iMac Pro iMac Pro for 3D

[jujoje]

We've had threads for graphic design and photography and pretty much every review on youtube has it covered for editing, so it seemed only fair to create a thread for 3D

In all seriousness though, I've managed to find very little how the imac pro performs for 3d tasks, so any rendering benchmarks or general impressions would be great to have. Anything from Arnold render speed to viewport or OpenCL performance would be great to see.

At the moment I'm looking to get a workstation for home, for doing freelance gigs and lookdev, mainly using Houdini. The system spec I was looking at was 10 Core, Vega 64 and 64Gb ram (wanted 128, but at that stage I should probably just optimise my scene better ). So wondering whether anyone here had put the new iMac Pro through it's paces on this kind of work. Particularly curious about the compute speed and core/vs clock speed (I think 12 core is the sweet spot for Houdini, particularly pyro, so the faster speed of the 10 core compared to the 14 core sounds like a good trade off...).

Speaking of which I came across this page on core vs clockspeed in Houdini:

https://www.vfxarabia.co/single-post/2017/09/10/Houdini-Benchmark-Cores-vs-Clockspeed-updated
https://www.vfxarabia.co/single-pos...nchmark-for-Houdini-Vray-and-Realfow-56-vs-12

and it appears that the i7/i9 did surprisingly well compared to the Threadripper and old Xeon. Would the new 10 core be closer to the former or the old xeon processors? (Haven't had a look at processors for a while now and find Intels name scheme confusing as hell).

Anyway, any suggestions/input welcome (even if it is "just get a linux box" )

 

[sputnikBA]

I don't have much to add, but I'm posting because this is a thread I've been waiting for.

I've been searching around in a few different places but a lot of people heavily into 3D work lean windows. Basically a real chicken & egg scenario where most of the software was either windows only / plugins were windows only / nvidia only etc because thats where the users were and he users were there because thats where what they needed was.

I'm hoping that the iMac Pro, Mac Pro, general increase in GPU performance across the line (and eGPU) and Apple's renewed focus on Pros helps here.

bad news is that it still seems there is a ways to go... but the good news is that Apple is supposedly working behind the scenes with companies like OTOY to bring Octane support to AMD / macOS. AMD's ProRender plugin also has inbuilt support in Cinema 4D, as well as currently testing beta plugins for Blender* (and I think Maya as well, but I don have a link to substantiate that rn). I think the Foundry was working on native support for it as well akin to how Cinema 4D does but I don't know the status of that.

An example of the 10core render time on the BMW test in blender (bare in mind its only one user and one test)

This is the 10-core iMac Pro, 3GHz Intel Xeon W, Radeon Pro Vega 64 16GB, macOS High Sierra
(These are the best options for CPU and GPU with the current 10-core, the fastest iMac shipping at the moment)

2.79 OFFICIAL BUILD:
CPU: 01m 10.47s
GPU: 02m 41.65s (OpenCL, as always)

2.79.1 DAILY BUILD (Dec 26 Download):
CPU: 00m 53.53s
GPU: 02m 09.06s
GPU + CPU: 01m 39.35s

I ran each of the above tests twice; both times the results were within 1 second of each other.
Something about the newer builds speeds it up significantly for both CPU and GPU.

For comparison, I also ran it on a 2015 5K iMac, 4GHz Intel i7 (quad core), Radeon R9 M390 2GB, macOS El Capitan
CPU specs were the highest available at the time; GPU isn't (using the M390/2GB rather than the M395/4GB). So the GPU data isn't as useful as it might be (though all iMacs before the iMac Pro seemed to fail the GPU test). Still, the difference is huge:

2.79 OFFICIAL BUILD:
CPU: 02m 34.91s
GPU: 01h 28m 40.89s


Also, the GPU and CPU renders don't match on the 2015. Some of the lights are calculated differently, so you get different intensities. On the 2017, they do match.

