Mac Pro 5.1 & Titan X Performance

I have a Titan X 12GB installed in a Mac Pro 5,1 with the latest CUDA and Web drivers. I have another Mac Pro 5,1 that is identical specs but has an ATI Radeon 5770. Both systems are running Sierra 10.12.6.

When running Cinebench R15 the 5770 performs around 67 Frames Per Second. The Titan X averages 56 FPS. The Titan X should perform significantly better but obviously it's not. I want to blame nvidia's drivers but find it hard to believe they would write drivers which are that bad.

Any rendering I do where VRAM is heavily utilized the Titan X does the job I expect it to do. Render times are at least three times faster than the 5770. I used benchmark scenes in Autodesk Flame for Mac to compare.

Any ideas about Titan X FPS performance being low?

Since hard drives are so much slower they are probably already running at their max speed even if on SATA II, as I said they cannot even match SATA II speeds let alone SATA III.

I again advise you to run BlackMagic Disk Speed Test as it will tell you if your drives are fast enough for 4K use. If not you can look at various options to speed things up such as the following.

1. If you have a 5400RPM drive replace it with a 7200RPM drive, this will still be much slower than an SSD of any type but obviously a 7200RPM drive is going to be faster than a 5400RPM drive
2. You could convert two ordinary hard drives in to a RAID0 i.e. 'stripped' RAID, this splits the work between the two drives so you can read half the stuff from one and half the stuff from the other at the same time effectively doubling the speed
3. You can replace the hard drives completely at least for video editing purposes with an SSD, you could keep the hard drives for archiving or backup purposes

The Titan X is or was pretty much the fastest Mac compatible video card until Nvidia literally this month released beta drivers for the new GTX 10x0 family. (Although I believe early reports suggest these beta drivers give poor performance at the moment.)

Your Mac Pro specs are very good but there is one area I would double-check.

You say you have a 250GB SSD but do not say what type or how it is connected. Furthermore a 'mere' 250GB of storage for video editing would be rather limited and implies you may have other additional storage as well. So what are the answers to the following questions.

1. What type of SSD?
2. How is it connected? E.g. to an internal drive bay, or a PCIe adapter - if so which adapter?
3. Do you use this 250GB SSD for both booting from and storing and editing the video files? If you use other additional storage for the video files what kind?

I would also suggest running the BlackMagic disk speed test tool which will show you if your system can cope with 4K video files. See https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12

Ok your SSD appears to be a Samsung EVO 850 which is a SATA III device, it also appears to be connected via the spare SATA port in the optical drive bay. The SATA ports for the optical bay and the SATA ports for the four standard hard drive bays are all SATA II meaning they can only do 300MBps speed. SATA III could in theory do 600MBps.

I do not know the exact speed your Samsung drive is capable of but if it is similar to my own SATA III SSD it will be in the region of 500MBps. So firstly it is going to be limited due to your using SATA II to less than 300MBps since you never get 100% effective speed. In other words probably nearer 250MBps rather than 500MBps exactly as your own results found.

To give you a comparison of what would be possible, a Samsung AHCI PCIe type SSD drive connected via a PCIe adapter would be able to get close to 1500MBps! For the mathematically challenged that is six times as fast as yours.

If your interested in one of these faster SSD drives see the following.

https://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCIe-Adapter-Support/dp/B00MYCQP38/

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-Express-Solid-state/dp/B0179DQM34/

And a speed test comparison - http://barefeats.com/hard200.html

As I am sure you already expect a traditional hard drive is much slower than an SSD. In fact even though some hard drives do come as SATA III compatible drives they cannot get anywhere near the speed of SATA II let alone the speed of SATA III.

So it does seem your storage speed is very likely to be a significant contributor to your problem. I will repeat my advise to run the BlackMagic Disk speed test as it specifically rates the results against the requirements for editing various video resolutions so you will instantly see if it is good enough for 4K requirements.

Note: It is possible via two different approaches to add SATA III interfaces to your Mac Pro so you can run your existing Samsung drive at its full speed, however as indicated above even if you do this you will still only get around 500MBps which will still be only a third of what the PCIe style SSD drives can do.