new MAC PRO

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Has anyone had any experience with a 3ds max/vray combo running on a new MAC Pro?
specifically I'm asking whether those dual video cards can actually be utilised properly within Vray RT.

With so many conflicting reports, I'm also wondering whether the FireGL's in the mac pro are better/worse than Quadros within MAX.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Mac Pro run on ATI - I'm not sure if ATI is yet supported so I guess you should not buy mac pro if you want gpu rendering.

[kagemaru]

We got four here already running. Maxed out versions, more then 9000€ each.
Stay away from this thing. I won't say anything else.

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

kagemaru; thank you for your frank response But I would certainly love if you could elaborate on why I should stay away?
On paper it seems great!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

They are very bad and you pay 65% of the price for the brand and apple logo.

[kagemaru]

kagemaru; thank you for your frank response But I would certainly love if you could elaborate on why I should stay away?
On paper it seems great!

I don't want to start os/hw/app war.
From my experience:
- four out of four here have had cooling issues (open space with 20+ pc around and air conditioning) that slow down cpu/performances
- to this day no one that i care about still supports openCL (useless double video cards)
- coupled with thunderbolt displays it's a disaster, several apps don't even start or have major issues (nuke8, resolve), how can a freaking display crash my apps it's beyond my comprehension
- you can't expand almost anything so i get this nice tiny cinerarium with any sort of cable around (reminds me a medusa): for example we have a fiber channel network and to connect to it i need an external boxed card that is as big as the mac pro itself
- random starts with ruined video signal, need to restart
- osx mavericks have problems, loses network connection, etc

Bottom line it's absurdly expensive and you are basically beta testing it. I can't think about any professional that would buy this thing (at this moment) apart from hipster editors that value apples more than money.

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

I don't want to start os/hw/app war.
From my experience:
- four out of four here have had cooling issues (open space with 20+ pc around and air conditioning) that slow down cpu/performances
- to this day no one that i care about still supports openCL (useless double video cards)
- coupled with thunderbolt displays it's a disaster, several apps don't even start or have major issues (nuke8, resolve), how can a freaking display crash my apps it's beyond my comprehension
- you can't expand almost anything so i get this nice tiny cinerarium with any sort of cable around (reminds me a medusa): for example we have a fiber channel network and to connect to it i need an external boxed card that is as big as the mac pro itself
- random starts with ruined video signal, need to restart
- osx mavericks have problems, loses network connection, etc

Bottom line it's absurdly expensive and you are basically beta testing it. I can't think about any professional that would buy this thing (at this moment) apart from hipster editors that value apples more than money.

Thanks for explaination kagemaru,

It certainly sounds as if there are plenty of things to sort out. I assume most of this happens within OSX? I was thinking of primarily using it in win 8 w/ 3dsmax , RT with opencl.
There's obviously no competition when it comes to bang vs buck that this thing is expensive. I thought I could somewhat justify the cost because a. The cpu would be upgradable. b. The ram could be too. c. Thunderbolt connect some serious CUDA cards for future RT work. d. i/o speeds out of this world. e. its just so darn pretty.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Thanks for explaination kagemaru,

It certainly sounds as if there are plenty of things to sort out. I assume most of this happens within OSX? I was thinking of primarily using it in win 8 w/ 3dsmax , RT with opencl.
There's obviously no competition when it comes to bang vs buck that this thing is expensive. I thought I could somewhat justify the cost because a. The cpu would be upgradable. b. The ram could be too. c. Thunderbolt connect some serious CUDA cards for future RT work. d. i/o speeds out of this world. e. its just so darn pretty.

Just get black bin and put apple sticker on it.

[kagemaru]

Thanks for explaination kagemaru,

It certainly sounds as if there are plenty of things to sort out. I assume most of this happens within OSX? I was thinking of primarily using it in win 8 w/ 3dsmax , RT with opencl.
There's obviously no competition when it comes to bang vs buck that this thing is expensive. I thought I could somewhat justify the cost because a. The cpu would be upgradable. b. The ram could be too. c. Thunderbolt connect some serious CUDA cards for future RT work. d. i/o speeds out of this world. e. its just so darn pretty.