From other people here on the forum though I've seen a few users mention that their usage of 3D apps like Unreal editor had dramatically better performance:

Ok, so to balance out my disappointing results with PhotoScan, here's my impressions of playing around with the Unreal Engine editor:

HOLY CRAP IT'S FAST NOW!!!

The difference in performance between my 10-core, Vega64 iMP, and my Late 2015 i7 iMac is so astounding that I don't even need to run exact benchmarks to see the difference.

1) Initial post-install compilation of the 3000 or so built-in shaders finished in just 2 minutes. Normally I'd be waiting around for 10+ minutes as they ticked down one-by-one.

2) Changing a master material (and thus all of its instances too) in a project I'd worked on before, recompiled in 7 seconds. With the results appearing in the viewport in about half a second. I'm used to this taking 20-30 seconds on the older iMac for the recompile, and 5-10 seconds for the materials to actually update in the preview window. This will speed up my material editing exponentially.

3) The biggest gain is in rebuilding the scene's light maps. Went from 3-4 minutes, to ~25 seconds. With the CPU being fully utilized for a good chunk of that.

Obviously Unreal Editor is very well optimized for multi-core systems.

and times for test renders appeared to improve by a reasonable margin compared to existing hardware [check the comments here].


So from what I'm seeing the iMac Pro's prospects look pretty good for 3D... 3D is one of the few disciplines that will make use of both all single and multicore performance you can throw at it (depending on tasks). The problem though is that some of this simply remains "potential" until third party's bring more of their wares on to macOS. Some of this on them and the nature of the market but a fair amount of it is also a result of Apple's historical lack of OpenGL support and now migration to Metal / Metal 2.

...and tbh we'll have to wait to see how all of that plays out. Also maybe 10.13.3 / 10.13.4 (or whatever release it is where eGPU support officially comes out of beta) will include better drivers & performance for the iMP Vegas. For any answers you want on perf right now, you might be better off looking into Cinema 4D forums and seeing what their users think & what results they are getting. They are only software with official ProRender support on OS X so they may be best equipped currently to make use of what the iMP has to offer.








*Beta tests seem to be restricted at the moment and you have to go to their discord to obtain access. may need to speak to user bsavery (brian) who seems to be an outreach rep for AMD

 

[Creedog]

Hi all, figured I could put in my two cents regarding my first week experience as a developer using the iMac pro. Please keep in mind that these are only preliminary observations, and a bit anecdotal. In addition, I have not installed bootcamp yet, so I can’t give direct windows comparisons at this time.

For a little background, for the last 5 years I have been the senior software architect over a team of about 100, building a cloud based, business web application.

A few months ago, I made the decision to leave the corporate world and start my own business. This meant a switch from primarily Windows web / web services / database development, to including an iOS 3D game application as well.

I have been doing minor iOS projects on the side since 2008. So this isn't new to me, just new being a full time job. I had been using an entry level 13" 2012 macbook pro with 8GB ram, no SSD, no retina. I am used to having multiple high end development workstations ($5K+), laptops, and mobile devices at my desk at work, due to my job duties. So the macbook pro just wasn't going to cut it as a primary machine.

I did a bit of research between the highest end macbook pro, the high end iMac 5K, and the low end iMac pro, and finally decided that I could wait 2 months until the iMac pro was released. I got the base model (8core/32gb/1TB ssd) with the Vega 64 upgrade.

For my current project, these are my major work activities:

iOS Game Development

• 3D Modeling, rigging, and animation
• Texture and material work
• C# Coding
• Game/level design and development in Unity

Web development

• Windows Server IIS Environment
• ASP.NET MVC / API web services
• HTML / CSS / JS / jQuery / etc

Database development

• MS SQL Server
• MySQL

Current Mac tools:

• Unity Plus 2018.3
• Xcode 9.2
• Visual Studio for Mac
• Pixelmator Pro
• Blender
• Git
• Beyond compare
• Snagit
• iTunes / Chrome / Safari

Windows tools:

• Windows 10 Pro
• Unity Plus 2018.3
• Visual Studio Pro 2017
• SQL Management Studio
• Beyond Compare
• Space sniffer
• Git
• Resharper
• Office 365 Business

My Impressions

Please keep in mind that I made a very large upgrade. And as powerful as the CPU/GPU are, the SSD probably makes as big a difference in many situations. Also, I'm only going to cover the tools that were costing me productivity.

