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| Greetings… I have been test driving a replacement Mac Pro and have observed some dramatic variations in rendering speed. I understand to expect variations when dialing in the rendering sweet spot as far as # of processors and ram dedicated to those processors. I speaking about dramatic rendering speed variations within a given setup. The test set up is: 2009 4,1 Mac Pro with the 5,1 firmware upgrade 2x X5670 2.93ghz 12 core tray 64GB of ram, 4x from one brand, 3x from another brand and a solo chip from a 3rd brand. The rig supplier says the ram is identical in specs but I have no way to confirm, although they all report as 1333mhz ddr3 chips. I am trying to get 8 matched 8GB chips so I can to test further. nVidia GTX 680 2GB for Mac Crucial M4 512GB internal SSD for AE Cache and project rendering External storage: Sonnet eSATA 3.0gbs via an E4P PCIe card and external D500P enclosures with WD 3TB HDDs AE CS6 and AE CC 2014 (most recent updates) Mac OS 10.7.5 and 10.9.4 on 1TB and 1.5TB seagate drives *** I have a test AE project, with render times on a 2007 3.0ghz 8 core 32GB ram Mac Pro under 10.7.5 and CS6, required 40min in non multi processor mode and 23 minutes under multi processor mode. I exhausted testing in CS6 to find the # processors and Ram/processor to find the sweet spot for 64GB of system memory with 12/24 cores. The project mentioned above renders in 8.5 -10 minutes under multi processor mode in CS6 on this faster Mac Pro. The observation I have questions about, is re-rendering this AE project and the render time being as fast as 8min 15sec or as slow as 9min 56sec, while I have made no changes to the project, AE settings or hardware. That seems like a very big swing in rendering efficiency. I have wondered if the mixed bag of memory modules may have some inherent issues which might intermittently contribute to the rendering process. I have tested the ram with Rember and Tech Tool Pro and the memory reported OK. I hope to shortly run the AHT on the MacPro to see if it finds any issues with the memory or the computer. I have tried deleting the rendered files from the SSD in case those files might have contributed to a slowing down of the SSD read/write speed. I won't get into trying to test AE CC, as that appears to be another can of worms, as far as AE CC being "render crippled" compared to CS6. I would welcome comments or suggestions to help me understand why some CS6 renders of the same project file are more than 20% better with no changes in the set up. Thanks RJ MIles MacTunes ... |
