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iMac Pro First impressions of 10 core iMac Pro

P

phobos

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 25, 2008
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Hello everyone
A little bit late to the party but just today I received my iMac Pro.
It's the 10core variant with 64 GB of Ram, Vega 64, 1TB SSD.

Managed to play a little bit with Cinema 4D and Final cut Pro, and the only thing I can say is WOW!
This thing is a beast.
Until now I was using a really old computer (late 2012 iMac) so that alone might have been part of my amazement but it's incredibly fast and most importantly for me, silent!

I left it render for about two hours and it was completely silent!
Pro render (GPU renderer in Cinema) was converging incredibly fast, Open GL navigation with all effects
(SSAO, DOF, Screen space AO etc) was super smooth and real time previews were happening instantly.
I'm just blown away!

Played a little bit with Final cut as well and videos where I had some slowness before were just fluid.

For me at least it's a game changer. I can already see how much of an impact it will have in my work.

Just some benchmarks compared to my old machine.

1) 1975x2500px render

2012 iMac: 28m:10s
iMac Pro: 8m:07s

2) 4000x2250px render

2012 iMac: 135m: 43s
iMac Pro: 39m:14s


I'm going to prepare a video about the iMac Pro in the next few weeks. Let me know if you have anything that you would like to see tested. If it's 3D related even better.
 
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phobos said:
Hello everyone
A little bit late to the party but just today I received my iMac Pro.
It's the 10core variant with 64 GB of Ram, Vega 64, 1TB SSD.

Managed to play a little bit with Cinema 4D and Final cut Pro, and the only thing I can say is WOW!
This thing is a beast.
Until now I was using a really old computer (late 2012 iMac) so that alone might have been part of my amazement but it's incredibly fast and most importantly for me, silent!

I left it render for about two hours and it was completely silent!
Pro render (GPU renderer in Cinema) was converging incredibly fast, Open GL navigation with all effects
(SSAO, DOF, Screen space AO etc) was super smooth and real time previews were happening instantly.
I'm just blown away!

Played a little bit with Final cut as well and videos where I had some slowness before were just fluid.

For me at least it's a game changer. I can already see how much of an impact it will have in my work.

Just some benchmarks compared to my old machine.

1) 1975x2500px render

2012 iMac: 28m:10s
iMac Pro: 8m:07s

2) 4000x2250px render

2012 iMac: 135m: 43s
iMac Pro: 39m:14s


I'm going to prepare a video about the iMac Pro in the next few weeks. Let me know if you have anything that you would like to see tested. If it's 3D related even better.
Click to expand...

Nice report.

This config is same as mine which I'm waiting for except mine will have 128GB RAM.

The two cases you mention show 1) a 3.5x improvement and 2) a 3.1x improvement.

For me, I will be expecting a minimum of 2x improvement compared to my MP6,1 6core, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Dual D500s.

...and in addition I will now be able to run 2 instances of my code simultaneously within the 128GB RAM vs. just one on my MP6,1.... so maybe I'll see 4x improvement in my throughput. :)
 
I mentioned this in another thread but many reviews lean towards video encoding and it would be nice to hear from people who specialise in other “Pro” disciplines.

sputnikBA said:
Most of the reviews skew heavily toward video editing though.

There are one or two that talk about image editing and rendering but personally I’d like to see more input from people in other pro disciplines that might benefit from the hardware. I’d really like to know what the effects the different BTO options have in various fields.

If anyone has any info/reviews on:
- Unreal / Unity / Modo / Maya / Blender / Zbrush etc etc
- DAWs (particularly Logic Pro)
- the better optimised Adobe competitors for image editing (Affinity apps, Pixelmator Pro, Capture One Pro etc).

Please share what you know. I’ve been digging through their respective forums but a lot of these places are either Windows only or don’t have iMPs yet.

I need to replace hardware and like many of you there are a bunch of different options I’m weighing up and the info would help immensely.
Click to expand...