Memory
The 8GB of memory I had in the macbook pro was a serious detriment. I had to open / close tools and micromanage memory to prevent disc swapping. Currently, on my iMac pro, I have every tool, every project open, hovering around 16GB of memory used. I knew this was my baseline when purchasing the iMac Pro, and figured the 32GB provides a bit of headroom for me for now. I do plan on upgrading to 64GB/128GB at some point in the future (2years+).

Unity
The iMac Pro definitely shines here. The Macbook pro would take about 2 minutes to load the Unity "Open project window" and another 2 minutes to load my project (around 3 GB of assets). The iMac pro opens Unity instantly, loads the project instantly. When switching between projects, this saves a lot of time.

When designing large / complex levels, I would have frame rate issues in the editor, not to mention lots of lag when running the project on the mbp. Some sample detailed asset scenes were so complex, they would crash Unity, or run at 5 seconds per frame Since this was also the dev server, it would cause client slowdowns as well while testing and debugging. I have none of these issues with the imp. It loads any scene instantly, and runs the game within the editor perfectly.

Importing a large asset package into my project would take 10-30 minutes with the mbp. The longest asset import I have had on my imp was about 30 seconds.

Building my project in Unity (prior to xcode deployment) would take about 2-3 minutes on mbp, is about 5 seconds on imp.

Switching build targets (even with cache server) would take about 2+ hours on mbp. On imp, switching from iOS to Windows takes about 5 mins. Switching from Windows back to iOS is taking about 15 min. Not sure why the discrepancy. Need to do a little more testing here, but regardless, this is a huge booster when building out the dedicated server.

Just clicking around, switching scenes, changing tabs, all seemed to have just a bit of lag (or more) on the mbp. Everything I do in Unity now is instant. In many ways, it feels like using an iPhone. I can truly work at my speed.

XCode
This was definitely one of the most painful areas of development. A fresh build would take 22+ min on the mbp. On days where I had to do a lot of direct, on client device testing, I could easily spend 4 hours+ just building and watching the beachball. (Not to mention that I couldn't do any other tasks during this time, the machine was pegged)

On the imp, this is taking 1 min 30 sec - 2 min, from pressing fresh build in unity to being installed on my iPhone. This was the main reason I bought this machine. This time saver alone will pay for the cost of the machine. And I can continue to work in the background during the build. No loss of time.

Pixelmator Pro
To be honest, this was running just fine before, once it was open. It just took a couple of minutes to open. Now, it opens instantly.

Blender
Haven't done much work with blender since I got the imp. Just opened files and tweaked models. Everything loads instantly now, I didn't experience any lag, but didn't do any exporting yet. Most of my 3d models (being mobile targeted), ran smooth on the mbp, with some occasional lag.

Final Impressions
I've always enjoyed developing on Windows over Mac OS. Windows has always seemed more responsive, and allowed for higher productivity. In reality, I've been spoiled by high end developer class PCs, while using mid level consumer mac hardware. Now that I can compare Apples to Apples (?), Mac OS has been a delight, and every bit as responsive as Windows.
[doublepost=1516635415][/doublepost]In addition, I have done a little bit of gaming in Mac OS X, for anyone interested. (I usually game in Windows, better performance, bigger library, but I haven't installed boot camp yet).

I played CS:GO, which ran around 20-45 fps at low settings at native resolution on macbook pro. On iMac pro, at max settings (2K resolution, 5K did not render properly in mac os x), it was 250+ fps.

I also played fortnite. At "Epic" for all settings, it mostly ran around 60+ fps. In large fire fights, It did drop below 60fps once or twice, so I lowered to 1K resolution and never went below 60fps again.

 

[jujoje]

I don't have much to add, but I'm posting because this is a thread I've been waiting for.

