8 Core Macs vs. Quad core should I upgrade? / graphics card upgrade?

I just bought my new Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Core Intel Xeon computer with 3 GB of Ram. 4 Sata drives 2 of which are Raided.
I purchased the computer used about 6 months ago and i like it but, I wonder if im missing out on some unreal power that is offered by the new 8 core macs that have released this year.

If i sell my computer and buy a new 2008 Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
WILL I GET A REAL BOOST?

I use FCPStudio.
Edit HD, HDV, and some DV. Render on every project, Love Nattress effects, filters intensive, and green screen often. Starting to get into ProRes.

Use Color on a feature about every 8 weeks, so lots of color gets used.

And After effects every now and then.

On my computer every day and night.

Now for my graphics card.
Running 2 monitors

30inch cinema display and a 24 inch Sony FW900 for correcting on.

Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
I use color lots and i understand Color is rendering off the graphics card.
Im willing to upgrade if it will run my color software faster and render faster. Right now Rendering SUCKS.
What would be the best card to upgrade to and what are my options.

Thanks
Ricky

Macworld Benchmarks

The above article includes tests which include 4 core 2.66 model and even 4 core G5 2.5GHz. Only your business mode can inform you whether the speed boosts are enough. The speed boost themselves may improve as software and OS are updated over time though.

The most significant number to me is that it seems Compressor 3 MPEG2 encoding is about 80% faster. Other numbers are a bit closer and your box actually seems to have a better frame rate for Quake.

Of course one would wish they had more relevant numbers. They do have Photoshop and Cinema 4D numbers though.

Normally I'd say don't be in a hurry to upgrade because speed bumps are often in the 10-20% range but that 80% or so speed improvement on MPEG2 compression can be a significant productivity enhancement if you make DVDs.

Craig's spot on...depends on your speed requirements and if that justifies the purchase. I personally decided to put my $$$ into a loaded Macbook Pro / 2.6 Ghz Core 2 Duo / 4 GB Ram rather than replace my PPC Quad / Kona LHe because it still kicks a$$ rendering AE & C4D projects. If I was intensely rendering all the time, day & night, I just may make the leap.

For actual speed numbers from a reputable tester, go to Barefeats:

[www.barefeats.com]

They even throw my PPC Quad in the mix so you can really see the speed progression. I always spend a week with these guys before making large equipment purchases. Their service is priceless.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

You guys rock, thank you so much.

Im keeping my QUAD.

Those Barefeats tests are very old. I think there's been significant bus speed improvements with the new 8 core Macs.

This is much more relevant.
[www.barefeats.com]
Notice the speed improvements over the previous 8 core Mac.

Some seat-of-the-pants comparison from actual use. I do a fair amount of FCP rendering and MPEG2 compression for DVD's (I shoot sports video in DV format, capture 40-50 minutes straight per tapel - soccer, ice hockey, lacrosse - requires more than one tape per game). Output is to DVD (full games) and web (short clips). Particularly with ice hockey, I do a color-correction on an entire game, so every frame has to be re-rendered.

Had a Quad PPC G5 2.7Ghz (4GB RAM) for two years until last November when I upgraded to Quad 2.66Ghz Intel (5GB RAM). Didn't notice much difference in either FCP rendering or MPEG2 compression in terms of speed.

Upgraded to the brand new (Jan 2008) 8-core 2.8Ghz Mac (currently 2GB RAM, upgrading to 6GB as soon as my 4GB of memory ships), as I got a great deal on it. FCP rendering is noticeably faster. Example - 75 minute hockey game, 3-way color corrector added, plus some slow-motion replays and end-of-period scoreboard graphics - renders in about 20-25 minutes! Wow!

Haven't noticed anywhere near the 80% improvement in MPEG2 encoding mentioned in a previous post. It's definitely faster, but not by that much. Not sure that additional RAM will improve MPEG2 encoding, as my sense is that encoding is processor intensive, but I can always hope!

So - kind of depends on what you're doing the most of ..... be advised, I'm not going to go back to one of the previous machines ....

