iMac Pro iMac Pro Bugs?

[bjhinkle]

Has anyone else seen this strange behavior with the breakout view of CPU from Activity Monitor?

Other than this, it seems to be running quite nicely.

IMHO, this is how the normal iMacs SHOULD run for their price point. I hope this graphics performance "trickles down" to the standard models. This machine is actually game capable. I'd say Nvidia 1070 level, maybe 1080. Not Ti though.

 

[06tb06]

I'm stunned and confused by the number of people on this forum who are putting "game" or "gaming" in the same sentence or paragraph of a post followed by "iMac Pro." The iMac Pro is not a gaming machine. The fact that someone would buy the iMac Pro and then compare the graphics card to that of a comparable graphics card in a gaming PC or game console baffles me.

Buying a device strictly for gaming these days couldn't be easier with all the consoles, Steam machines, purpose-built gaming PCs, handhelds, etc. and people are still wanting to spend $5K or more on the iMac Pro just to rate the gaming performance.

 

[bplein]

Buying a device strictly for gaming these days couldn't be easier with all the consoles, Steam machines, purpose-built gaming PCs, handhelds, etc. and people are still wanting to spend $5K or more on the iMac Pro just to rate the gaming performance.

And it never ceases to amaze me how people jump to conclusions.

The OP never said "I bought this iMac Pro strictly for gaming" or that he bought it "just to rate the gaming performance". Whatever the reasons the OP bought the iMac Pro, should he be prevented by YOU to play games on it or hope that the GPU performance makes it into standard iMac models? If fact, that's what he really said, that it would be great to get this level of GPU performance in the standard iMac.

 

[Double-Slit]

Sometimes people buy what they want or like. Their needs are of secondary importance. That's the influence of marketing, and that's what Apple is good at ;-)

 

[bplein]

Sometimes people buy what they want or like. Their needs are of secondary importance. That's the influence of marketing, and that's what Apple is good at ;-)

Sometimes it’s not Marketing. As a technology professional I know I want server class components and extra horsepower even if I would be better served on a cost per year basis by an i7. But you can’t tell me that the reason I run 2 Xeon-based VMware systems in my closet is due to marketing.

I’m a power user. Even though it’s for home/hobby/self-education. My most recent Xeon purchase is for desktop rather than VMware. So what.

 

[OBirder]

Has anyone else seen this strange behavior with the breakout view of CPU from Activity Monitor?

Yes seen it a few times.

The weirdest bug we had so far was that after when the display turned off after 15 min (no sleep) and with a mouse click only the attached second monitor came back to life and the iMac Pro display stayed dark no matter what we did. A reboot fixed it. Happened only once.

 

[Double-Slit]

Sometimes it’s not Marketing. As a technology professional I know I want server class components and extra horsepower even if I would be better served on a cost per year basis by an i7. But you can’t tell me that the reason I run 2 Xeon-based VMware systems in my closet is due to marketing.

I’m a power user. Even though it’s for home/hobby/self-education. My most recent Xeon purchase is for desktop rather than VMware. So what.

Please do not take it personally bplein, I meant people in general and perhaps mostly myself. I would very much like to have an iMac Pro, just because it's wonderful stuff.

I see it as a piece of art, same with my current imac. It's simply an art to put so much technology into one device, to make it work well and to make it look beautiful aswell.

There is no need to justify a purchase to others, perhaps only to the wife ;-)

 

[bjhinkle]

I did not buy the iMac Pro for gaming. I bought it for work, transcoding video, CAD, and general workload.

But if you think I’m not going to try gaming on a Vega 56, you’re nuts.

It runs Starcraft 2 full res, ultra graphics settings, beautifully. It also runs most of my games in high detail at 1080p (more than enough for me) perfectly.

No internet troll is going to tell me I can’t try to game on a Mac with these specs. ;-)

 

[haruhiko]

There are always people even in real life who like to judge people. I've had some friends visiting my home telling me how can I buy cheaper this cheaper that through here and there implying that I'm an idiot buying expensive stuff. Of course, these people are not likely to be my guests anymore ;-).

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

I'm stunned and confused by the number of people on this forum who are putting "game" or "gaming" in the same sentence or paragraph of a post followed by "iMac Pro." The iMac Pro is not a gaming machine. The fact that someone would buy the iMac Pro and then compare the graphics card to that of a comparable graphics card in a gaming PC or game console baffles me.