Totally missed your reply! Thanks for all the info I hadn’t thought to check out the Cinema 4D forums for benchmarks (Houdini people tend to favour Linux pretty strongly, so unlikely I’d see anything there). Didn’t come across much noteworthy, just the general impression that the new iMac Pro was quick.

Things look promising from a cpu and gpu standpoint, and from the conversation I had with one of the Apple business reps it seems that the popular choice for workstation is the 10-core one (this was the Regent Street store so there are a lot of post and vfx houses around there). He did say that they seemed happy with the new iMac Pro, but he would say that

The problem though is that some of this simply remains "potential" until third party's bring more of their wares on to macOS. Some of this on them and the nature of the market but a fair amount of it is also a result of Apple's historical lack of OpenGL support and now migration to Metal / Metal 2.

I totally agree with OpenGL being a sore point with Apple’s support. From talking with the Houdini devs the lack of dev tools and Apple’s idiosyncratic and outdated OpenGL implantation (OpenGL 4.3?!) are a major source of issues. While Houdini on macOS mostly works well now, I recall Modo on the Mac having severe GL issues (and this was after the guy from the Foundry did a presentation at the Apple keynote).

bad news is that it still seems there is a ways to go... but the good news is that Apple is supposedly working behind the scenes with companies like OTOY to bring Octane support to AMD / macOS. AMD's ProRender plugin also has inbuilt support in Cinema 4D, as well as currently testing beta plugins for Blender* (and I think Maya as well, but I don have a link to substantiate that rn). I think the Foundry was working on native support for it as well akin to how Cinema 4D does but I don't know the status of that.

This is amazing news; I've never known Apple to chase after this market (I always got the general impression that they were pretty standoff-ish), so if they are going after the pro 3D market and trying to collaborate even with the smaller players like OTOY (and hopefully Redshift) then things are looking up. Wouldn't hold my breath though, but definitely gives me some hope they might actually fix the GL and focus on providing a solid platform for 3D work. Makes me wish I could wait for the Mac Pro; money down they're going to do a demonstration with Pixar's xPU version of Renderman, much like they did with the trash cam Mac Pro and Mari (one can but dream).

Oh and as a side note, didn't realise AMD Pro Render was coming along so nicely. Seems pretty decent, although render a cube cause my MacBook Pro's graphics card to melt. But nice to have another player in the GPU market, particularly one that isn't CUDA.
[doublepost=1516655101][/doublepost]

Hi all, figured I could put in my two cents regarding my first week experience as a developer using the iMac pro. Please keep in mind that these are only preliminary observations, and a bit anecdotal. In addition, I have not installed bootcamp yet, so I can’t give direct windows comparisons at this time.

For a little background, for the last 5 years I have been the senior software architect over a team of about 100, building a cloud based, business web application.

A few months ago, I made the decision to leave the corporate world and start my own business. This meant a switch from primarily Windows web / web services / database development, to including an iOS 3D game application as well.

I have been doing minor iOS projects on the side since 2008. So this isn't new to me, just new being a full time job. I had been using an entry level 13" 2012 macbook pro with 8GB ram, no SSD, no retina. I am used to having multiple high end development workstations ($5K+), laptops, and mobile devices at my desk at work, due to my job duties. So the macbook pro just wasn't going to cut it as a primary machine.
...

Must be a pretty awesome step up to go from the 2012 MacBook Pro to the iMac Pro (that's a hell of a spec leap); it must have been painful doing that kind of work on a MacBook; the Xcode times in particular are night and day.

Good to hear you're enjoying your shiny new iMac Pro

 

[sputnikBA]

This is amazing news; I've never known Apple to chase after this market (I always got the general impression that they were pretty standoff-ish), so if they are going after the pro 3D market and trying to collaborate even with the smaller players like OTOY (and hopefully Redshift) then things are looking up. Wouldn't hold my breath though, but definitely gives me some hope they might actually fix the GL and focus on providing a solid platform for 3D work. Makes me wish I could wait for the Mac Pro; money down they're going to do a demonstration with Pixar's xPU version of Renderman, much like they did with the trash cam Mac Pro and Mari (one can but dream).

