly sitting on the fence or were merely just Mac Pro curious had much more information, taken somewhat from the real world of apps and benchmarks to use to make their final decisions.

    Do You Need a New Mac Pro or Not?

    So do you need a new Mac Pro or merely want one?

    There can be a subtle difference often between those users who want a new Mac Pro and those users who actually need one. Are you more a Prosumer user or a Pro user? Are you a studio-based Pro or a small independent Pro? Does your production pipeline consists of the teamwork and interoperability of others or is it mainly just you?

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    In this article Architosh is going to establish some guides for making decisions as to acquiring the new Mac Pro and which model. The focus will be on the Mac Pro versus an i7-based iMac as an alternative. We will not be really looking back at the old Mac Pro, though for some that choice also exist.

    Companion Pieces

    We have two companion articles that have just gone up in the the past few days that shed additional light on the Mac Pro discussion. In one piece Akiko Ashley offers an intelligent Viewpoint on the issue of what Apple thinks a Pro user is and who the new Mac Pro is for? The article is very relevant for studio-based 3D professionals in animation and visual effects (VFX).

    The second companion article is a Firm Profile story on the work of Archiform 3D, a highly successful global architectural visualization firm. In that article Steve Bell, its owner and principal, discusses what 3D professionals like him actually need in a workstation and what he thinks of the new Mac Pro. The articles are interesting as they provide counter-points from the perspective of scale. Miss Ashley is arguing her points largely from the perspective of good sized 3D studios, like those found in the TV and film industry, while Mr. Bell offers his views as a small shop with its own private render farm.

    First the Fruit Then the Technology

    Rather than scrub through a curated review of the benchmarks found around the web we are going to go straight to the heart of the matter so readers can get informed and go straight to decision making. We will scrub through the tests on the second half of this article. (see page 3 if you want to jump to that now) 

    Let’s start looking at the decision to get a new Mac Pro industry by industry to flush out the issues.

    Low Hanging Fruit First

    Film Editing

    Apple didn’t just wake up one day and say, “let’s make a radical new computer just for fun!” The new Mac Pro is indeed a complete rethinking of what a desktop or workstation computer can be but it was built for a set of purposes. Chief among those is the film editing market and the effort Apple is putting into recapturing the hearts and minds of film pros who lost significant faith in the company after the Final Cut Pro X debacle.

    But Final Cut Pro X is making a comeback and early test results show that the new Mac Pro powers through Final Cut Pro X (10.1) with significant advantages over the fastest CTO iMac available or any other Mac around. In the video below–likely the first published independent results showing the new beast in action, the new Mac Pro powers through 18 effects in real-time on 4K video on Final Cut Pro 10.1.

    For those outside the film industry–like myself–the shock and awe of this is likely lost or a bit lost at minimum. Apple has made the latest Final Cut Pro X utilize both GPU’s on the new Mac Pro. This early review of Final Cut Pro X 10.1 on the new Mac Pro can be found here. Another review by Macworld magazine also touts the strengths of the new Mac Pro in regards to film editing with Final Cut Pro X 10.1)

    For Final Cut Pro X users the new Mac Pro is low-hanging fruit. It’s a no-brainer…as they say. And the numerous test results demonstrate this. If Final Cut Pro X is your livelihood, you likely need a new Mac Pro.

    Photoshop Accelerated

    A key new technology introduced in Adobe Photoshop CS6 is Adobe’s new Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). This new graphics engine introduced GPU-accererated features into Photoshop that give it an unprecedented performance in areas like the Oil Paint filter, lighting effects, et cetera. MGE utilizes both OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks, but not the proprietary CUDA from NVIDIA.

    For Adobe Photoshop CS6 or Photoshop CC users, you must turn on MGE features in the Photoshop > Preferences menu (Mac). There are different settings of course but choosing Use OpenCL will enable–importantly for many Architosh readers–the Tilt-Shift feature, along with some others like Field Blur. GPU’s must support OpenCL 1.1 and the new Mac Pros certainly do.

    01 – The Mac Pro’s twin GPU architecture is one of its most impressive features and Apple is clearly throwing its weight behind GPU compute resources for pro users.

    Is Photoshop CS6 or CC really low hanging fruit for making a decision to buy a new Mac Pro? Well, Macworld had Photoshop CC OpenCL test results at 162 seconds on the new Mac Pro compared to a CTO 2013 i7 iMac at 233 seconds. That’s a 140 percent improvement in speed–a huge performance difference. If you work with a lot of the filters and effects that the Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine touches, then the OpenCL performance of the new Mac Pro, in particular, is beneficial. And the larger the files you apply these MGE-based effects to the more important the benefit.

    OpenCL Compute

    One large area of application is in the area of OpenCL-based parallel computing. We will not talk in too much detail here about all the available OpenCL-based apps but simply list a few that are key in particular to Architosh readers and Mac creatives. Refer to the list below:

    Importantly, while Adobe’s Mercury Graphics Engine utilizes OpenCL 1.1 and while some of the latest AMD/ATI video cards support this standard, Apple’s Mac Pro is listed as a Conformant Product for OpenCL 1.2, with a dated entry of 27 Nov 2013 for the FirePro D500 Compute Engine, as it is called, which must be the engine behind the D500 and D700, but possibly not the D300.

