Anyone buy a 2010 Mac Pro to run Maya 2009-2011?

[bluesteel]

I’m thinking about buying a new workstation for Maya 2011. I’m looking at either a 2010 Mac Pro 6-core 3.33GHz/ATI Radeon 5870, or a 2010 Mac Pro 12-core 2.93GHz/ATI Radeon 5870. I’ve been told by Autodesk tech support that although Maya will see all the cores, that its not guaranteed that it will use them, and use them efficiently for rendering. They said that Maya 2011 isn’t optimized for processors more than 4-cores.

I just started using Maya last year on OS X, and I find it absurd how slow Autodesk qualifies new hardware and operating systems, not allowing professionals to take advantage of the latest technology that can save a ton of precious rendering time.

Has anyone pulled the trigger and purchased a new 2010 Mac Pro for use with Maya 2009-2011? If so, which Mac Pro, and what configuration did you get and Why? What version of Maya are you running? Are you having any problems running Maya, bugs?

I was also wondering, if your using a Mac Pro, what graphics card are you using and Why? And, what kind of problems are you having with your particular graphics card when working in Maya?

I realize that the selection of OS X compatible graphics cards, especially workstation cards, is very sad. I wish Autodesk, Nvidia, ATI (AMD), and Apple would work harder and more closely in order to provide better workstation graphics cards for running Maya.

Also, if your using a Mac Pro to run Maya, how much memory do have installed and Why? Have you seen any patterns in efficiency with regards to speed or slowness in terms of rendering? have you found a memory “sweet spot”?

from speaking to Autodesk technical support, i’ve found that on the OS X side of things, they have no concrete advice in terms of how much memory is ideal for Maya when working in the viewports or when rendering. after many conversations with Autodesk, i’d be very surprised if they spend any time at all optimizing Maya for OS X and apple hardware. very sad knowing you just spent $6000 for software that is suppose to be optimized for OS X and apple hardware.

[Aaron.M.Swope]

I use many Autodesk products on my mac/bootcamp. I am an engineering student, so I mainly use Inventor Professional and 3ds Max. I do use Maya on a weekly basis. Autodesk software really doesn't take the full potential of multicore computers as of yet. The only time it does is during rendering, and even then it is hit and miss. now don't get me wrong, I love Autodesk, but as you said, they can be a bit slow on keeping up with the current hardware and OS's.

As for the GPU I have the 5870. as of yet I have not had any issues with this GPU, but then again, I am not a power user in maya. but I can tell you that it is a great card from my experience with Inventor and 3ds Max.

For RAM, I have 24GB (3x8 OWC) my old machine had 12GB of RAM ,and at times, thinks would tend to slow down due to lack of sufficient RAM. Once again as of yet I have not had any issues with 24GB of RAM, but I have only been using this computer for about a week.

[strausd]

I use ZBrush, AE, Maya, and Cinema 4D on a 12-core 2.93.

[bluesteel]

I use many Autodesk products on my mac/bootcamp. I am an engineering student, so I mainly use Inventor Professional and 3ds Max. I do use Maya on a weekly basis. Autodesk software really doesn't take the full potential of multicore computers as of yet. The only time it does is during rendering, and even then it is hit and miss. now don't get me wrong, I love Autodesk, but as you said, they can be a bit slow on keeping up with the current hardware and OS's.

As for the GPU I have the 5870. as of yet I have not had any issues with this GPU, but then again, I am not a power user in maya. but I can tell you that it is a great card from my experience with Inventor and 3ds Max.

For RAM, I have 24GB (3x8 OWC) my old machine had 12GB of RAM ,and at times, thinks would tend to slow down due to lack of sufficient RAM. Once again as of yet I have not had any issues with 24GB of RAM, but I have only been using this computer for about a week.


thanks for the concise reply, its very helpful. what Mac Pro are you using?

[bluesteel]

I use ZBrush, AE, Maya, and Cinema 4D on a 12-core 2.93.

these are the exact applications i use. what was your reaction to any difference in performance with the new Mac Pro vs. prior workstation when using Maya? Are you using Maya 2011?