Oh and as a side note, didn't realise AMD Pro Render was coming along so nicely. Seems pretty decent, although render a cube cause my MacBook Pro's graphics card to melt. But nice to have another player in the GPU market, particularly one that isn't CUDA.

I was pretty surprised when I cam across it myself.

Two (three?) major things that have hurt Apple in this market were weak GPUs across most of their line (which they & AMD seem to be addressing), but more importantly the software side of the equation. OpenGL & Vulkan support being obvious sore points. I still wouldn’t hold my breath on anything other than Metal support given how committed they are to that... but I am cautiously enthusiastic about seeing what 2018 can do for these kinds of apps and their most important plugins on the Mac.

I’m on aging hardware that needs replacement and really wanted to avoid Windows if I can, but was looking as if I wouldn’t have a choice. “If I have to keep going to Bootcamp to get a, b, or c, I might as well just go Windows”.

I’m still keeping eyes of a few things, but I’m at least more optimistic about how much will be available in macOS natively.

 

[phobos]

Finally finished the video and it's up, so you can have a look
On the video I'm focusing more on 3D and more specifically Cinema 4D. I've also used a lot of content browser scenes so if you own Cinema you will be able to compare it to your machine.

So I had my iMac Pro for 3 weeks now. I was blown away by the rendering speed immediately and 3 weeks in I absolutely love how fast and silent it is. GPU rendering is also fast which is something I did not expect! You can definitely do actual work with it. It's not an underpowered card by any means.
In the video I'm comparing with a cheap (in comparison) PC and the iMac Pro came ahead on CPU and GPU tests. The PC cost around 2500 euros so of course if you spec out a similar PC you will probably get more performance out of that. But I'm pretty positive it's not going to be as silent.

ProRender is fast and you will be able to see how it performs in the video. It's using Metal in Cinema 4D and I have the suspicion that it's optimised quite heavily because the renders times on the Mac side are quite good. Which is definitely a plus!

The one thing I forgot to mention on the video review is the very tight SD card port. It has some sort of metal to catch the SD card and it seems to not be padded or anything so after a few times inserting the card in and out my SD card shows scratches on the label! The port is a bit too tight for my liking. Definitely worse than any other iMac.

Let me know if you have any questions or if you want me to test something out! To those hesitating buying one, do not! It's a really nice machine. An expensive one for sure but nice!

 

[Bryan Bowler]

Finally finished the video and it's up, so you can have a look
On the video I'm focusing more on 3D and more specifically Cinema 4D. I've also used a lot of content browser scenes so if you own Cinema you will be able to compare it to your machine.

So I had my iMac Pro for 3 weeks now. I was blown away by the rendering speed immediately and 3 weeks in I absolutely love how fast and silent it is. GPU rendering is also fast which is something I did not expect! You can definitely do actual work with it. It's not an underpowered card by any means.
In the video I'm comparing with a cheap (in comparison) PC and the iMac Pro came ahead on CPU and GPU tests. The PC cost around 2500 euros so of course if you spec out a similar PC you will probably get more performance out of that. But I'm pretty positive it's not going to be as silent.

ProRender is fast and you will be able to see how it performs in the video. It's using Metal in Cinema 4D and I have the suspicion that it's optimised quite heavily because the renders times on the Mac side are quite good. Which is definitely a plus!

The one thing I forgot to mention on the video review is the very tight SD card port. It has some sort of metal to catch the SD card and it seems to not be padded or anything so after a few times inserting the card in and out my SD card shows scratches on the label! The port is a bit too tight for my liking. Definitely worse than any other iMac.

Let me know if you have any questions or if you want me to test something out! To those hesitating buying one, do not! It's a really nice machine. An expensive one for sure but nice!

Thanks for the video -- I enjoyed! It's great seeing what others are experiencing.