Any insight you have to do with modelling, rendering, animating, texturing and so on would be greatly appreciated. For anyone else it would be really great to see some comparisons between the two Vega BTO options as well.
 
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sputnikBA said:
I mentioned this in another thread but many reviews lean towards video encoding and it would be nice to heard from people who specialise in other “Pro” disciplines.



Any insight you hove to do with modelling, rendering, animating, texturing and so on would be greatly appreciated. For anyone else it would be really great to see some comparisons between the two Vega BTO options as well.
Click to expand...

Yes, I run Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) codes which are highly parallel and can use as many cores as possible. Each core (the worker bee tasks) will require 8GB RAM so having 128GB will allow this on a 10 core machine and leave some 40-50 GB for other things such as the kernel buffer cache when required. I'm expecting a 2 to 3 times improvement compared to my current MP6,1 6core machine with 64GB RAM. The addition of the vector instructions in the iMac Pro will mean recompiling my code and hopefully the code compiler will do the right thing in recognizing code segments that can be vectorized. If so, this will be a big benefit for me.
 
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Hi, im curious how it performs in boot camp with 3dsmax and vray. Not sure if this is in your ability to test? Cinema 4d performance makes me interested.
 
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phobos said:
Hello everyone
A little bit late to the party but just today I received my iMac Pro.
It's the 10core variant with 64 GB of Ram, Vega 64, 1TB SSD.

Managed to play a little bit with Cinema 4D and Final cut Pro, and the only thing I can say is WOW!
This thing is a beast.
Until now I was using a really old computer (late 2012 iMac) so that alone might have been part of my amazement but it's incredibly fast and most importantly for me, silent!

I left it render for about two hours and it was completely silent!
Pro render (GPU renderer in Cinema) was converging incredibly fast, Open GL navigation with all effects
(SSAO, DOF, Screen space AO etc) was super smooth and real time previews were happening instantly.
I'm just blown away!

Played a little bit with Final cut as well and videos where I had some slowness before were just fluid.

For me at least it's a game changer. I can already see how much of an impact it will have in my work.

Just some benchmarks compared to my old machine.

1) 1975x2500px render

2012 iMac: 28m:10s
iMac Pro: 8m:07s

2) 4000x2250px render

2012 iMac: 135m: 43s
iMac Pro: 39m:14s


I'm going to prepare a video about the iMac Pro in the next few weeks. Let me know if you have anything that you would like to see tested. If it's 3D related even better.
Click to expand...
Yes I want to see the video!
 
OP is there anyway you can do a multi day render of a animation through cinema 4d? Would be great to see how it handles long peroids of render times.
 
Hey guys

bxs said:
Nice report.

This config is same as mine which I'm waiting for except mine will have 128GB RAM.

The two cases you mention show 1) a 3.5x improvement and 2) a 3.1x improvement.
Click to expand...

Hope you get yours soon!
I've noticed the difference as well in rendering speed but I kinda think that it has to do with the fact that I was drawing resources from Cinema. Had iTunes and Photos open for the first time and also installing some other applications.
At some point I realised and closed them but it was probably too late. Will re-render and see if there's any difference.


PhysicsDude unfortunately I don't have access to Elements3D.

Sorry to dissapoint PortableLover but I don't have access to Windows and 3DS Max, but I will do longer renders to see how the machine performs. I don't think I still trust it to run renders unsupervised during the night (!!) but I will do longer renders that will last for hours.

The plan so far is to do the following

1) Test more extensively CPU rendering with longer renders and notice if there's fan noise. Report on Render times as well

2) Do the same for GPU based rendering

3) Compare rendering speeds with a similar but much cheaper PC. A friend has an 8 core Ryzen with a Vega Card. I think.
Need to check with him for the specs. I suspect the GPU tests will go to PC and probably the iMac's CPU will win the CPU render test. But it's probably going to be close.