    For users utilizing OpenCL-accererated applications, any apps tapping the benefits and power of OpenCL 1.2 further increase the payoff of the new Mac Pro. All the apps listed above tap the power of OpenCL 1.1 with the possible exception of Apple’s applications which may tap both version 1.1 and 1.2.

    In summary, if you spend a lot of time in Final Cut Pro X, use Apple’s Motion and Compressor, if you are a Photoshop CC or CS6 power user, or utilize one or more of the OpenCL compute-intensive apps above then the new Mac Pro will likely greatly accelerate your workflow and be worth every penny in productivity speed-up!

    If that is you, you can skip page 2 and go right to page 3 for curated and noted test results from around the web.

    next page: Higher Hanging Fruit and Curated Test Results Listing

    Higher Hanging Fruit

    We just looked at the key low-hanging fruit–cases where a new Mac Pro would almost always make sense. Reaching for the higher fruit always means more work for less return. In this case, we are gauging return on investment (ROI). When you have OpenCL based parallelization involved and extensive or sustained compute-intensive tasks like those in the applications listed in the previous page, the return on investment is rather easy–especially if your billable rate is high.

    Many industries and fields have a valuable cost per hour but are quite diversified across applications and workflows. Let’s just start with some of the industries and work through the discussion.

    Architecture

    The typical architecture firm has a range of individuals doing many functions. Those individuals charged with spending time drafting, modeling and using BIM (building information modeling) applications can vary with role. By in large, nobody spends their entire day in such applications. Typically, staff architects are engaging with other applications like email, project management tools, databases and web browsers, in addition to design tools. As Macworld correctly notes in its review of the new Mac Pro, many of those applications are written exclusively as single-threaded apps and so a higher frequency CPU is more beneficial than a 8 or 12 core CPU like in the Mac Pro. So where do you strike the balance?

    If you or your staff are primarily engaged in non-project or office management functions or have dedicated specialities in 3D or rendering–in other words are really pushing their boxes–then consider a Mac Pro if your primary tools benefit from either OpenCL or are highly threaded for multi-core CPUs. Here are some notes:

    Of the architectural BIM/CAD solutions just mentioned only GRAPHISOFT ArchiCAD stands out as being clearly benefitting from the many cores available in the new Mac Pro. However, all the apps above would benefit from its super fast next-gen PCIe flash storage.

    Industrial and Product Design

    Similar to architecture, industrial design shops have a wide variety of roles but in this case we are going to concentrate on the designer and assume a very concentrated use of their workstation needs being centered on high-end tools. There are a wide variety of tools in the professional CAID and product design market but many of the biggest tools like SolidWorks, ProE (Creo) and CATIA are not on the Mac. Siemens’ NX is however is on the Mac.

    CAID and MCAD tools are generally powerful 3D systems utilizing OpenGL for their main viewports. Very large assemblies and complex geometries push up against the edge of the performance of the GPU. There is little doubt that the industry’s best tools wouldn’t benefit the most from workstation class AMD FirePro workstation class GPUs. The only question is would the second GPU benefit the setup? Because CrossFire on OS X is not supported we don’t see the second GPU doing much for OpenGL viewport generation until folks like Siemens specifically write NX for Mac for the dual GPU setup. However, the quality of the FirePro-based GPUs may provide the benefit that users have been seeking in the Mac Pro all along–true workstation class GPUs!

    Visualization

    In our feature on Archiform 3D, Steve Bells makes some good arguments against the new Mac Pro. He’s a CINEMA 4D user and with that program–like most 3D software packages that are CPU-bound, the value of having more cores can be very good, but there is always a trade-off with number of cores and core clock frequency for single-threaded operations. (see image 02)

    02 – The Porsche Tower project in Miami by Archiform 3D by Steve Bell.

    Mr. Bell makes note that during the rendering and animation parts of the workflow, which can often be many hours long, including up to a day or more, having as many cores to throw at the render job is invaluable. But those slower frequency cores are not helping you with single-threaded modeling and most scene editing operations where a faster frequency CPU would shine.

    Unlike Architecture and Product Design, the visualization market workflow often consists of a sustained duration of modeling and scene setup activities and some long burn render and animation times. In the past this is when you would take a long coffee break. There are lots of tools in this space but each user should check with their tool maker to learn just how threaded their application is and for what parts of their workflow. Generally the rendering functions are highly threaded and CPU bound and so multi-processors and multi-cores are valuable.

    One negative for the Mac Pro is that it does not come with more than one processor socket. In the PC space you can build a render box with four (4x) 16-core Opteron processors to create a 64-core monster. If viz pros considering the Mac Pro have access to a local network render farm or a remote cloud render solution and like to work that way, then the Mac Pro with either the 4 or 6 core Xeon option might make for a great machine. But take a look at the Blender and Cinebench test results carefully. (see next page).

