"But you are right, once you've lived with a MacBook, other laptops feel like crap."

So bizarre. I've used quite a few different Mac laptops over the past year, mostly trying to help friends get something configured or set up. The all feel like toys to me. The keys are all squishy, and very slow and cumbersome to type on. Most of them are so light that they don't stay in place when i type or drag across the touch pad. The screens all seem tiny too, but perhaps that's the users' personal choices in trying to get a small laptop? I'm still just not seeing what people like about them.

It's a religion. My best friend - RIP ;-( - was a sucker for sales pitches, and at one point had Bose-disease ( fortunately cured). Still had iDisease with almost iEverythingElse. If they'd put out iUndies, he'd have been wearing them every day.

geoff

>> The NVidia 7 series gpus are faster at gaming related tasks like triangle
>> setup, rops, texture filtering, etc, but those are of no use for compute with
>> programs like Vegas Pro, etc

This type of info, about both the 600 and 700 series, has been shared on this forum and other places for a while. It's not true. Some of these cards have the same exact GPUs that the Quadro cards have, and those are useful for video editing for sure.

Also, Premiere Pro sees a significant speed increase when using the Kepler GPUs. The reality here is that Vegas does not utilize the Kepler GPUs, but that is an SCS problem, not an nVidia Kepler problem.

Maybe this helps you understand why many people "claim" that the 600 & 700 series are better for gaming. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-680-review-benchmark,3161-15.html

Edit: Here is another http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-kepler-versus-fermi-in-adobe-after-effects-cs6_2127

Absolutely, the Fermi cards are better at general compute tasks, but the difference between the Kepler and the Fermi cards is not as big as the difference between the Kepler cards and no GPU acceleration. The claim in these fora have generally been that Kepler cards are not designed to do this, and that expecting SCS to support them is futile since there is little gain to be had. That is apparently not true given:

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

No GPU - time line render. 110 seconds, mpg-2 render 174 seconds
GTX-570 - time line render. 9.4 seconds, mpg-2 render 90 seconds
GT-640 - time line render. 10.5 seconds, mpg-2 render 163 seconds
GTX-660 - time line render. 9.4 seconds, mpg-2 render 88 seconds
GTX-680 - time line render. 9 seconds, mpg-2 render 84 seconds
Quadro 2000 - time line render. 11.2 seconds, mpg-2 render 160 seconds
Quadro 4000 - time line render. 10. seconds, mpg-2 render 164 seconds

If I read these tests correctly, I would be better off investing in a GTX-6xxx card than a Quadro card for Premiere (at least CS5). These results would indicate that the claims of vast inferiority of Kepler cards is exaggerated, perhaps the OpenCL implementation (that is the driver) of said cards is not optimized, and they therefore have sub-par OpenCL performance.

Given that Premiere Pro CS5 uses CUDA and not OpenCL to render using the GPU, and that the GTX 6xx series share their GPU with the (presumably) much more powerful Quadro Kxxxx cards, the finger currently points directly at the OpenCL implementation for the GTX-6xx series cards, not the cards them selves. It is not only possible, but highly likely, that nVidia limits OpenCL performance on the "gaming" cards to foster sales of their "professional" cards. So, wouldn't the solution for companies like Adobe be to use CUDA instead of OpenCL with nVidia cards? CUDA is clearly not limited by the driver...

"This type of info, about both the 600 and 700 series, has been shared on this forum and other places for a while. It's not true. Some of these cards have the same exact GPUs that the Quadro cards have, and those are useful for video editing for sure."

Oh yeah they absolutely are useful for video editing, I use a 670 in my dekstop pc after all. But that's not what I meant when I posted that. What I meant was when comparing an NVidia 750m in one laptop compared to the Intel HD5000 in my Mac Air. Some feel the 750m will blow the HD5000 away because it's much faster on gaming benchmarks. While the 750m will be faster than the HD5000 for games due to better performance on triangle setup, textture filtering, etc, for Vegas Pro those don't matter. What does matter is gflops of compute power and the HD5000 and 750m are similar there. That's why the HD5000 in my Mac Air is as good as the 750m in other laptops when it comes purely to Vegas Pro and other compute supporting programs.

In other words I can have my cake and eat it too :) I can get realtime playback performance with 1920x1080 28mbps 'best/full/32bit" footage on the timeline, I can get 10 hour battery life when I need it, and it's only 2 pounds to carry around, all from a little Mac Air. Hence why I made that post, people shouldn't be deceived by gaming benchmarks, they don't paint the full picture for us that just want to do video editing an other compute related tasks.

First of all, thanks for all the useful information. Secondly, forgive me for starting mac vs PC debate on a forum where a mac shouldn't ever have come up!

Next debate, Fusion or Parallels? I have an upgrade path to Fusion, and a free copy of Paraells. Which is best?

I still haven't used Vegas yet on my new Mac, but this week I did a lot of audio. I could not believe how fast the flash storage is. According to the Black Magic utility, I get about 700MB per second. That means I was able to normalize a 700 MB audio file in just over a second. In Reaper and Wavelab the waveforms drew in in seconds.

