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When and where can I find more about Pixar demoing the Mac Pro?
- Thread starter Siderz
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I'm not sure what you're expecting them to do with it. It would serve the same purpose as whatever individual workstations they're using now are doing and would probably perform on par or better depending on how current they are.
It's not like this is some magical solution for any performance bottleneck they're having. All of the heavy lifting will still be sent to their render farm.
That's why I'd like to see it; see what they actually do with it, why would they bother mentioning it if they're going to show regular things?
I also really like Pixar.
Fair enough. I would imagine it to be more of a PR/marketing move more than anything.
I'm a big fan of theirs as well.
They're showing off some pro 3d filmmaking software that's being ported to Mac. It's being done to entice 3d pros back to the mac.
What do you mean?
They're going to be doing stuff on the new Mac Pros with dual AMD FirePro GPUs aren't they?
Dual Workstation Class FirePros is better than anything else a current Mac Pro does
Probably if pressured they will give people their precious CUDA cores as well
The video should get posted here after the session:
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/
You need a free developer account (not a paid membership) to see that page.
Yeah, it comes down to the software you use. Something like Maya would definitely benefit from the Firepros, but others users need CUDA.
So while the inclusion of workstation class GPUs are nice, we won't really know just how versatile this will be for 3d work until we know more info (upgradeable? nvidia options? will software become optimized for open cl? etc.)
Hello, there was an additional MacRumors thread that was chatting about this as well (located here) but the video is up now and for those people that are having a hard time signing up for a developer account (or those who don't want to), we have posted an entire in-depth review of the speech on our post titled, Pixar's Speech at the Apple WWDC Demonstrating MARI on the New Mac Pro.
This is the text I posted on the other thread about the review.
As a high-level review from the Mac Pro standpoint (taking out the Pixar animation discussion), they don't talk about specific stats on the Mac Pro, but Jack Greasely (MARI Product Manager) talks about how great it is as an out-of-the-box computer that has multiple GPU's. Also, Jonathan Hoffman (Pixar's Character Shading Technical Director) says that although he's used MARI for years, this is the smoothest he's ever seen it run. It's also really cool to see the Mac Pro on the desktop next to the monitor - it looks so tiny as opposed to my Mac Pro now which would collapse my desk if I put it on top of it now!
I was hoping for a few more stats or more attention on the Mac Pro, but I understand the purpose was to demonstrate the software. If you're into art at all, the texturing demo is amazing and the story of how Apple shipped him the computer to use (ahead of it's release) in a huge box (so he wouldn't know what it looked like) is funny!
Pixar Post - T.J.
This is the text I posted on the other thread about the review.
As a high-level review from the Mac Pro standpoint (taking out the Pixar animation discussion), they don't talk about specific stats on the Mac Pro, but Jack Greasely (MARI Product Manager) talks about how great it is as an out-of-the-box computer that has multiple GPU's. Also, Jonathan Hoffman (Pixar's Character Shading Technical Director) says that although he's used MARI for years, this is the smoothest he's ever seen it run. It's also really cool to see the Mac Pro on the desktop next to the monitor - it looks so tiny as opposed to my Mac Pro now which would collapse my desk if I put it on top of it now!
I was hoping for a few more stats or more attention on the Mac Pro, but I understand the purpose was to demonstrate the software. If you're into art at all, the texturing demo is amazing and the story of how Apple shipped him the computer to use (ahead of it's release) in a huge box (so he wouldn't know what it looked like) is funny!
Pixar Post - T.J.