 

[physics dude]

Finally finished the video and it's up, so you can have a look
On the video I'm focusing more on 3D and more specifically Cinema 4D. I've also used a lot of content browser scenes so if you own Cinema you will be able to compare it to your machine.

So I had my iMac Pro for 3 weeks now. I was blown away by the rendering speed immediately and 3 weeks in I absolutely love how fast and silent it is. GPU rendering is also fast which is something I did not expect! You can definitely do actual work with it. It's not an underpowered card by any means.
In the video I'm comparing with a cheap (in comparison) PC and the iMac Pro came ahead on CPU and GPU tests. The PC cost around 2500 euros so of course if you spec out a similar PC you will probably get more performance out of that. But I'm pretty positive it's not going to be as silent.

ProRender is fast and you will be able to see how it performs in the video. It's using Metal in Cinema 4D and I have the suspicion that it's optimised quite heavily because the renders times on the Mac side are quite good. Which is definitely a plus!

The one thing I forgot to mention on the video review is the very tight SD card port. It has some sort of metal to catch the SD card and it seems to not be padded or anything so after a few times inserting the card in and out my SD card shows scratches on the label! The port is a bit too tight for my liking. Definitely worse than any other iMac.

Let me know if you have any questions or if you want me to test something out! To those hesitating buying one, do not! It's a really nice machine. An expensive one for sure but nice!

Subscribed! (I also do 3D)

 

[alien3dx]

XCode
This was definitely one of the most painful areas of development. A fresh build would take 22+ min on the mbp. On days where I had to do a lot of direct, on client device testing, I could easily spend 4 hours+ just building and watching the beachball. (Not to mention that I couldn't do any other tasks during this time, the machine was pegged)

On the imp, this is taking 1 min 30 sec - 2 min, from pressing fresh build in unity to being installed on my iPhone. This was the main reason I bought this machine. This time saver alone will pay for the cost of the machine. And I can continue to work in the background during the build. No loss of time.
/QUOTE]
have you try ram disk concept upon compiling ? like this. https://gist.github.com/derjohng/a828e4c40a328fe5881f
4Hour is nasty.. In my year work, even 1 minute annoy me much.

Currently write react-native, don't have much issue after i using external ssd . no need virtual ram

 

[phobos]

Glad you guys enjoyed the video! I'm very happy that the iMac Pro is as powerful as it is and also that Apple didn't mess up. Bullet dodged!

 

[bxs]

phobos: Supper video. I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for sharing it. My iMP is similar to your except I purposely configured it with 128GB RAM which I will say gets used a lot of use with all the i/o my workload does and speeds things along nicely as much of my data sits in RAM within the kernel's buffer cache. CPU<-->RAM speeds are hugely superior even compared to using the internal SSD.

Thanks...

 

[richinaus]

Glad you guys enjoyed the video! I'm very happy that the iMac Pro is as powerful as it is and also that Apple didn't mess up. Bullet dodged!

Yes, thanks so much for posting the video. Very useful. I wonder how the Vega 56 compares to the 64 in real world c4d.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

I'm using the 10-Core, 128GB, Vega64 model.

Modo is my primary 3D app these days, and the difference in viewport responsiveness is dramatic. Whereas my late 2015 iMac, and 2017 MBP would chug and hang trying to transform million poly scenes, the iMP has no problem smoothly editing/tumbling 20 million poly scenes. It only starts to chug like my older system at 35 million polygons or so.

Unreal Engine Editor is also dramatically faster. Not just for the viewport, but in compiling shaders, and in rendering out light maps. It's actually faster at those tasks than my dual-GTX1080ti i7 PC.

 

[richinaus]

I'm using the 10-Core, 128GB, Vega64 model.

Modo is my primary 3D app these days, and the difference in viewport responsiveness is dramatic. Whereas my late 2015 iMac, and 2017 MBP would chug and hang trying to transform million poly scenes, the iMP has no problem smoothly editing/tumbling 20 million poly scenes. It only starts to chug like my older system at 35 million polygons or so.

