Hi to all!
Its the first time I post on MacRumors. Recently I bought my first ever Macintosh iMac computer, its the 2011 aluminum one. One important reason for purchasing an iMac was to develop apps for ios devises. However, my main area of expertise is 3D and 2D graphics and I wasnt quite sure whether I should by a Mac pro or an iMac.
The budget I was willing to spend at the time would cover a basic Mac Pro: (One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor 3GB (three 1GB memory 6GB (six 1GB) memory memory, 1TB hard drive, and the ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5).
For same money I could by a maxed-out iMac: (27-inch: 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 16GB Ram memory 1TB hard drive, 256 SSD, AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2GB).
So I thought that the Quad Core i7 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of Ram combined with a 2GB of ATI GPU card would be more than just good for my work. Btw, I also knew a general consensus that Mac computers are mostly used by those who work on graphics as designers. Considering the fact that Mac Pros have been out for too long and might be on the end of their life sickle I considered that the best way to go is the maxed-out iMac which has the 2 thunderbolt port as well.
However, issues have risen when using 2D applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and flash CS5. And the same issues appear when using 3D applications such as Maxons Cinema 4D Studio R.12 (not to mention that Maya 2012 does not work on OS X Lion and Autodesk officially says to Mac users do not upgrade to OS X Lion and 3D Studio Max simply doesnt exist for Macintosh computers but that is out of the course of my question). The issues I face while working on illustrator, and Cinema 4D r.12 mainly are:
Loading icon when rotating or zooming-in the main camera to an object as well as camera movement delays which cause mouse-control unresponsiveness especially when the sciences are heavy, and by heavy I mean 50 blends (with a gradient fill on these 50 objects) on Illustrator using the Blend tool and 4 simple lights on a scene which contains 18 polygon objects which the overall geometry does not exceed 20.000 polys creating an overall frustrating user experience...
From personal experience these are not extremely heavy sciences and I wouldnt expect the iMac! with a 2GB of GPU to have these rather trivial lags, which reminds me of my PC, bought in 2007 with an Intel Duo processor at 3GB ram and an NVidia G-force 8800-gt GPU at 512GB.
So the question is is there a way to better the iMacs performance when using Adobe CS5 products and 3D packages or I have simply done the wrong choice buying an iMac to work on graphics? Btw it looks like the ATI GPU might perform poorly since its more tailored for games when compering to nVidia GPUs which perform better on graphic applications, which again leads me on the second part of my my question since I cant upgrade/change the GPU
Thank you, in advance for taking the time to read my story.
Its the first time I post on MacRumors. Recently I bought my first ever Macintosh iMac computer, its the 2011 aluminum one. One important reason for purchasing an iMac was to develop apps for ios devises. However, my main area of expertise is 3D and 2D graphics and I wasnt quite sure whether I should by a Mac pro or an iMac.
The budget I was willing to spend at the time would cover a basic Mac Pro: (One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor 3GB (three 1GB memory 6GB (six 1GB) memory memory, 1TB hard drive, and the ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5).
For same money I could by a maxed-out iMac: (27-inch: 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 16GB Ram memory 1TB hard drive, 256 SSD, AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2GB).
So I thought that the Quad Core i7 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of Ram combined with a 2GB of ATI GPU card would be more than just good for my work. Btw, I also knew a general consensus that Mac computers are mostly used by those who work on graphics as designers. Considering the fact that Mac Pros have been out for too long and might be on the end of their life sickle I considered that the best way to go is the maxed-out iMac which has the 2 thunderbolt port as well.
However, issues have risen when using 2D applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and flash CS5. And the same issues appear when using 3D applications such as Maxons Cinema 4D Studio R.12 (not to mention that Maya 2012 does not work on OS X Lion and Autodesk officially says to Mac users do not upgrade to OS X Lion and 3D Studio Max simply doesnt exist for Macintosh computers but that is out of the course of my question). The issues I face while working on illustrator, and Cinema 4D r.12 mainly are:
Loading icon when rotating or zooming-in the main camera to an object as well as camera movement delays which cause mouse-control unresponsiveness especially when the sciences are heavy, and by heavy I mean 50 blends (with a gradient fill on these 50 objects) on Illustrator using the Blend tool and 4 simple lights on a scene which contains 18 polygon objects which the overall geometry does not exceed 20.000 polys creating an overall frustrating user experience...
From personal experience these are not extremely heavy sciences and I wouldnt expect the iMac! with a 2GB of GPU to have these rather trivial lags, which reminds me of my PC, bought in 2007 with an Intel Duo processor at 3GB ram and an NVidia G-force 8800-gt GPU at 512GB.
So the question is is there a way to better the iMacs performance when using Adobe CS5 products and 3D packages or I have simply done the wrong choice buying an iMac to work on graphics? Btw it looks like the ATI GPU might perform poorly since its more tailored for games when compering to nVidia GPUs which perform better on graphic applications, which again leads me on the second part of my my question since I cant upgrade/change the GPU
Thank you, in advance for taking the time to read my story.