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports

Jef,
Did you ever watch the activity of your procs with activity monitor during a FCP render ? or even real time playing ?

Compressor uses the whole set of Cores... what about Fcp now ?

some multi threading ? or still just a little part of the power available?

---------------------------------
A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

By Sunday night I will have a review of the 8 core 2.8 machine and I will directly contrast it's performance to last year's 4 core 2.6. These tests pit the machines against each other using ONLY FCS 2.0. While the MacWorld lab tests are interesting, I wanted a job specific comparison of the two machines.

So keep your eyes peeled at my blog over at [bscenefilms.blogspot.com]

Francois,

I've watched the cores on Compressor runs, as I knew all 8 were being used and wanted to see them in action (watching right now, actually!). However, I have NOT watched core utilization during FCP rendering - just missed an opportunity to do that, but will have another chance in the next day or two.

To be a bit more specific about my real-world testing alluded to in my first post, I just finished an FCP (FCS 2.0) render of a 71 minute ice hockey game that had color-correction applied to the entire timeline, as well as some multi-layer graphic elements in about 10 locations. I timed the render - it took 23 minutes. This with just 2GB of RAM.

Why the boost in rendering speed? If I understand it correctly, I think the new Penryn processors found in the 8-core include a new instruction set known as SSE-4, which I believe is similar in some respects to the Altivec instruction set on the old PowerPC chips. I also believe that FCP 6 may be coded to make use of the SSE-4 instructions, which could explain the improvement. If FCP is not yet updated to use SSE-4, we may see even further speed gains in rendering with the next version of FCP!

I then exported the rendered FCP sequence to a QT reference movie with DVD SP markers - that took about 4-5 minutes (didn't time it exactly).

Compressor run (single-pass) on the 71 minute project just completed - audio took 3:46, video part took 8:24, for a total compressor run of 12:10.

Totaling that all up, 23 minutes render, 5 minutes QT export, 12 minutes compressor means I went from completed FCP edit to ready-to-DVD-author in 40 minutes. WOW!

I must confess, I have never timed previous workflow components on my earlier machines, but I can safely say this 8-core monster is noticeably better than even the quad-core Intel I had for the past 10 weeks. Looking at that Compressor run, maybe I AM getting that 80% improvement. Seems to me similar runs on the Intel quad-core were taking around 18-20 minutes for a similar sized project.

Having used FCP since 1.0 back in 1999, it is simply amazing how far the software has come, and just as impressively, how fast the hardware has gotten. And as we all know, the hardware will continue to get better .... I remember my one son rendering a Boris Graffiti 3D motion text clip he had created back around 2000-2001 (Graffiti came bundled with one of the early FCP releases!). The clip was 18 seconds long, and it took 45 minutes to render on a G3 Indigo iMac ...

Rendering and compression is really not much of a bottleneck any more, at least not for standard video production. Sure, all that Pixar CGI stuff requires massive render farms, but most of us aren't doing that ..... yet!

Jeff Elliott
ESVNSports

thank you both for your reactivity

Mike, (AKA bscene), could you have an eye on the Cores when doing your tests ?


What you say Jeff about the new SSE-4 instructions might be the opening of a new era

(I am on the market for a 2008 MacPro)

---------------------------------
A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

I took an HD clip and added CC to it and then rendered that. All 8 cores were grinding on the process. They all sat at about 3/4ths processing capacity during the render.

I should add that FCP was using all 8 cores all of the time - RT playback - whatever. It engaged them all.

Review is up over at [bscenefilms.blogspot.com]

GREAT, a few days ago you guys had me convinced i dont need to look into the new 8cores.

NOW you've changed my mind back to buying.

I appreciate all your posts.
What is the best way to sell my computer Ebay?


(Anybody interested in an Intel Mac 2.66 quad core
with
Studio 2 & tons of plugins,
CS3 including A.E.
and 3GB of ram?)

=)

Great Job

---------------------------------
A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

Quote
I appreciate all your posts.
What is the best way to sell my computer Ebay?

Craigs List.

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.