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Ram myth...

T

the vj

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 23, 2006
654
0
Ok, I have a dual quad core 2.6 mac pro.

I added 8GB for a total of 10GB.

So... I am using After Effects and the render takes all 8 cores. After effects uses maximun 3.5 GB and I have multiprocessing enable.

The thing is that once I am rendering I can not touch the machine, everything slow down, even opening Safari is slow.

The thing is that having 10GB is basically useless. In my experienece any mac can run perfect with 6GB, adding more is wasting money.

After 10GB I do have more capacity of course but the system is not faster and everything is limited by the procesors capacity, period.
 
is that program 32 or 64-bit?

I might be wrong but isn't adobe still 32-bit on the mac side?
 
10 GB is definitely not a waste of money, as you have put it. That amount of RAM allows you to do more things at once. Increasing RAM doesn't usually speed up the eventual rendering (most of that is processor speed and how well the program can utilize the graphics card), but if you want to be editing, color correcting, compositing, titling, and working with audio at the same time that RAM will get used and it's likely that even 10 GB might not be enough.

P-Worm
 
Unless your app is 64bit, the app can only use around 3gb of ram.

You can however make ram disk and use that for scratch.
 
a 32-bit app like AE CAN use more than 3GB of RAM when using the render cue and enabling multi-processing because it creates multiple instances/virtual nodes and each one is capable of using 3GB of RAM.
 
Consultant said:
Unless your app is 64bit, the app can only use around 3gb of ram. You can however make ram disk and use that for scratch.
Click to expand...

I second the ram disk for scratch! In effect you are using a portion of your ram as a hard drive except it is much, much faster than a hard disk and still smokes Intel X-25's.

Here is a thread about hardware based ram disks, such as the Hyperdrive or the ANS-9010, but the first reply describes how to set up a ram disk for your purposes.
 
Chris7 said:
So PPro CS4 is 32 bit for PC and 64 bit for Mac? Is this true with After Effects, also? Leopard is a 64 bit OS, yes?
Click to expand...

No, the other way around: CS4 is only 32 bit for OSX but 64 bit for Windows.
OSX won't have 64-bit until CS5.

After Effects is on the way (for windows).
Here's a link (look at march 16) with some more information: (and further links):

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/64bit/
 
Tosser said:
No, the other way around: CS4 is only 32 bit for OSX but 64 bit for Windows.
OSX won't have 64-bit until CS5.

After Effects is on the way (for windows).
Here's a link (look at march 16) with some more information: (and further links):

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/64bit/
Click to expand...

Thanks. I looked at one of the links on the March 16th section: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_64bit_wp.pdf

In the FAQ section it says,
"What do I need to do to upgrade to 64-bit on a Mac?
Mac OS Leopard is already 64-bit capable and ready to use additional memory. All you need
to do is upgrade the memory to start seeing the benefits."

Is there a difference between "64-bit capable" and actual 64-bit?

Will AE and PPro work as well on Leopard as they will on Vista (by "as well," I'm referring to the benefits listed in the link, like faster rendering, taking advantage of more RAM, etc.)?

-Chris
 
Chris7 said:
Thanks. I looked at one of the links on the March 16th section: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_64bit_wp.pdf

In the FAQ section it says,
"What do I need to do to upgrade to 64-bit on a Mac?
Mac OS Leopard is already 64-bit capable and ready to use additional memory. All you need
to do is upgrade the memory to start seeing the benefits."

Is there a difference between "64-bit capable" and actual 64-bit?
Click to expand...
Well, yes. The OS is "capable" of taking advantage of extra ram, since it is64 bit, even if the app itself aren't.

Will AE and PPro work as well on Leopard as they will on Vista (by "as well," I'm referring to the benefits listed in the link, like faster rendering, taking advantage of more RAM, etc.)?

-Chris
Click to expand...
No, not if you're running Vista 64 bit, but since os X is already 64 bit "capable", it can take advantage of more ram as a whole. AE CS4 on OS X is 32 bit, 64 bit on Vista.

Edit: Lightroom 2 is supposedly 64 bit on both platforms.
 
Tosser said:
Well, yes. The OS is "capable" of taking advantage of extra ram, since it is64 bit, even if the app itself aren't.