[galstaph]

I use a 2009 2.26 octo. w/ gt120:rolleyes: (waiting for 5870 to be available)

The main issue in osx lies in the licensing for cores to mental ray (4). In windows, you can run more cores as the licensing is there iirc. Otherwise you can run 2 instances to speed it up (8 cores, 4 per instance) or use the command line to do it in the background to speed up renders. Alternately you should be able to buy more licenses from mental ray. otherwise maya isn't too horrible on a mac pro

[bluesteel]

I use a 2009 2.26 octo. w/ gt120:rolleyes: (waiting for 5870 to be available)

The main issue in osx lies in the licensing for cores to mental ray (4). In windows, you can run more cores as the licensing is there iirc. Otherwise you can run 2 instances to speed it up (8 cores, 4 per instance) or use the command line to do it in the background to speed up renders. Alternately you should be able to buy more licenses from mental ray. otherwise maya isn't too horrible on a mac pro

thank you...makes sense :-)

[Lone Deranger]

I very seriously doubt that Autodesk and nVidia/Mental Images would introduce a deliberate disparity in their CPU/core licensing between OSX and Windows within the same application.

I think what Autodesk means by: "although Maya will see all the cores, that its not guaranteed that it will use them, and use them efficiently for rendering." is that some parts of Maya are still horribly single threaded. Like the mesh operators for instance.

Anyway, I'm going to contact Autodesk and Mental Images and see about rendering performance on the 6-cores. Maybe MI is still limiting their MRforMaya licenses to 4-core CPU's but I highly doubt it.

The main issue in osx lies in the licensing for cores to mental ray (4). In windows, you can run more cores as the licensing is there iirc.

[bluesteel]

I very seriously doubt that Autodesk and nVidia/Mental Images would introduce a deliberate disparity in their CPU/core licensing between OSX and Windows within the same application.

I think what Autodesk means by: "although Maya will see all the cores, that its not guaranteed that it will use them, and use them efficiently for rendering." is that some parts of Maya are still horribly single threaded. Like the mesh operators for instance.

Anyway, I'm going to contact Autodesk and Mental Images and see about rendering performance on the 6-cores. Maybe MI is still limiting their MRforMaya licenses to 4-core CPU's but I highly doubt it.

if you could post here after you have contacted them, it would be much appreciated :-)

[Aaron.M.Swope]

thanks for the concise reply, its very helpful. what Mac Pro are you using?

2010 6-core 3.33GHz 24GB OWC RAM. ATI 5870 GPU. 128GB SSD boot drive x2 (one in optical bay) 1 for OSX 1 for windows. 2x 1TB 7200RPM 1 for OSX, 1 for windows. 2 TB time machine drive

[bluesteel]

2010 6-core 3.33GHz 24GB OWC RAM. ATI 5870 GPU. 128GB SSD boot drive x2 (one in optical bay) 1 for OSX 1 for windows. 2x 1TB 7200RPM 1 for OSX, 1 for windows. 2 TB time machine drive

did you consider a 12-core? if you did, did you not get one because you felt strongly that the 6-core was sufficient? or was it a financial decision? have you run Maya yet? any issues?

[Aaron.M.Swope]

did you consider a 12-core? if you did, did you not get one because you felt strongly that the 6-core was sufficient? or was it a financial decision? have you run Maya yet? any issues?

As an engineering student, I needed a kick ass computer to run CAD software. Because I am a student I was able to get a technology grant so this Mac pro only cost me about 3 hours of paperwork, and essay writing. So my decision was based only on performance. The 6 core at 3.33GHz will run circles around the 12 core. Autodesk software is mostly single threaded, so the increased clock speed, and 24GB of RAM allows the computer to efficiently run single thread processes, while still having 6 cores plus 6 virtual cores for rendering. Yes I have used Maya 2011 on the new machine, and it had yet to even show a sign of a hitch. It also boots Maya 3 times faster than my old machine.

[Lone Deranger]

Aaron, looks like a fantastic setup you've got there.
Would you mind running Cinebench 11.5 (http://www.maxon.net/downloads/cinebench/cinebench-115.html) on your Mac Pro and posting the results back to us please?

Best to run it after a fresh reboot with no other apps running in the background.

Much appreciated.

[bluesteel]

I use ZBrush, AE, Maya, and Cinema 4D on a 12-core 2.93.

just had a conversation with an Autodesk Maya tech support person and his comments are driving me crazy. he kept saying that Maya isn't optimized to run on a 12-core mac pro and recommended that i buy a 6-core mac pro. its driving me crazy because i want to decide today if i go 6-core or 12-core. i don't make a living from my box, so its not mission critical to have speed and power, but i use to get really frustrated waiting for renders on my 8-core 2.26GHz. i can afford a 12-core 2.93, but its hard to justify another $2250 over the 6-core if i am not going to see a huge performance difference with Maya 2011.

are you seeing much faster average render times in Maya? can you elaborate?