Unreal Engine Editor is also dramatically faster. Not just for the viewport, but in compiling shaders, and in rendering out light maps. It's actually faster at those tasks than my dual-GTX1080ti i7 PC.

I am looking to use Unreal so this is really good to hear. I don’t quite have the budget for the machine you have but certainly can go 8 core with a Vega 64 and 32gb ram. My models wont be huge, but I cant stand delays or fans when working.
From what you say comparing to the dual 1080ti, it sounds to me that Apple have certainly released a machine fully VR capable. I had been looking at gaming machines with similar specs to what you say, but now I am nearly convinced that the iMac pro is right for me [3D, visualisation, VR]

 

[Somian]

I'm using the 10-Core, 128GB, Vega64 model.

Modo is my primary 3D app these days, and the difference in viewport responsiveness is dramatic. Whereas my late 2015 iMac, and 2017 MBP would chug and hang trying to transform million poly scenes, the iMP has no problem smoothly editing/tumbling 20 million poly scenes. It only starts to chug like my older system at 35 million polygons or so.

Unreal Engine Editor is also dramatically faster. Not just for the viewport, but in compiling shaders, and in rendering out light maps. It's actually faster at those tasks than my dual-GTX1080ti i7 PC.

One question: are you actually able to run the unreal engine editor at the native screen resolution? When I try it on a MacBook Pro with a connected 5k monitor, the viewport only renders at ¼.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

One question: are you actually able to run the unreal engine editor at the native screen resolution? When I try it on a MacBook Pro with a connected 5k monitor, the viewport only renders at ¼.

Yes, it renders at native resolution. Though some of the sprites are obviously lower-res. Renders native on my external 5K's too.

Dunno what model of MacBook Pro you have, but it could definitely be a video memory thing.

 

[smallpaul]

I'm in the market for an IMP myself. I'm a c4d user and looking to cut down render times more than anything. I can't afford much more than the base model but was thinking about upgrading the graphics card to the Vega64 and maybe 64GB of RAM.

 

[jujoje]

I'm in the market for an IMP myself. I'm a c4d user and looking to cut down render times more than anything. I can't afford much more than the base model but was thinking about upgrading the graphics card to the Vega64 and maybe 64GB of RAM.

I've got the 10 Core with the Vega64 and 64GB Ram. I'm not using C4D, but have been pretty happy with the performance in Houdini (mainly openCL simulations and rendering). Compared to my MacBook Pro it's stupidly faster for rendering (Mantra was kinda unstable on the MacBook) and compares well to the workstations at…work.

If you're using Radeon Pro Render with C4D (I think it's default renderer now?) the Vega will be worth it, and 64GB of ram is kinda a no brainer for 3D. That said I'm currently hitting the memory limits of the graphics card before the RAM

 

[HumpYourWayUp]

Doing 3D on the iMac Pro is not too good!
My windows machine (1080TI) outperforms the iMac Pro quite significantly!
I would suggest getting a PC especially due to the upgradeability of the GFX card.

Also very IMPORTANT and nobody seems to talk about it:
http://barefeats.com/opencl_v_metal_resolve.html
Even thought these are benchmarks of a video software they show a trend.
The Metal Graphics API is outperformed by every other API(OpenCL, CUDA) available.
And do not forget Apple plans to drop OpenGL and Co in favor of the inferior Metal API
https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/ (Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL)

Damnit do not drop superior APIs in order to push crappy Metal on Pro users!!! It gets worse and worse!

 

[jujoje]

Doing 3D on the iMac Pro is not too good!
The Metal Graphics API is outperformed by every other API(OpenCL, CUDA) available.
!

Conversely OTOY claimed that metal performance was equivalent to CUDA in Octane. I think it's less metal is inherently slower, but rather that it's a newer API and we're still in the first pass of implementations for major apps. Hopefully soon things will get up to speed.

Would I rather Apple went with Vulkan over metal? Yes. Would I like them to update their OpenGL Driver to at least 4.5? Also yes. However metal is not the all singing all dancing disaster you seem to want it to be.