4) Test, throttling a little bit more, when it comes to rendering. To see at what point render performance will start dropping.


If anything else comes to your mind let me know and if I can test it, I will.
 
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phobos said:
Hello everyone
A little bit late to the party but just today I received my iMac Pro.
It's the 10core variant with 64 GB of Ram, Vega 64, 1TB SSD.

Managed to play a little bit with Cinema 4D and Final cut Pro, and the only thing I can say is WOW!
This thing is a beast.
Until now I was using a really old computer (late 2012 iMac) so that alone might have been part of my amazement but it's incredibly fast and most importantly for me, silent!

I left it render for about two hours and it was completely silent!
Pro render (GPU renderer in Cinema) was converging incredibly fast, Open GL navigation with all effects
(SSAO, DOF, Screen space AO etc) was super smooth and real time previews were happening instantly.
I'm just blown away!

Played a little bit with Final cut as well and videos where I had some slowness before were just fluid.

For me at least it's a game changer. I can already see how much of an impact it will have in my work.

Just some benchmarks compared to my old machine.

1) 1975x2500px render

2012 iMac: 28m:10s
iMac Pro: 8m:07s

2) 4000x2250px render

2012 iMac: 135m: 43s
iMac Pro: 39m:14s


I'm going to prepare a video about the iMac Pro in the next few weeks. Let me know if you have anything that you would like to see tested. If it's 3D related even better.
Click to expand...

Love, love, love hearing about everyone's experiences! Thanks for sharing!!
 
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A couple more impressions.

I don't know how it's possible but I seem to be getting the same Cinebench results as the 8core iMac Pro!
On Cinebench 15 the best score I'm getting is 1684. I really wonder how that is possible because I've seen somewhere I can't recall, a score of 2000 for the 10 core.

Anyone else with a 10 core willing to share their Cinebench 15 results?

EDIT: After a couple of restarts I managed to get the score to 1836 but nowhere were 2000. I will leave the system to update and do all it needs to do in the background and check again on Sunday or so to see if something will change.

The other issue I seem to be having is with the wifi seeming to pause and then at some point resuming. It happens with normal web pages and downloads.
At this point I'm not sure if my router is to blame or not but something is fishy.
 
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phobos said:
A couple more impressions.

I don't know how it's possible but I seem to be getting the same Cinebench results as the 8core iMac Pro!
On Cinebench 15 the best score I'm getting is 1684. I really wonder how that is possible because I've seen somewhere I can't recall, a score of 2000 for the 10 core.

Anyone else with a 10 core willing to share their Cinebench 15 results?

EDIT: After a couple of restarts I managed to get the score to 1836 but nowhere were 2000. I will leave the system to update and do all it needs to do in the background and check again on Sunday or so to see if something will change.

The other issue I seem to be having is with the wifi seeming to pause and then at some point resuming. It happens with normal web pages and downloads.
At this point I'm not sure if my router is to blame or not but something is fishy.
Click to expand...
Could you run intel power gadget and tell me what frequency your CPU is running at during the test?
 
phobos said:
The other issue I seem to be having is with the wifi seeming to pause and then at some point resuming. It happens with normal web pages and downloads.
Click to expand...
If this is happening consistently, please file a radar.
 
phobos said:
A couple more impressions.

I don't know how it's possible but I seem to be getting the same Cinebench results as the 8core iMac Pro!
On Cinebench 15 the best score I'm getting is 1684. I really wonder how that is possible because I've seen somewhere I can't recall, a score of 2000 for the 10 core.

Anyone else with a 10 core willing to share their Cinebench 15 results?

EDIT: After a couple of restarts I managed to get the score to 1836 but nowhere were 2000. I will leave the system to update and do all it needs to do in the background and check again on Sunday or so to see if something will change.

The other issue I seem to be having is with the wifi seeming to pause and then at some point resuming. It happens with normal web pages and downloads.
At this point I'm not sure if my router is to blame or not but something is fishy.
Click to expand...

