Transcoding on Mac Pro 2009 vs Mac Book Pro

[Tariqfilms]

Hi All,

I have a Mac Pro (Early 2009) with
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
32 GB 1066 Mhz DDR memory
AMD Radeon Sapphire 3072mb Graphics Card
1 x SSD running (10.11.3) OCZ-Vertex 3 120GB Sata Internal
4 x 2TB WDB Black Drives, these have been made into 2 Volumes Raid. so 1 x 4TB (Video Drive 1) 1 x 4TB (Video Drive 2)

I recently upgraded my graphics card thinking it would speed things up in Final Cut from my AMD 512mb card but I see zero difference in transcoding which is pretty much all I needed the speed increase for.


When I import a test 2 min 4k Video file and select Create Proxy Media file my Mac Pro takes around 8 minutes to transcode into proxy media. With any graphics card.

The same video file on my MacBook Pro 15inch Mid 2014 2.8Ghz Intel Core i7 (16 GB 1600 Mhz DDR3) with NVIDIA GT 750M 2048 MB takes 1 minute.

I tried the video file on an external USB 3 drive and the times are pretty much similar, so am I right in thinking that the transcoding is down to CPU speed and that should I really bother upgrading the Mac Pro? I purchased the graphics card hoping it would make a significant difference but it's made hardly any. Is there anything else that I'm doing wrong or is the transcoding to proxy or optimised purely down to CPU speed?

Thank you

 

[h9826790]

Both are running the current FCPX?

My 4,1 with dual 7950 works very well in FCPX.

I am just a home user, only use it for light video editing. I am not really sure what transcoding is. But I think the GPU basically only use for analysis or rendering. The coding part is the CPU's job.

If the job is CPU raw power related, than there is no way a Quad core MBP can beat the 8 core cMP by 800%. There must be something not CPU performance related.

Can you run the BruceX test to check the performance difference between the cMP and the MBP?

I never own any other Mac, and I only know very little in video editing, FCPX. I am not sure if the quick sync in the MBP speed up the process, if it does, nothing in the MP can beat it. In fact, from your result, I guess it's quick sync related.