...No, not if you're running Vista 64 bit, but since os X is already 64 bit "capable", it can take advantage of more ram as a whole. AE CS4 on OS X is 32 bit, 64 bit on Vista...
Click to expand...
Sincere thanks for the clarification.

So what will AE and PPro be able to do better once they are made 64-bit for OSX?

-Chris
 
Chris7 said:
Sincere thanks for the clarification.

So what will AE and PPro be able to do better once they are made 64-bit for OSX?

-Chris
Click to expand...

Yes, better than now, but no doubt not better than their Win-counterparts which by then will be even more polished.

People more or less agree that it will be 64bit on OS X in CS5, but in reality, that is not even a given. Adobe have said "in a future release", so it might not even happen before, say, CS6 (assuming they still use the "CS" numbering).
 
Mac4Obama said:
is final cut pro 64 bit or 32 bit like cs4?
Click to expand...
Tosser said:
I believe it's still a 32-bit carbon app.
Click to expand...
On a lynda.com tutorial, Larry Jordan said that FCP can make use of only 4 GB of RAM. Is this accurate?
Tosser said:
, I just realised you were asking what they'll be able to do better.They will be able to adress lots more ram
Click to expand...
Thanks. I wonder if this is why some say that PPro seems to be more stable on Vista 64 than OSX? Any guess as to how much RAM PPro and AE CS4 can access on OSX?
 
Chris7 said:
On a lynda.com tutorial, Larry Jordan said that FCP can make use of only 4 GB of RAM. Is this accurate?
Click to expand...
Actually, by definition it should be somewhere in the realm of 3.25GB. But in order to do that, one would need to have 4GB, so, yeah, one could say that everything above buying 4GB ram is wasted.

Thanks. I wonder if this is why some say that PPro seems to be more stable on Vista 64 than OSX? Any guess as to how much RAM PPro and AE CS4 can access on OSX?
Click to expand...
There can be a lot of reasons for better stability. Or to put it in reverse: The instability can be caused by a lot of different things.

I have just switched (from Macs to Thinkpads) and I'm still on Vista Business, 32-bit, until I feel at home. Until I feel at home, say, in a month or two, I will be using this 32bit os, because I'm worried about instability caused by drivers, or, hell, even not being able to find the drivers I want. This of course depends on your hardware and what you will plug into it and so on, but I'm trying to say that the stability/instability you experience can be caused by many things, not necessarily because it's 64bit/32bit. A lack of ram, too much heat and so on can cause instability as well.

But, anyway, OS X as such has a problem with firewire. Even if you buy an expresscard with the superiour Texas Instruments chipset, it doesn't work as it should when using it for audio (dropouts, clicks and at times the inability to recognise that something is connected), and in video you run the risk of dropped frames and whatnot. However, if you boot into windows on the very same computer, none of these things happen.

Even USB is slower on OSX than Windows for some odd reason. It has always been like that, but until they decided to cripple and on some hardware entirely remove firewire, this was not a problem at all.

I'm saying all this, not to put Apple down, but to show that it's not necessarily the app itself or whether the OS is 64bit or 32bit that matters.

I believe PPro on OSX, as it is a 32bit app, will be able to address the same as FCP, also a 32bit app - around 3.25GB ram.
 
Tosser said:
There can be a lot of reasons for better stability. Or to put it in reverse: The instability can be caused by a lot of different things...
I'm saying all this, not to put Apple down, but to show that it's not necessarily the app itself or whether the OS is 64bit or 32bit that matters.

I believe PPro on OSX, as it is a 32bit app, will be able to address the same as FCP, also a 32bit app - around 3.25GB ram.
Click to expand...
Interesting. On the PPro side they keep on saying 8 GB minimum of RAM, and also that PPro works better on Vista 64 than a 32-bit Windows or OSX. I bet this is at least partly due to PPro being a RAM hungry app. I know you listed several things of why things can run better on Vista than OSX, besides the RAM. Maybe this will all be addressed with CS5 and Snow Leopard. (But that's probably what they said about CS4 and Leopard.;))
 
Can you limit your rendering to 7 cores or less? That'll leave the last core available to process something.

You can have all the RAM in the world, but if you're pegging all of the CPUs for something, you won't have much "power" left to do anything.

32bit/64bit won't do squat for you in this case.
 
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