There's some details with the 10 core and 8 core if you'd like to check it out. you should be getting around 1850-1900 on the benchmark for the 10 core...that's given cinebench which will temp up the CPU and drop your 10 core down to about 3.5-3.6GHz. The 8 core drops to 3.9, so given the multiplier and getting about a 1675 on the 8 core, your 10 core actually makes sense. The Geekbench results are not very good, and cinenbench is only so good. You basically need to run a burn in test and immediately benchmark the CPU to see the actual performance in the end.
 
Ok so I started activity monitor and there's photoanalysisid doing the face recognition stuff and taking around 10% of the CPU. When that was not running I could get close to 2000 in Cinebench. I will leave it do its thing during the night (still needs to download and process 13.000 more pictures) and hopefully in the morning the CPU will not be hogged by that process.

I'm not really concerned about the actual score I just got a little bit worried when the first run-through showed similar results to the 8 core. Now that I know that there are things going on in the background I'm a little bit more relaxed.

Trebuin as you mentioned the 10 core downclocks lower than the 8 core so that could also have an effect. Either way I'll try in the morning and see what will happen then.

Concerning the wifi issue, at the moment I'm connected through ethernet and everything works as expected. Fast downloads, fast page loading. Will inspect further the following days.

The one last thing I find a little bit weird is the actual sound from the speakers. I'm not a big fan of how it sounds.
It looks like there's a lot of stereo separation or they're using some sort of effect to enhance stereo and it just sounds a little bit weird to me. Also there's a bit too much base. I kinda liked how the late 2012 iMac sounded!


Other than that I'm still very impressed by the machine. Will do some more benchmarks and post them here once all the background procedures finish up.
[doublepost=1515188401][/doublepost]
shadow82x said:
Any backlight bleed? :)
Click to expand...

I believe there is (top left) and I basically found out about it on the first boot up when there was a black screen and the brightness set on max. But I'm one of the few people who have their brightness on just one bar so I cannot really see the light bleed and I have a dark background as my desktop.
 
no light bleed on mine...it's rather irritating given when it's turned on & the screen is completely black...it looks no different to me than when off. I'd like the start chime back.

Edit: it does show a little brighter in the corners when I max out the light...but the screen is painfully bright then.
 
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Hi Phobos. I have a mid-2010 12-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro and would love to see direct C4D render comparisons (Standard or Physical). Could you render a few of the preset scenes and show your times, and I'll do the same. Still wondering if the 10-core is worth the investment, or wait for the (mythical and possibly very expensive) Mac Pro.
 
skippermonkey said:
Hi Phobos. I have a mid-2010 12-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro and would love to see direct C4D render comparisons (Standard or Physical). Could you render a few of the preset scenes and show your times, and I'll do the same. Still wondering if the 10-core is worth the investment, or wait for the (mythical and possibly very expensive) Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Here you go! Here are three scenes taken out of the Studio library. Didn't make any changes other than adding the info watermark. It was just loading the scene and hitting render.

The Grapes and Rocks scenes are CPU based while the Save The Princess scene is GPU based

Would be interesting to see your results as well. Just to see if there are any improvements!

Grapes.jpg
Rocks.jpg
Save The Princess - GPU Rendering.jpg
 
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Thanks! My Mac Pro rendered the grapes project in 6:50 (the iMac is 79% faster), while the rocks took 1:26, where the iMac is 68% faster. The princess scene just crashes my Mac if I render to the Picture Viewer, although my Nvidia card does render to the display – weird. These percentages pretty much bear out the benchmarks I've been seeing.

If you want to try some more, in the same folder Cheese took 1:06; Cogs (frame 96) took 6:04; Docking bay was 6:19; and Sun Light - Fabric was 6:53. Be interesting to see if any scenes can render a full 100% faster!

Am really in two minds about getting one – but I imagine the general C4D workflow is just much snappier with that faster single core performance.
 
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