    Entertainment Media

    Akiko Ashley’s new Viewpoint article about the Mac Pro in animation and VFX studios is a superb essay into some of the key matters affecting the use of the new Mac Pro in this space. Many of the same issues at hand for visualization 3D pros, like those doing architectural visualization, affect the entertainment media industry workflows as well. Some of the same application packages are utilized.

    We do know of at least one E&M software package that has been optimized for the new Mac Pro and that is MARI. Originally developed by director Peter Jackson’s WETA studios and used in the making of the film Avatar, MARI–which is now owned by The Foundry–was showcased at the 2013 Apple WWDC in a special session on the new Mac Pro. (see image 03 below)

    03 – The Foundry presenting MARI for OS X at Apple’s 2013 WWDC, special session on the new Mac Pro.

    MARI for Mac OS X utilizes GPU-accelerated real-time procedural noises, patterns and projections. In the WWDC presentation it was mentioned that MARI was originally designed with multiple GPUs in mind. It was also originally created on the Mac and Linux–not Windows. For Mavericks MARI got updated to support the latest OpenGL and OpenCL 1.2

    The way MARI works with the Mac Pro’s dual GPU’s is the Apple template for how the Cupertino company developed its own software to leverage the dual GPUs. Jack Greasley, MARI’s original developer and now with The Foundry, notes in the presentation that they always wanted to leverage one GPU for processing huge amounts of data while the other GPU processes all that data to the display. In the presentation he mentions AMD’s CrossFire and says that CrossFire is fantastic for gamers but that capability has never been available for artists until now.

    Apple’s technology for leveraging the dual GPU’s isn’t the same as AMD’s CrossFire technology. There are differences…though we are unclear to their specifics. What we know from AMD is that OpenCL is self-aware of the presence of multiple GPUs and there is no code changes necessary for applications to leverage more than one GPU’s OpenCL capabilities. On the other hand, for OpenGL, application developers need to make changes in their code and specifically target both GPUs.

    On the next page we’ll curate many of the best test results to help sharpen your decision making. Do you know if you still need a new Mac Pro or merely want one?

    next page: Curated Test Results and Listing

    Curated Test Results and Closing Comments

    What we know about Apple’s new Mac Pro is that it has two GPUs standard and that all of them are blazing fast in OpenCL performance. The D500 and D700 utilize the Tahiti Architecture while the D300 is Pitcairn-based. We covered a lot of details on these CPUs in our popular article, “The Mac Pro, So what’s a D300, D500 and D700 anyway? We have answers,” 24 Oct 2013)

    Somewhere on the Internet I read a comment where a user assumed Adobe would never update its applications to truly take advantage of the new Mac Pro’s innovative dual built-in GPUs as standard. However that will likely not be the case. On Jeff Tranberry’s official Adobe blog he writes of the new Photoshop CC 14.2 update that Adobe has updated the latest version of Photoshop CC for the new Mac Pro.

    Specifically, Adobe will modify Photoshop so it takes full advantage of one of the two available GPUs. He also says that Adobe expects to “add support for both of the new Apple Mac Pro GPUs, and to continue to optimize” for their customers.

    Final Cut Pro X Testing 

    Here are references to Final Cut Pro testing and benchmarking:

    Adobe Photoshop CC Testing

    General Graphics sand Gaming Testing

    We want to point out some key findings in these various tests. Firstly, for 3D and CAD users the Anandtech Cinebench R15 tests truly showcase what Steve Bell of Archiform 3D talks about in his criticism of the new Mac Pro–that is that you want lots of cores AND high frequency as well. Clearly, the multi-threaded test shows that the 12-core Mac Pro is a monster and you can also see it in the Anandtech Blender 3D tests as well.

    For Maya and modo users digging into David Girard’s tests over at ArsTechnica is a worthwhile trip.

    General Apps and Benchmarks Testing

    Boot Camp Testing

    Some people may want to buy a Mac Pro and run Windows apps in Boot Camp, making their Darth Mac their favorite Windows box. People have been looking at things like SolidWorks, CATIA, and of course Windows games to run on Macs for years. Anandtech did test the Mac Pro under Boot Camp but with respect to gaming.

    Closing Comments and Recommendations

    This compendium of notes and discussion, along with our two companion features, highlight a very healthy dose of key issues involved in the new Mac Pro purchase decision process. The key take-away points should include:

    The last point above deserves closer attention. What single-threaded functions will push a CPU? What multi-threaded functions will push a CPU? The latter is easier to answer for most of us. Rendering animations is a very clear example for the latter.

    In helping to decide which computer to get–between the fastest iMac and the lower entry Mac Pro–for a single-threaded dominated workflow, the reader is advised to consult their software application developer directly for a detailed explanation. Especially if it is not accounted for in any of the testing results referenced above. —- ANTHONY FRAUSTO-ROBLEDO

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