Got my first Mac in September....iMac 24", 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067MHz DDR3...thought it would be a nice change from PC and was not disappointed. Then I found myself with a new job opportunity working with graphics and 3D animation. Got the CS4 Master Collection and also started working with Blender 3D. Found out real quick that my iMac just didn't have the punch I needed for the 3D stuff. My new boss told me to find something that would give me the processing power I needed. Having been mislead a bit by the salesman at the Apple Store about being able to upgrade the iMac (also my fault for not researching) I was hesitant about getting another Mac so I went with HP.
Got the HPE-180t with the i7-920 quad core 2.66GHz with 12 GB DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM. This system cut the rendering time for animations down by half but still left me dissatisfied....so....
Last week I got the Mac Pro 8 core (2 x 2.26GHz 16GB 10066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Card). Imagine my surprise when I found that my rendering didn't improve very much. Here's some more specifics.
There is a benchmark page (eofw.org/bench) dedicated to showing how various systems compare after running a test on the Blender application. You can change a few variables such as how many threads you can run based on the number of cores. Also you can use either 32 bit or 64 bit Blender application.
The iMac ran the test at 00:01:04:00 (1 minute 4 secs) on a max of 2 threads on the 32 bit app.
The HP ran at 00:00:25:00 on a max of 8 threads on the 32 bit app.
The Mac Pro ran at 00:00:21:00 on max of 16 threads on the 32 bit app. On the 64 bit app it ran at an impressive 00:00:05:82 (ok..that's like wow fast..but wait).
So the Mac Pro blazes the test on the 64 bit Blender app...but when it came down to real world application of rendering my animations you could not tell any difference between the HP and MAC PRO and very little difference from the iMac. When I look at the activity monitor during rendering I see that the Mac Pro is only using about 150-201% CPU (out of 1600%?)...about 88% system memory being idle...and up to about 350MB of real memory...not much of the processing power available.
Does anyone know what gives here? Is there anyway I can dedicate more processing power to work on this application or is the application itself limiting the processor power that can be applied.
Sorry for the long thread but really need some help here. Thanks.
Got the HPE-180t with the i7-920 quad core 2.66GHz with 12 GB DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM. This system cut the rendering time for animations down by half but still left me dissatisfied....so....
Last week I got the Mac Pro 8 core (2 x 2.26GHz 16GB 10066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Card). Imagine my surprise when I found that my rendering didn't improve very much. Here's some more specifics.
There is a benchmark page (eofw.org/bench) dedicated to showing how various systems compare after running a test on the Blender application. You can change a few variables such as how many threads you can run based on the number of cores. Also you can use either 32 bit or 64 bit Blender application.
The iMac ran the test at 00:01:04:00 (1 minute 4 secs) on a max of 2 threads on the 32 bit app.
The HP ran at 00:00:25:00 on a max of 8 threads on the 32 bit app.
The Mac Pro ran at 00:00:21:00 on max of 16 threads on the 32 bit app. On the 64 bit app it ran at an impressive 00:00:05:82 (ok..that's like wow fast..but wait).
So the Mac Pro blazes the test on the 64 bit Blender app...but when it came down to real world application of rendering my animations you could not tell any difference between the HP and MAC PRO and very little difference from the iMac. When I look at the activity monitor during rendering I see that the Mac Pro is only using about 150-201% CPU (out of 1600%?)...about 88% system memory being idle...and up to about 350MB of real memory...not much of the processing power available.
Does anyone know what gives here? Is there anyway I can dedicate more processing power to work on this application or is the application itself limiting the processor power that can be applied.
Sorry for the long thread but really need some help here. Thanks.