Would like Comparison with my present Mac Pro

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Would like Comparison with my present Mac Pro

Presently, I have a Mac Pro, late 2013 edition, with a 2.7 GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processor; 64 GB of Ram; 2 AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB Graphics Cards. I use it a lot to render 3D images with DAZ Studio and Poser.

I'm looking over the specs now on the new Mac Pros. I'm wondering how much faster than what I presently have the new Mac Pro would be. Would the basic layer offered be much faster? That includes a 3.5 GHz 8-core processor; 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory; a Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 memory for the Graphics Card. I'm guessing I should up the Ram to 96 GB. If I upped the processor a bit, that would be a 3.3 GHz 12-core.

I really do not understand what all these products are. So, could someone fill me in, at least to would this be a much faster Mac Pro, or what options might I choose (assuming I can afford them) to get a much faster computer.

As a related query, Catalina uses Metal for GPU rendering, and neither DAZ Studio nor Poser can use Metal, so I would still have to rely on the deprecated Open GL and Open CL that Catalina supplies. (At least, that's what I presently believe.) So, does this mean that I would not get much of a boost in 3D rendering if I bought a new Mac Pro.

Mac Pro, macOS 10.12

Posted on Dec 12, 2019 1:48 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

128,269 points

Dec 12, 2019 6:00 PM in response to Stephen Souza1

First decide in what way your current mac is using up its resources. That will require some fooling around with Activity Monitor.

Many Mac Pro users were surprised to find that has RAM and CPU to burn, but their Mac was still slow. That is because it is very easy for it to get I/O bound with two few drives attached.

How to use Activity Monitor on your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Dec 12, 2019 6:01 PM in response to Stephen Souza1

First decide in what way your current mac is using up its resources. That will require some fooling around with Activity Monitor.

Many Mac Pro users were surprised to find that has RAM and CPU to burn, but their Mac was still slow. That is because it is very easy for it to get I/O bound with two few drives attached.

How to use Activity Monitor on your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 3

Dec 13, 2019 12:36 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Well, DAZ Studio is using a lot of CPU and Energy. For example, 2262.6 under CPU %. Memory 5.8 GB. Energy Impact 2256.7. Disk 6.5 MB written; 1.10 GB read. Network 765 KB sent; 2.0 MB received. So, I'm guessing this is saying that a faster CPU, or more cores, would improve the render time of DAZ Studio. Is that correct?

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Answer 4

Dec 13, 2019 4:34 PM in response to Stephen Souza1

If it is CPU-bound, look carefully at benchmarks that compare CPU power. Newer processors that seem trivially different may actually be far ahead in compute power because of architectural differences and advanced and faster caches.

The tragic flaw in many upgrades is that getting additional parallelism in arbitrary software is very difficult. "More than a handful is wasted." That is why processor speed tends to trump having more processors, unless your software, like Compressor, can be optimized for multiple processors.

If your Applications use an advanced graphics processor, it may be worthwhile comparing the old and new GPU (as Processors). but this is fraught with peril depending on how the new software performs on the new GPU. That information may be extremely difficult to find.

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Answer 5

Dec 15, 2019 1:48 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

With DAZ Studio rendering, checking in the Activity Moniter, % CPU is given as 2328.9. The Memory is given as 5.97 GB. I don't see anything for GPU usage.

Question: If my present Graphic Cards, which are two AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB, both contain Open GL and Open CL, why is the CPU usage shown as being so high? Wouldn't the 3D rendering, at least in part, be handled by the Graphic Cards? (The CPU is a 2.7 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5.)

I am trying to check if DAZ Studio and Poser make use of multiple cores in a CPU.

Looking over Graphic Cards for the Mac Pro 2019, the AMD Radeon Pro 580X can deliver 5.530 Teraflops. The AMD Radeon Pro Vega II can deliver 28.18 Teraflops. Both have Open GL 4.6 and Open CL 2.0. The second card looks better, but would rendering in DS or Poser with it mean that DS would render faster?

Mainly, I'm confused here about why the CPU usage is shown as so high in the Activity Monitor when DAZ Studio is rendering.

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Answer 6

Dec 15, 2019 2:14 PM in response to Stephen Souza1

Stephen Souza1 wrote:

Mainly, I'm confused here about why the CPU usage is shown as so high in the Activity Monitor when DAZ Studio is rendering.

it is very possible the vendor of your software prefers one CPU/GPU setup under a certain version of MacOS better than others. If that is your selection criterion, you need to ask the vendor which would perform better, and WHY.

Having the GPU capability to crunch more numbers (more teraflops) will not help in the slightest if, for example, "we only do GPU computation using NVIDIA cards, otherwise, we just let the CPU crunch those numbers".

The 'state of the art' for the Macintosh is Metal-2. But it depends completely on whether the software manufacturer uses Metal, uses something out of date like OpenCL (which will get emulated and may end up in the CPU), or ignores it completely and uses the CPU directly.

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Answer 7

Dec 16, 2019 11:51 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

It looks like both DAZ Studio and Poser use the CPU for rendering.

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Would like Comparison with my present Mac Pro

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