Buying a device strictly for gaming these days couldn't be easier with all the consoles, Steam machines, purpose-built gaming PCs, handhelds, etc. and people are still wanting to spend $5K or more on the iMac Pro just to rate the gaming performance.

Game performance is a metric that most people can understand. Non-GPU 3D rendering, RAW photo editing, and 8K video encoding are not things that most people have a feel for. But they know how fast game X runs on their current system.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Game performance is a metric that most people can understand. Non-GPU 3D rendering, RAW photo editing, and 8K video encoding are not things that most people have a feel for. But they know how fast game X runs on their current system.

That may be true but its not a gaming machine there are no gaming drivers for the graphics cards and while it will be a fine gaming machine for a professional with leisure gaming needs. It is just not up to the standard of a gaming PC with an overclocked quad core i7 and an NVIDIA 1080 ti with the latest gaming drivers. This is a good thing that same PC will be spanked in all the things you mentioned and the imac pro was designed for.

There is no need to dumb things down for people no need to discuss gaming performance other than to mention it is pretty good and will be better when windows gets better drivers. This is not a gaming machine and endless discussion of the minutae of gaming on it is pointless.

 

[BayouTiger]

Are we going to discuss other issues/bugs here? If so I am seeing a crash/reboot from time to time. The crash log refers to the BridgeOS. I was also seeing this with my nMP since 10.13.2 came out. Seems to be a sleep thing, since I've not had it shut down on me, but return to it with a restart login and a "Your computer was restarted due to a problem" warning.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

Are we going to discuss other issues/bugs here? If so I am seeing a crash/reboot from time to time. The crash log refers to the BridgeOS. I was also seeing this with my nMP since 10.13.2 came out. Seems to be a sleep thing, since I've not had it shut down on me, but return to it with a restart login and a "Your computer was restarted due to a problem" warning.

I've had it fail to completely wake from sleep once. The system seemed to respond to input (I heard login screen bloops), but I couldn't get any of the displays to work without a hard reboot. Nothing came up afterwards about the system needing to restart because of a problem.

More bothersome is the still-shaky 5K external monitor support. I have two Dell 5K displays (dual DisplayPort inputs through Sonnet TB3 adapters) mounted to either side of the iMP, and it took some port swapping and multiple monitor reboots to get both to display 5K at the same time. Turns out I could only get 5K streams on the first and fourth TB3 ports. The Dells still individually glitch from time to time after waking from sleep, requiring me to unplug/replug to reset them. Problems range from disappearing cursors (until I click something), reversion to 1440p, to synch glitches that distort the screens, to intermittent HDCP errors that either prevent me from playing iTunes videos at all, or automatically downgrade them to SD resolution.

I never had these problems on my 2015 iMac with one of these screens attached via both TB2 ports.

On an unrelated (to the iMP) note... iTunes is actively erasing/losing previously purchased movies (like the Avengers) from my account now. Probably some contract thing with Disney. Good thing I'd downloaded most of them, and could just add them back in. Make saves of everything you have in the cloud, boys and girls. You can't trust it to always be there.

 

[Brookzy]

Turns out I could only get 5K streams on the first and fourth TB3 ports.

This is because the four Thunderbolt 3 ports are driven by two Thunderbolt controllers, so if for example you wanted to connect two LG UltraFine 5K (Thunderbolt 3) displays, you’d have to connect one to either port 1 or 2, and the second to either port 3 or 4. This is documented on the Apple support site regarding external displays.

Are you sure you couldn’t get 5K video using, for example, ports 1 and 3? It is strange for only ports 1 and 4 to work simultaneously.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

This is because the four Thunderbolt 3 ports are driven by two Thunderbolt controllers, so if for example you wanted to connect two LG UltraFine 5K (Thunderbolt 3) displays, you’d have to connect one to either port 1 or 2, and the second to either port 3 or 4. This is documented on the Apple support site regarding external displays.

Are you sure you couldn’t get 5K video using, for example, ports 1 and 3? It is strange for only ports 1 and 4 to work simultaneously.

Yeah, I knew about the potential controller issue (my 2017 MBP has it), and assumed that I'd be OK with ports 1 & 3, but it didn't work until I tried using ports 1 & 4. I just checked 2 & 4, and that works too.