This is a ‘what Mac for…..’ thread.

We are looking to run Vue 10 Infinite for environmental modelling purposes. On a 2008 Unibody 15″ Macbook Pro, broadcast quality renders take up to 8 hours a frame. The aim is to create animations so speeding up render time is a bit of a priority.

Macs in the frame are one of the new iMac 27 inch, maxed out with RAM, HDD etc, 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor and a AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5 graphics card. The other option is to bite the bullet and go for a low end Mac Pro with a 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor, ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB graphics card. RAM will be as much as I can afford. The Mac Pro can obviously be upgraded later and I know I have to shell out for a monitor but… for a professional machine, which would you go for?

Price is important but for a few hundred GBP more, the Mac Pro seems like a better option.

Any thoughts guys?

PC based here, but from my experience See if you can stretch to a dual quad xeon in one machine, failing that the i7’s are great vfm. I know nothing about mac render farms, but am just setting up an amazon cloud render farm from here, could be the way to go?

btw are you rendering 1080, 780 or PAL? Seems a long render time.

wouldn’t got for any.
the money you’re paying for a mac you’d get a far better spec’ed pc. 8 hours per frame? that stupid. what have you get in there? reflections? ambient occlusion? final gather?
are you rendering for broadcast in HD or pal?

I’d get a dedicated rack mounted system for rendering or sent it to a render farm. Currently running an i7 pc with 18gb of ram and geforce 460gtx sli cards. does the job at running my day to day 3D no problem. then a xeon powered rack for rendering

i wouldn’t go for the pro, the macbookpro and imacs are way faster and have thunderbolt. the performance jump from the core2duo to the sandybridge 2011 was nearly double. the 15 and 17in now have 4 cores so if your software can make use of them your render times will drop.
i’m not in your game but a photographer so have to process raws to tiff, work on large (2-4gb) photoshop files and do a bit of video in FCP and even my 13in MBP can edit native 5D footage and not drop frames with it’s 512 shared card. the main hold-up is disk speed, if you can separate your applications from the destination drive and implement ssd’s then the speed gains are significant. i have fitted an SSD in place of the dvd drive and use this as a scratch/back-up which has improved things but the 5200rpm main drive is still the bottleneck and needs to be changed for an ssd to really fly. using 8gb ram but 16gb is now cheap so that’s the next upgrade.

i would consider a 15in MBP from the refurb store or the last revision from PCworld as there was just a little speed bump and then wait for a thunderbold ssd solution that suits your needs (and has the extra port for daisy chaining your monitor) buy the 16gb ram from crucial/kingston and fit an SSD.
or an imac but switching drives is not user-friendly like the MBP and fitting a second SSD is a BTO and very expensive.

i have no idea how the video cards affect your apps so can’t really comment about the imac v pro in this regard but if you need a superduper card then sonnet do a thunderbolt to PCI box that takes a couple of cards.

No direct experience, but what are you looking for in terms of a speed improvement, and is that realistic?
ie, 8hours a frame, how many frames therefore how long in total?
To get it down to something reasonable, how much faster does it need to be? Is that possible? It sounds like you need a huge step up in performance, which I guess isn’t going to be cheap, even if it’s possible. I think I’d be looking at contracting it out.

not much experience of environmental modelling and never used a Mac, I spend all day doing 3d visuals for packaging designs, processor speed and number of cores is the most important factor,

Thanks all. Been having trouble with t’interweb (still am) so haven’t been able to get back to thank you for your input. I have gone for the fully tricked out iMac in the end.