[mjsmke]

Im only using a 2.93 quad core for maya. It was either that or the 2.26 octo but tha would have been slow in other apps like photoshop that i use more often. If i do a high res render i just go on facebook while i wait, or make some food or something. I couldnt justify spending almost twice as much for faster render times.

[gabicava83]

$2250 is a lot of money, for something that is currently not supported fully.

I would buy the 3.33 hex, 24GB of RAM and some SSD's + 1TB Samsung HD's and still have money left over.

just had a conversation with an Autodesk Maya tech support person and his comments are driving me crazy. he kept saying that Maya isn't optimized to run on a 12-core mac pro and recommended that i buy a 6-core mac pro. its driving me crazy because i want to decide today if i go 6-core or 12-core. i don't make a living from my box, so its not mission critical to have speed and power, but i use to get really frustrated waiting for renders on my 8-core 2.26GHz. i can afford a 12-core 2.93, but its hard to justify another $2250 over the 6-core if i am not going to see a huge performance difference with Maya 2011.

are you seeing much faster average render times in Maya? can you elaborate?

[Transporteur]

its driving me crazy because i want to decide today if i go 6-core or 12-core. i don't make a living from my box, so its not mission critical to have speed and power, but i use to get really frustrated waiting for renders on my 8-core 2.26GHz.

I don't know wether the Maja render engine can handle all 24 threads of the 12-core system, but if it can and your main concern is to reduce render times, than the 6-core won't satisfy you.

The multithreaded speed of the 6-core is pretty much equal to the 2.26GHz 8-core.
So don't waste your money on a system that provides equal speeds, go 12-core.
If Maya doesn't support al 12-cores as of yet, stay with the 8-core. As I said, the 6-core won't render faster.

[vogelhausdesign]

Cinema 4D, Maya 2010, Realflow 5, I recommend using Maxwell, Mental+VRay for rendering out multicore.

[toxic]

just had a conversation with an Autodesk Maya tech support person and his comments are driving me crazy. he kept saying that Maya isn't optimized to run on a 12-core mac pro and recommended that i buy a 6-core mac pro. its driving me crazy because i want to decide today if i go 6-core or 12-core. i don't make a living from my box, so its not mission critical to have speed and power, but i use to get really frustrated waiting for renders on my 8-core 2.26GHz. i can afford a 12-core 2.93, but its hard to justify another $2250 over the 6-core if i am not going to see a huge performance difference with Maya 2011.

since you have 8 cores right now, have you checked how well it uses those cores? open Activity Monitor and double-click on the CPU usage monitor, it'll show you the load on each core. I think you can make a decision based on how well it's making use of your cores... you can also disable cores and see if going with 6 or 4 cores changes how well they're used.

[chrono1081]

I use Maya 2011, ZBrush, and Houdini mostly for 3D modeling on my Mac Pro.

Maya 2011 sees all my cores and uses them when I render. My render times are great I think.

[chrono1081]

Cinema 4D, Maya 2010, Realflow 5, I recommend using Maxwell, Mental+VRay for rendering out multicore.

Aw I wanna use RealFlow...:( Too bad they don't have a personal learning edition thats watermarked or something.

[strausd]

these are the exact applications i use. what was your reaction to any difference in performance with the new Mac Pro vs. prior workstation when using Maya? Are you using Maya 2011?

Haha sorry for the extremely delayed response. But this is my first workstation, I was using my MBP for all other renders, very limiting. And ya, I am using Maya 2011.

[lunar76]

I recently installed 16GB of Ram on my Mac Pro for Maya 2011, but when im using Maya it doesnt use more than 2-3gb of RAM? Can anyone tell me why that would be?

[dryanreeb]

Maya 2011 WILL NOT WORK with an ati 5770. EX: create poly cube, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away. Switch to shaded mode with one cube, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away, hit #1 for translate mode, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away.

I am curious if anybody else has had this problem with the 5770. I am supposedly being able to trade up my card for the 5870 some time in the near future, but im reluctant until i find some people with a proven track record of being able to run maya 2011 with an ati 5870 hd.

Any advice would be great
Ryan

[sepu]

Maya 2011 WILL NOT WORK with an ati 5770. EX: create poly cube, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away. Switch to shaded mode with one cube, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away, hit #1 for translate mode, wait ten seconds for the beach ball to go away.

