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>Someone who works in CGI came around to say that, no, $50,000 is a normal amount of money to spend on their workstations You'd still be crazy to spend it on a

>Someone who works in CGI came around to say that, no, $50,000 is a normal amount of money to spend on their workstations You'd still be crazy to spend it on a Mac Pro unless you had very specific MacOS needs. Building a threadripper multi-Nvidia GPU PC is going to outperform it in any meaningful way with a modern CGI workflow. OS starts to matter very little when it's a choice of seeing almost a finished image in almost real time which is what you get with CUDA backed rendering engines VS having to still chug away on CPU.

lproven 6y ago
I submit that it's not just about performance. Both Linux and Windows still take a _lot_ more maintenance than macOS. If you have a room full of creative video artists, who are not techies, then you want them to have maximum productive up-time. You do not want to have to employ a small army of system support techies to keep those boxes running. I used to work on a PC magazine in the West End of London. The mag was about Windows PCs, and was written on Windows PCs, but it was laid out on Macs. I supported both, and the servers and the network. The PC side of things needed more than 10x as much support. That's not materially different even today. Secondly, it's not just about the boxes and their OS. It's also about the apps. A lovely fast sleek Linux distro is no use at all if it doesn't run the apps you need... and if those apps only run on one vendor's kit, or even just run best on that vendor's kit, then that is the kit you buy.
- rrmm 6y ago
  I can believe that. What sort of support did the non-mac systems mainly need compared to the mac systems?
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  I get that but it is about performance when we reach the magnitudes GPU rendering is over CPU rendering. This isn't 20% faster, it's the difference between seeing the image in almost finished form and interacting with it with real time responsiveness vs having to wait minutes for an image. [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_P1G_wbK8&t=0m33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_P1G_wbK8&t=0m33s

lproven 6y ago

I submit that it's not just about performance. Both Linux and Windows still take a _lot_ more maintenance than macOS. If you have a room full of creative video artists, who are not techies, then you want them to have maximum productive up-time. You do not want to have to employ a small army of system support techies to keep those boxes running. I used to work on a PC magazine in the West End of London. The mag was about Windows PCs, and was written on Windows PCs, but it was laid out on Macs. I supported both, and the servers and the network. The PC side of things needed more than 10x as much support. That's not materially different even today. Secondly, it's not just about the boxes and their OS. It's also about the apps. A lovely fast sleek Linux distro is no use at all if it doesn't run the apps you need... and if those apps only run on one vendor's kit, or even just run best on that vendor's kit, then that is the kit you buy.

rrmm 6y ago
I can believe that. What sort of support did the non-mac systems mainly need compared to the mac systems?
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
I get that but it is about performance when we reach the magnitudes GPU rendering is over CPU rendering. This isn't 20% faster, it's the difference between seeing the image in almost finished form and interacting with it with real time responsiveness vs having to wait minutes for an image. [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_P1G_wbK8&t=0m33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_P1G_wbK8&t=0m33s