Copying a 1.5GB audio file from a Mac mini to my MacBook took under 10 seconds over Ethernet.

Rendering audio with RX3 noise reduction was slow, but I was able to have 5 files rendering at the same time, while still able to work in real time on the 6th file. An hour long audio file took about 18 minutes with RX3 added. Without RX3 that same file only took about 5 minutes with the other plugins. That's about the same as my 6 core desktop PC.

Overall, I don't regret buying the MacBook. As a bonus, many audio devices don't require a driver on a Mac. When I showed up to mix a concert, I was able to plug my Mac into the Behringer x32 without needing to download anything. My RME UFX did need software though.

~Jay

"M" isn't Messina by any chance ?

geoff

> "Secondly, forgive me for starting mac vs PC debate on a forum where a mac shouldn't ever have come up!"

Actually, Sony makes Sound Forge for Mac and Spectral Layers for Mac and most of us Mac users are hoping there will be a Vegas Pro for Mac so we can stop this ridiculous discussion about the best way to run Windows on Apple hardware. So I feel that talking about Mac's is very relevant to this forum.

> "Next debate, Fusion or Parallels? I have an upgrade path to Fusion, and a free copy of Paraells. Which is best?"

It seems that you are in the best position to tell us since you have a free copy of Parallels just use that and if you're happy with it... problem solved. I use Fusion because I work with VMware systems all day at work so I bought the Pro version to get the additional vCenter support. I'm sure they are both good. When you install it, make sure that you share a folder on your Mac with the virtual machine. That makes it very easy to work on the same files in booth environments.

> "Overall, I don't regret buying the MacBook. As a bonus, many audio devices don't require a driver on a Mac."

This is what PC users who have never used a Mac don't get to experience. They expect to have to install drivers to get anything to work, but on a Mac, most of it just works right out-of-the-box. I recently swapped an NVIDIA graphics card for an ATI graphics card and all I did was shutdown, swap the cards, boot and keep working. No drivers to install, they were already there.

And if the drivers aren't included, they make it very easy to get. I forgot to set up my printer on a new OS X install until one day I went to print something and the printer dialog said something like, "You don't have any printers defined but I see there is an HP DeskJet on your network, would you like me to set it up for you?" I clicked yes, it download and installed the drivers and in 2 minutes I was printing. Had I been on a PC I would have spend considerable time on the HP site looking for drivers, downloading and installing huge bloated software with drivers, rebooting, disabling all the bloatware that HP installs, and maybe 30 minutes later I would be printing.

You really have to unlearn some of your PC ways and get into how Mac does things. I went crazy trying to find a program to open ISO files when I first got my Mac until I realized that all you need to do is double-click on it and it opens because support is built into the OS for disk images. It's just a great tool to work with.

~jr

"This is what PC users who have never used a Mac don't get to experience. They expect to have to install drivers to get anything to work, but on a Mac, most of it just works right out-of-the-box. I recently swapped an NVIDIA graphics card for an ATI graphics card and all I did was shutdown, swap the cards, boot and keep working. No drivers to install, they were already there."

I don't feel this is true at all. Both my wife and I have Mac's as laptops and there are definite driver issues on Mac. For example my wife has one right now, she is connecting 2 displays to her new top of the line Macbook Pro, the 15" fully loaded model and it just won't work right, the display will be all garbled up. We had to take an hour to diagnose it and finally figure out there there is a conflict with the displays and a thunderbolt-to-ethernet adapter. She eventually determined that she has to disconnect the ethernet adapter, turn on her Mac and then connect the ethernet adapter to avoid having the displays garbled. She has still not found any other solution to this other than this workaround. Meanwhile booting to Windows 8 gives no such issue at all, it all works perfectly with all the displays and ethernet adapter all installed.

We both use a mix of Windows 8 and OSX and have learned that the whole "It just works" argument on Mac is completely bogus. Windows 8 has proved to be more trouble free for us than OSX. In fact Windows 8 has proved to be remarkably stable and trouble free, far more than Windows 7 and XP were.


"And if the drivers aren't included, they make it very easy to get. I forgot to set up my printer on a new OS X install until one day I went to print something and the printer dialog said something like, "You don't have any printers defined but I see there is an HP DeskJet on your network, would you like me to set it up for you?" I clicked yes, it download and installed the drivers and in 2 minutes I was printing. Had I been on a PC I would have spend considerable time on the HP site looking for drivers, downloading and installing huge bloated software with drivers, rebooting, disabling all the bloatware that HP installs, and maybe 30 minutes later I would be printing."

This isn't really true as well, not with Windows 8 anyways. I haven't had to look for a driver in ages, it finds them for me on the rare occasion that they aren't already there but usually they are all included.

> "For example my wife has one right now, she is connecting 2 displays to her new top of the line Macbook Pro, the 15" fully loaded model and it just won't work right, the display will be all garbled up. "

I was not implying that Mac's don't have problems (all computers have problems) but I'm also not seeing how this was a missing driver problem. I was talking about needing drivers and having to go search for them.

> "This isn't really true as well, not with Windows 8 anyways."

I don't use Windows 8 so perhaps it's better than Windows 7 at this. I've never had any version of Windows fetch a 3rd party print driver for me.