As for doing 3D on the iMac Pro, I use a linux workstation every day at work, and the iMac Pro holds up well in comparison. This may not hold true for your specific work cases, but definitely does for mine.

 

[rjtiedeman]

I have have simplified my CAD to Vectorworks 2018 for all my design work. My 3D software has to be flexible and needs to work well with Adobe CS products and fuction well in a all mac office design office. I have been waiting for the bugs to be worked out in the new IMP before investing 8K in something that may have issues.

The problem with comparing pcs is they have endless possible combinations. Check the following link. http://cbscores.com/index.php?sort=rend&order=desc

For me as a computer user I would rather have stability in my work day them a slight speed bump that I may not even notice if I go get a cup of coffee or answer the phone. When I started working in 3D I used to keep a book by work station to pass the time when waiting for my mac 650’s screen to redraw. We are light years from that and I have a purchase request in for a 10 core imp.

Also check out the comparison link taken from the Vectorworks web site. If you scrole down you will see a comparison done withthe IMP base model. https://forum.vectorworks.net/index...user-success-hardware-benchmark-results-r699/

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

Doing 3D on the iMac Pro is not too good!
My windows machine (1080TI) outperforms the iMac Pro quite significantly!
I would suggest getting a PC especially due to the upgradeability of the GFX card.

I've got a PC under my desk with two 1080ti cards. Do you know what I use it for? Games and VR. Nothing else. While I use my iMac Pro constantly. That's the value of the Apple user experience, combined with Microsoft's complete and utter contempt for its users, their users' privacy, and their users' right to decide what apps and updates are installed on MY hardware.
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I'm in the market for an IMP myself. I'm a c4d user and looking to cut down render times more than anything. I can't afford much more than the base model but was thinking about upgrading the graphics card to the Vega64 and maybe 64GB of RAM.

HATE to have to bring this up, but you need to realize that Apple's iMac Pro support has been shown to be laughable. My system is running OK again currently, but I've had updates that broke drivers I depended on, and required a clean reinstall to fix. So just realize that if you're not technical enough to work out your own machine's issues, you may find Apple's support to be slow to help you.

 

[rjtiedeman]

I agree completly. I have been working with 3D on the mac for 20 years plus. I work with several mac only design groups and I need to share data. SO THAT SAID. I have never been able to get apple support with anything except mechanical failure. Support for CAD and other job specific software was possible 20 years ago but non existant today. I am not sure it’s any better for PC users. I did get great service recently from NETGEAR with a WiFi Router set up they were very helpful. However applecare will almost always refer you to the Apple Genius which means lugging you mac to the mall to wait for several hours while a non cad user tries to fix your mac issue. They normally pass the issue back to 3rd party tech. we are asking too much for apple to know arcane or obscure software.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

I agree completly. I have been working with 3D on the mac for 20 years plus. I work with several mac only design groups and I need to share data. SO THAT SAID. I have never been able to get apple support with anything except mechanical failure. Support for CAD and other job specific software was possible 20 years ago but non existant today. I am not sure it’s any better for PC users. I did get great service recently from NETGEAR with a WiFi Router set up they were very helpful. However applecare will almost always refer you to the Apple Genius which means lugging you mac to the mall to wait for several hours while a non cad user tries to fix your mac issue. They normally pass the issue back to 3rd party tech. we are asking too much for apple to know arcane or obscure software.

The current problem is not arcane or obscure software, but Apple's own OS and framework updates. Updates that recently have re-introduced bugs that were fixed in earlier updates, and introduced new ones. There's also their recently demonstrated inability to fix iMac Pro hardware issues in any kind of professional timeframe (2-3 weeks instead of 2-3 days), the lack of trained techs (leading to botched repairs), the lack of available spare parts, and their unwillingness to do certain repairs even when you're willing to pay the full out-of-warranty cost of them.

 

[smallpaul]

So I just got my new imac pro delivered two days ago. So far I'm really happy with it. I've done some render tests in cinema 4D and it's rendering at roughly 4x the speed of my 2011 quad core imac.