Cineversity

I am SUPER excited about the new Mac Pro coming in December and have already started dreaming about how amazing C4D will run on it.  That being said, as they announced a little bit of the pricing the other day I want to make sure I am spending my money in the right places to get the most bang for my buck in Cinema.

It appears there are basically 4 things you can upgrade when building one of the new Mac Pros:

Processer: 4-core, 6-core, 8-core, and 12-core
Memory: Between 12gb-64gb
Graphics: Dual AMD FirePro either D300, D500, or D700
Internal HD: 256gb-1T Flash

I do mostly still architectural type renders and not a lot of animations.  I also use Photoshop quite a bit.  Where are the best places to spend my money to get the best performance out of C4D?  What kinds of resources does C4D use most heavily, Graphics card power?  Memory? Raw CPU power?

Also, It looks like I will have to be careful on what I store on my internal SSD memory vs. some other type of external HD. 

Thanks for your help in advance

Hi Techie999,

My best advice would be to look into two things.

The first one will be Cinebench. I assume that once the new MacPro is available, you will get a lot of reliable information here.

Secondly, and that is something I normally suggest for Laptops, iMac etc, (as the new concept seems closer to these than to a tower) check out what is easily replaceable and what is not. What ever is later with little work replaceable, will be the lowest on the Apple order list for me. Anything that is soldered or “hardwired” needs to be the best possible. Well, having said that, with Thunderbold2 things might be a little bit more flexible. External Thunderbold2 PCI boxes and drives will change the way we worked just a while ago.

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CINEMA 4D is a wide and versatile application, with a lot of different technology inside. Some of this can’t be used with all cores (based mostly on the hierarchy in the information flow), some (I would think most!) uses all core to the best possible. Keep in mind that each release things might change to utilize these options even more. I’m not an expert what Graphic Cards will do in 2014 for C4D, not even close.

With Photoshop, normally RAM to the max, to avoid moving stuff to drives. With SSDs via T2 this might change the picture. My main work in Ps is basically 16K images in 16 or 32 bit/c. RAM is always to little… always.

I’m not certain when I can buy one, as my RED needs an upgrade as well (Dragon) but for me, 12 cores would be the first fix point on the “buy now” option at Apple, then Graphic. Anything else later.

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Architectural visualization is normally modeling and rendering intensive, at least the years I did it. Which part is more time intensive for you might change the importance of Graphic vs Cores. (Again, the border between these is changing). My advice here, call up the Activity Monitor on your Mac and check where the bottle neck is currently for you. When do wait the most on the machine and where is it maxed out. The Activity Monitor will tell you more about your very individual needs than anyone else can tell you, except for the redraw speed of the screen. With the target of the 4K movie market with this machine, I do not see a problem here.

Since your work is about single images (not animations) I guess even a small SSD might help here, and not bigger is better—if the money could flow into more “cores or graphic”. Ram is normally the easiest to change, and the cheapest from 3rd parties.

I guess—if you ask others—you might notice that you get perhaps very different answers. Analysis your work, as you know Architectural visualization might have in itself many different challenges.

However, I think it is a great machine and nice concept, I hope you get the best combination possible for your work.

My best wishes for the new Mac!

Sassi

Wow, thank you very much for the fast and very comprehensive reply.  You raised some very good points in here.

It does seem like Cinebench has become an easy to find number for each new computer.  It is sometimes hard to find the score for different configurations of machines, they usually just list the base models, or the preconfigured models.  Maybe I am looking in the wrong place, do you have a good website for comparing side-by-side Cinebench scores?

I like the idea of looking at the activity monitor to figure out where the bottle necks are (although I am not the best at interpreting the results).  I checked activity monitor out during a render and it showed:

% CPU: 754% (I have 2-Quad Core processers so it sounds like its using basically as much CPU as it can get)
Threads: 32 (not sure what this means, but this seems to stay pretty constant)
Real Memory: 2.77gb
Virtual Memory: 7.33gb

Does this mean it is running out of Real memory and needs to work with the HD?  Is this a sign I need more ram?  Hardrive usage seems to be very low.

From reading the FAQs on the Maxon website, It sounds like C4D uses the GPU for modeling, the switches to the CPU when rendering.  When thinking about my workflow, and where I spend the most time waiting, on my current machine it is probably waiting for it to update the view when moving around a model or changing views.  As most of my models get quite complex rather quickly I spend a lot of time spinning around the model, then waiting for it to update the viewport (or worse, making a bunch of instances and waiting for it to update the view to show the new instances).  This sounds like having the more powerful graphics card may help out this part quite a bit.

So, in the end, like you said, it may be best to max out CPU power (as this isn’t changeable), then upgrade the video card.  The memory is replaceable so may be best to upgrade from a 3rd party (but it seems like I may already be maxing out the 14gb I have in my current computer if C4D is sending over 7gb to virtual memory) and not worry too much about the HD.

Thanks again for the help, this really helped clear up the options quite a bit for me!

Thanks for the nice feedback, Techie999.

The newest list is perhaps this one here: http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/Benchmarks/cinebench.html/_/lukas-bauar-r15

Yes, virtual memory is not preferable.  I can’t link to companies here, or I do it for all, but for newer Macs, the memory is pretty cheap (using computer 30+ years, I think it is dead cheap today). I just checked, for MacPros it start roughly around $10 per gig. Waiting for RAM based shortages is certainly an expensive luxury ;o) In other words—it doesn’t pay off these days anymore.

I’m not certain how simple a graphic-card exchange will be, hence my comparison with laptops. I guess we will see a lot of information in November in the “press”.

Perhaps you work already in that way, but for complex buildings the Layer-Manager allows for an easy switch if you place sections of your model on different layers, and have perhaps “proxies” on other layers. It may take a little time to get used to this, but the redraw is so much faster with an reduced appearance, will say only the absolute necessary parts. You might render a texture for the proxies from the full res, to have a visual guide. Just a thought. (I did not mentioned XRef, as I think you know it of course)

Optimization of your workflow will keep you fast and opens the doors for even larger projects. I hope your new machine will support this in the best way.

All the best

Sassi

P.S.: Not the place here to get too much into detail, but half of my work wouldn’t be possible in time without “iCleanMemory”, especially with some software (not MAXON) which doesn’t clean up after memory use. It’s cheap and easy to set up.