~jr

>>>>This is what PC users who have never used a Mac don't get to experience. <<<

We do get it, trust me.

This is your typical Mac experience.

#1. Pay $1000 more for same hardware and settle for almost nonexistent options when buying it.

#2. Want to install serious software like Fusion, Softimage, 3DSMax, Samplitude, or even Vegas, NO, it just does not work, not unless you go with some bootcamp like nonsense.

#3. Any time you may save by not having to install drivers is negated by all the nonsense you have to go through if you want/need to use the above-mentioned programs.

#4. You find out that serious interfaces like RME work better on Windows and that the lowest latencies quoted by Apple/RME only work if you use your Mac on February 29th between 4 and 5 PM. I've been using mine at lowest possible latency ( buffer ) setting without encountering any problems ever.

There is more, but I think that is more than enough.

> "#1. Pay $1000 more for same hardware and settle for almost nonexistent options when buying it."

We've been through this before and the facts are exactly the opposite: The new High-end Mac Pro is $2000 less than a DIY PC and the new Entry-level Mac Pro is $1000 less than a DIY PC using the same parts. Check the links to those two articles. They list the parts they used to compare and the numbers don't lie. If you buy the same workstation-grade parts, the Mac is a better deal.

I think what you object to is the extraordinary cost of workstation-grade parts in general, and that Apple doesn't let you choose cheaper parts. I have to agree with you there. After owning a Quadro 4000, I have to honestly say that there is nothing worth $800 about that card. Nice card, but it shouldn't cost that much. I get the feeling that you would never spend the money on a Quadro card. After all, you can get an entire PC for the $800 cost of a Quadro 4000. That's different than saying that Apples cost more for the same hardware. You just don't agree with the hardware they chose to use, and the fact that you can't change it, but they are giving you a good deal on the hardware they sell. It's just not for everyone's budget.

If I were building another DIY PC, I would not put two "overpriced" workstation-class graphics cards in it, so I'm with you on that one. The fact that I have not brought myself to spend the money on a new Mac Pro yet bears this out. I'm now looking at used 2010 12-core Mac Pro's that are more affordable because you can't buy a new entry level Mac Pro and upgrade it later so I'm not arguing with you there. It's all or nothing with Apple and sometimes that's a hard financial pill to swallow. I get it.

> "#2. Want to install serious software like Fusion, Softimage, 3DSMax, Samplitude, or even Vegas, NO, it just does not work, not unless you go with some bootcamp like nonsense."

Yea, yea, yea, and you can't run FCP X, Motion, Logic Pro X, etc. on Windows. That's not the point. There will always be some software that doesn't run on your platform. I don't use any of those programs that you listed except Vegas and I'm hoping that Sony is working on a fix for that so this doesn't affect me. My other PC applications like Sound Forge Pro, SpectraLayers Pro, Pro Tools, Boris RED, BCC, Cinema 4D, Carrara Pro, Vue, Hexagon, Waves plug-ins, etc. all have Mac versions so I'm in good shape there.

> "#3. Any time you may save by not having to install drivers is negated by all the nonsense you have to go through if you want/need to use the above-mentioned programs."

Luckily I don't need to use any of them and Vegas Pro runs fine in VMware Fusion in a virtual machine so I've got that sorted out (which is what this thread was about). It's really easy to run Vegas on a MacBook Pro either in a virtual machine or natively via bootcamp. Sorry to have gotten off on other Mac vs PC issues.

> "#4. You find out that serious interfaces like RME work better on Windows and that the lowest latencies quoted by Apple/RME only work if you use your Mac on February 29th between 4 and 5 PM. I've been using mine at lowest possible latency ( buffer ) setting without encountering any problems ever."

Yea, but you can say the same thing about MOTU. They perform beautifully on Mac's but they are horrible on PC's. I use to tell people to avoid buying a MOTU audio interface if the have a PC because the PC drivers are terrible but those MOTU interfaces are a favorite for Mac musicians. It all depends the if the manufacturer sees themselves as primarily a PC or Mac shop. I assume RME focuses on the PC because Pro Tools pretty much has the high-end Mac audio hardware market cornered. My M-Audio Firewire interfaces that I bought for my PC works perfectly fine on my Mac as does my M-Audio USB audio interfaces. There will always be hardware who's drivers are better on one platform than the other.

> "There is more, but I think that is more than enough."

There is always more. The debate will never end. There will always be those who hate the Mac or love the Mac or hate the PC or whatever. The only thing that is important is that you like the platform you're on. I think you and I love the platform we chose... we just didn't choose the same one. lol ;-)

~jr

Yea, but you can say the same thing about MOTU. They perform beautifully on Mac's but they are horrible on PC's."

Not true since maybe 6 or 7 years ago, when MOTU finally realised what they were missing out on.

geoff

Jr,

I wish I could love the platform I'm on...

At times, I've wanted to throw the Macbook out of a window, and other times put my foot through the front of my PC.

Usually, though, it's the software that's at fault, but it's hard to get physical with software, so it's the hardware that gets the "percussive maintenance"

But, the MacBook Pro is still new, so I being kind to it. ;)

~Jay