Anyone tested out the new Mac Pro (2013) yet?

Dappertutto

Has anyone put Isadora (or any other realtime softwares for that matter) on the new black "trash can" Mac Pro?

I'm curious about general performance, memory/graphics card configurations, driver compatibility, and any tips/advice you might have for using the system.

I'm going to buy one soon and any experiences to share would be much appreciated. Good timing, as it seems that their ship times are now pick up speed.

Thanks!

Dappertutto

For those who are similarly interested, here's a good post by @fubbi on multiple monitors for the ew Mac Pro and Thunderbolt buses:

http://troikatronix.com/community/#/discussion/1139/the-new-mac-pro-multiple-video-outputs.

Skulpture

I believe its only @fubbi who has had the chance to really put them through his paces. I met him a few weeks ago in Berlin and told me they were incredibly fast in all areas.

primaldivine

One odd thing that was noted by Fubbi (see post above) was that these machines do not run 'headless'... meaning if you plan to network several together, and use one machine as the Master, the networked machines each need to have at least one monitor/screen attached.

Jamie

Michel

If you only use VGA connections you can get up to 6 projectors/screens with the normal thunderbolt - VGA adapters. As Fubbi wrote this is not possbile if you go the digital way.

Best
Michel

fubbi

the headless business is a bit voodoo. there are a lot of discussion in the server building community about making headless workstations that use the GPU power.

Thats the core of the problem I believe; making sure the GPU is doing the work without a head, instead of just idling.

imagine have a render cluster for isadora with something like this: http://www.virtualgl.org/About/Introduction

There are several ways to make the trashcan output some serious video business. Absolutely a killer system for isadora. Awsome power and

basically two built in triple head 2 go's.

fubbi

jbrem003

I've installed Isadora on my new tower and the playback is very solid. The output specifications when using thunderbolt (while very expensive) do offer an exciting possibility for daisy chaining to reach a large monitor output count. The one thing that I can't seem to resolve however is the display mapping in all OSX versions after Lion. This is something we've managed to circumvent by dual booting Snow Leopard on the older Mac Pro towers, but I feel that we're being worked into a corner with the new tower design.

Is there something we can look forward to in Izzy 2.0 that allows for easy re-mapping of displays when the stages all go berserk?

Is there any word from apple on why display remapping seems to be more and more of an issue with each progressive OSX release?

(hint: you must disable "monitors have separate spaces" right off the bat in Mission Control unless you want a menu bar on every Izzy output.)

It feels like we're fighting an uphill battle with Apple on this one... and now I need to buy external chassis if I want to use the tower for video capture...

Fred

No need for an external chassis, there are plenty of thunderbolt capture devices.

bartersound

Hey Dappertutto,

I have a MBP 2.7 GHz i7 w/ 16GB DDR3 running Mavericks. I updated the Nvidia driver with CUDA (don't know if that really help with Izzy but it has with After Effects) . Though I get crashes while programming from time to time, I find this machine to be very powerful. I can easily run 3 1080p videos to 2 displays. I haven't pushed it much farther than that at this time.

jbrem003

@bartersound I generally try and avoid running programs that try and use the you alongside izzy. I've had the same problem with Photoshop. It's like a noisy bus full of kids all screaming for the drivers attention, eventually you're going to crash. Program and save/close to work on content. Good habit.

jbrem003

@fred Know of any dual or quad channel SDI thunderbolt capture devices? I can build a tower with a $400 investment for a card that will do this with any of the older Mac Pro towers.

Fred

No, you need pcie for this, but you can get a quad card in an expansion unit, the quad card is quite expensive though. Will you really have 2 HD captures running simultaneously?

WizardOfOz

I have a Mac Pro 2013 (8 core / D700s) and have tested 6 x 1080 60p outputs using 5 x active single-link DVI adapters and the HDMI out (only had 5 adapters available). Single-link active adapters do not require USB power and can typically got for less than US$35, I have the Sapphire ones. Also waiting on some Startech DVI adapters (actually short cables) that are supposed to be Dual-link with out USB power for around the same price. Cheers Tom