Disappointing iMac Pro performance with Motion 5...

Question

Disappointing iMac Pro performance with Motion 5...

Hi,

I am a freelance motion designer and work mainly in Motion 5 for my projects. I'm currently working on an 5K iMac from 2014 with the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4 GB.

So I decided to invest in the new iMac Pro (8-core and VEGA 56 graphics-card /64GB RAM). On 27th of december it arrived and I was very exited to see how it performs in comparison to my current iMac.

The exports of timelines from premiere / FCPX are normally about 2x faster. Great.

BUT realtime playback and performance of Motion is just a little bit better / smoother that my current setup!!! How is this possible?!?!! Running iStat showed that the VEGA 56 is just barely working when using Motion (around 20%). Where as my 5K iMac show a graphics-card percentage above 45%...

How is this possible? I invested a lot of money in this new machine, and since Motion is my main application... I think this little improvement in performance vs my current setup is not worth the money...

Anyone else having this problem?

Thanks!

Sander.

iMac Pro (2017), iOS 11.2.1

Posted on Jan 1, 2018 11:11 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Karsten Schlüter

Level 7

34,098 points

Jan 1, 2018 11:45 PM in response to Sander Zwartepoorte

Sander Zwartepoorte wrote:

…

Anyone else having this problem?

not discussed as a problem, but sharing the same observations at my homebase

http://www.fcp.co/forum/6-motion-5/28404-motion-inconsistant-on-new-imac-pro

Feel free to join the party! 😉

afaik, there are talks 'behind the curtains' about this issue …

Hard to locate the reason for that, but some (very few …) performance numbers leave the impression, Motion ignores cores and GPUs.- The moment, you're project works for example, with 'matryoshka-ed' behaviors as Align-To (some graphic is aligned to some graphic which is aligned-to … you got the idea 😉 ) or, 'excessive' use of, say 1000 particles. Typical jobs for those number-crunchers but no joy …

Over at fcpco, I published a simple motn, in which a 100 cubes ask for calculating their position in 3D-space … = about an hour for export a 30secs. That is … say: strange. Compared to Blenders latest Renderer eevee, which does Volumetrics in real time …

Maybe, as an owner of an iMp and professional user of Motion, you should report straight to Cupertino?

Feedback - Motion - Apple

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Answer 2

BenB

Level 6

12,643 points

Jan 2, 2018 6:52 AM in response to Sander Zwartepoorte

I have test results about to be published that show Motion will not, in fact, take advantage of the iMac Pro hardware. Hopefully Apple will fix this with a patch update soon. Yes, fill out the feedback form, everyone.

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