from Hacker News

The Mac Pro – A Year in the Studio

by ArmandGrillet on 3/7/21, 9:09 PM with 36 comments

  • by jiggawatts on 3/8/21, 6:25 AM

    The problem I have with Mac Pro reviews is that they all seem to be written by people that live in a world without AMD Threadrippers and NVIDIA GPUs.

    A much, much cheaper Windows or Linux workstation will run circles around a Mac Pro. Many more threads, much more memory, much faster I/O, much better video cards. The latter is especially key for modern real-time raytracing workflows that utilise either the RTX or CUDA APIs.

    This is a bit like reviewing a Leica camera, going on and on about how good the image quality is for a "mere" $40K USD, and failing to point out that a $5K Nikon or Canon has not only has better image quality, but also more features, more choice, and better ergonomics.

  • by hedora on 3/8/21, 3:08 AM

    The text on this site is unreadable in portrait mode on my giant phone.

    Turning to landscape keeps the text the same size, but makes the lines wider.

    I usually don’t complain about website design, but this is illegible.

  • by clarkmoreno on 3/8/21, 4:52 AM

    Apologies if a bit off-topic, but the piece is quite challenging to read.

    Base font size on their blog is 11px... one cannot even ⌘+ zoom to victory. Compelling article packaged in poor accessibility.

  • by ericlewis on 3/8/21, 12:51 AM

    The 27 inch layout looks a lot like my typical Xcode layout & the XDR looks a lot like my Xcode layout with my own pro display (except instead of a char its simulator). The XDR is truly a wonderful monitor. It’s size is perfect and resolution decent. Multiple monitors become tiring to move my neck to look at, and the curved monitors only get utilized in the middle (nothing really on the sides for me)

  • by ASpaceCowboi on 3/8/21, 3:28 AM

    This is so wonderful to read! Thank you so much for sharing!!

    I'm trying to get more in the 3D world myself. I do plenty of 2D/graphic design professionally and I bought the mac pro (base version*) thinking I can upgrade it later.

    The main problem I ran into for Maya was the Arnold Render. I will have to come back to this document and research how they render real time using their GPUs and not their CPUs. I see they're using RedShift. I'll have to learn about that!

    Maya's Arnold render doesn't support rendering with AMD's GPU (AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16 GB) so I tried the RadeonRender Plugin but it's a pain trying to apply the textures to be the same.

    Are their Maya tutorials that anyone recommends on this?

  • by Liquid_Fire on 3/8/21, 11:30 AM

    Amusingly, the final video embedded on the page seems to have be taken down for copyright reasons:

    > This video contains content from UFC, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.