Update: Resolve on new 2012/13 iMacs

[Peter Chamberlain]

Hello all, I'm pleased to report that we have tested the late 2012 21" and 27" iMac systems and both are suitable for Resolve 9.0.4.

The specific configs we tested are

21.3" iMac 13,1 with 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7, with 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT650M and Mountain Lion 10.8.2
27" iMac 13,2 with 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, with 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT680MX and Mountain Lion 10.8.2

The systems tested also used the new Fusion drive which offers faster boot times and we used a ThunderBolt drive for image storage and playback.

Note; in both cases we tested the i7 as the CPU is used for ProRes and DNxHD decoding, and both systems had 16GB of RAM. The NVIDIA GeForce GT650M would comfortably play 3 nodes with color correction and some blur at 24fps while decoding HD DNxHD and the NVIDIA GeForce GT680MX 9 nodes.

Clearly the faster GPU is better for image processing so we expect the systems with a GTX 675MX graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory or the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2GB of GDDR5 will offer more nodes of correction in real time. A larger GPU ram is also better to handle higher res images.

We will include these systems in our next configuration guide.
Peter

Peter: Thanks for posting this update. Great news. Could you specify which Thunderbolt Drive you used. and will that have an effect on performance? Also, is this i7/16RAM/GT680MX iMac system suitable for grading DNG RAW files? Thanks.

Hi
I was just wondering what sort of fps rate you were seeing for rendering out footage during your latest tests? I work with Prores 444 footage alot and often render out to MXF DNxHD36 for offlining on AVID. I currently use an early 2011 17" macbook pro for this, but i'm considering the top spec 27" imac as a stop gap to a new mac pro (if they're ever released!). On paper the new onboard 680MX GPU seems to offer good performance but I'd rather try before I buy... At £2k seems like a good price.

Thanks, P.

[Rohit Gupta]

Hi
I was just wondering what sort of fps rate you were seeing for rendering out footage during your latest tests? I work with Prores 444 footage alot and often render out to MXF DNxHD36 for offlining on AVID. I currently use an early 2011 17" macbook pro for this, but i'm considering the top spec 27" imac as a stop gap to a new mac pro (if they're ever released!). On paper the new onboard 680MX GPU seems to offer good performance but I'd rather try before I buy... At £2k seems like a good price.

Thanks, P.

It renders at about 55 fps (I used the 3.4 GHz i7 model). The CPU is the bottleneck for this test as it's all used up. I was reading and writing back to the 3TB Fusion Drive.

Hi,
I am about to purchase one of the newish iMacs, and was wondering whether Resolve is running OK on the i5 processors, and how it is performing on for example the 2.9GHz i5 with the 660M or the 3.2GHz i5 with the 675MX.
Also, does the FusionDrive even impact much (or at all) on Resolve's performance?

Obviously the top of the range iMac performs best, however I am buying a computer for my home. 90% of the time I am working at different facilities using their setups, so this one would only be used pretty irregularly on high demand jobs, and rarely in client-attended sessions, which is why I'd like to save a few $.

Can anyone give an indication as to how many nodes and what framerates during render these setups are able to achieve. So far I have only been able to find tests with the 21" and 27" i7 with the top of the range graphics cards and FusionDrives.

Thanks for your help,

cheers,

peter

[Peter Chamberlain]

I would really go for the i7 models.
Peter