Well i don't know of course, but if it were my money, especially as things are today, it would be a no brainer.
The owner of the studio i'm working has been an apple fan boy since the early days (bought apple stocks in the 80s...), and i have nothing against apple, win, linux, i've used them all in small to big houses (from my home to mpc/framestore), it just isn't a proper machine right now.
I'm a strong advocate of previous mac pro for example, and speaking of which, instead of buying new black bins i am now making the boss buying upgraded parts (gtx 780ti and ssd hard disk) for our 2010 dual esacore mac pros that will crash these new one at a third of price.
Btw yes i'm mostly on osx at my desk (most comp/color), but that's another cons for the new mac pro to me, you can install just windows 8, no win7 whatsover. Don't know about RT with openCL, we run it especially on CPU/CUDA and as far as i know i haven't heard vlado very keen on the openCL side of it.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

openCL most of the time is pretty good as far as I remember. Its just ATI and their drivers that mess stuff up.

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

thanks for both your input. At the end of the day it would seem if you're dropping that much cash on it, its gotta work properly. I'm quite surprised at all the issues, and hopefully its just a course of software patches to remedy the situation.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Thy have been patching it since RT GPU got released. Dont get ur hopes up. There were some glimpses of ATI cards working but so far no 100%. I dont think that with pc hardware thinking "If it cost 5-10k£ it must be the best". You will be much better off with custom build pc of nowedge US - or scan - UK than any of those crappy dell/hp/apple/ibl/boxxx machines,

[Jvincentfx45]

Hello,

I was wondering if you got the new Mac Pro? I actually just purchased one and have been having a hell of a time with running vray for maya on windows 8.1. As of this time actually it's a disaster. it seems the dongle drivers and windows 8.1 are having some issues working together if you stop by the vray 3.0 maya beta forum I have a thread in there with some screen shots of what I am dealing with. I was hoping it was a bad dongle but this evening I broke and installed vray for maya on osx and everything is working amazingly this is a bit of a issue because of plugin in support but all I can do as of now. I was hoping to network it to my other Mac Pro.

Anyway was wondering if you got the Mac Pro if so have u had any issues with the dongle drivers? I can't speak about the heat to much mine is running quite cool a few degrees cooler than my other Mac Pro. I am more worried about this dongle issue if you guys have any suggestions that would be great.

Thanks, Jimmy

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Hi All,

So despite pretty much everyone has advised against getting one of these machines, I've gone ahead and gotten one. Hopefully my experiences might shed some light on anyone who's still considering one of these
I'll try and briefly outline what I do and what I require from the machine.

I do general 3D with an emphasis on aviation and architecture. So that means vray rendering in the traditional CPU sense is whats used the most.

The first obstacle was the bang Vs buck, and while you certainly can't compare windows boxes to this the nMP, it's a little more complicated when your requirements aren't standard.
The config I got was. Hex Core Xeon @ 3.5, 16GB ram, Dual D700 a.k.a FireGL W9000 a.k.a Radeon 7970, 1TB PCIE SSD

The things i really needed from this machine were

Size
Portability (can take it to work from home when needed)
Dual O/S
decent cpu performance
great IO performance

I use Windows 80% of the time and currently have Windows 8.1 Pro installed.
3ds max + adobe apps have all installed without a hitch and is behaving as you would expect from any win box.
As you can imagine the 1TB PCIE SSD flies. its stupidly quick!

Vray: Nothing to report here, it works as expected

Vray RT GPU OpenCL: With the latest beta Catalyst drivers it works flawlessly. Very surprised. The interesting thing is that these drivers are the standard gaming ones which recognise the cards as being Radeon 7970's.

So far, everything seems to be running smoothly. The box, I mean cylinder does get quite toasty warm when really pushing it with gaming and RT but the fan is still pretty darn quiet.

Happy to answer questions if anyone has any..