I am curious if anybody else has had this problem with the 5770. I am supposedly being able to trade up my card for the 5870 some time in the near future, but im reluctant until i find some people with a proven track record of being able to run maya 2011 with an ati 5870 hd.

Any advice would be great
Ryan


I have a Mac Pro 2010 8 cores 2.4 16 GB Ram with the 5770 and Maya its running smoothly so far here I dont have that problem that you are saying at all, it might be something wrong with ...

I also Run Nuke, Realflow, Zbrush

[J the Ninja]

I haven't had any problems with Maya and my 5770 (2.8 2010 quad, 8GB of RAM) Granted, I use Blender more since I learned it first and am still getting comfortable with Maya (yay @ free student version!) but what I've done with it has all be fine. Blender and Mudbox run fine too, FYI. SmallLuxGPU is also fine....mostly, had some problems with the SPPM renderer at one point, but I got it to work the other day.

[Uncle Pinny]

We just bought 4 Mac pro 12 core 2.66 models with 5870s and 26 gb ram each and Maya 2011. So far our experience is awful. The program is beyond buggy. Even hot fix 3 leaves a wealth of bugs.

On top of that we are finding rendering is painfully slow. And by that I mean our old dual core pcs running 2009 are beating it hands down. We cannot for the life of us work out what is going on. We are doing software batch renders. When doing mental Ray renders it blitzes by but software renders are.just terrible.

I know it's not highly threaded but we are racking our brains as to how to get it running smoothly. People have suggested completely uninstalling then installing from hotfix3 but this hasn't worked. Whether or not we completely removed it I have no idea but we have tried.

If anyone has any advice we would welcome it.

Thanks

[sepu]

here Im running SP1 and so far so good ... of course there is glitches here and there but that is reality of Maya ... but at least I've seen a huge improvement from my last Computer which it was a Quad, with 8GB Ram

[bluesteel]

i'm running Maya 2011 on a 12-core 2.93 with 24GB RAM and ATI 5870.

i've been experiencing problems with some very annoying viewport lag. when i have all 4 viewports shaded with a smoothness of "2" or "3", and i'm in one view, and i try to exit that view with "spacebar", my screen turns dark grey and i get the spinning beach ball for like 5-12 seconds until the four viewports show up. i've called Autodesk, and we are trying to pinpoint the problem. when they tested my scene on their iMac with an ATI 4670, they experience no viewport lag at all...such a pain.

another problem is Mental Ray Satellite rendering. with four extra computers, 8 extra Intel processors and 16GB RAM, rendering along with my 12-core Mac Pro (master), my renders don't go any faster. they render in the exact same time, sometimes a second or two faster. i was told by Autodesk that Mental Ray Satellite wasn't really designed for small render farms, but for major setups. i'm not sure, but i think if i buy a Mental Ray network license, and install on all my satellites, that this might make a difference?

i'm also very curious about this new Quadro 4000 for Mac, and how it will enhance the Maya 2011 experience. i wish Autodesk would test it out with Maya 2011 before the graphics card ships. i'm not shelling out $1199 until i know it'll perform well beyond the ATI 5870.

all in all, i've seen plenty of bugs with Maya 2011 for OSX. but what bothers me the most is the lack of proper customer support, technical support, hardware/software qualification, and the fact that Maya can't utilize a GPU to properly optimize the viewports (ie crossfire, CUDA realtime rendering, etc).

i'm definitely losing my patience with Autodesk. I don't think I'll be shelling out any more money to Autodesk until they get it together.

[bluesteel]

I am supposedly being able to trade up my card for the 5870 some time in the near future, but im reluctant until i find some people with a proven track record of being able to run maya 2011 with an ati 5870 hd.

the ATI 5870 works with Maya 2011, but you may experience bugs, issues. i really wish there was one all-powerful graphics card for Maya that worked seamlessly with the software.

[Uncle Pinny]

I'm genuinely shocked they can charge so much for something that has so many out of the box problems. We shelled out £2800 per single license compared to a vey reasonable £900 per license of C4D (albeit Broadcast version) and got something much more unstable and with less customer support. Add into that C4D uses every single thread our machines can muster 100% (24).

We are kind of thinking we may try to get our money back on the license given it renders slower than 2009 on 4 year old dual cores. I can't believe autodesk can't get the 5870 working well. It's not as if there's a wealth of Mac cards to have to work with and get working well!