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Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

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Fuser88

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Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostWed Dec 01, 2021 10:59 pm

We are upgrading our suite and considering a top of the line Mac Pro tower to run Fusion and Resolve. Can anyone here provide any insight if the 2.5GHz 28-core processor would be beneficial or overkill?

Thanks in advance!
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Sander de Regt

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Re: Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostWed Dec 01, 2021 11:04 pm

The number 1 question in that context is: what will you be using it for? Because 'Fusion' can mean a single Text node or it can mean a 50+ layer comp in 8k. What is your use case?
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George Deierling

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Re: Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostWed Dec 01, 2021 11:06 pm

Its a bad time for investing in MacPro, with all the M1 stuff happening.
What about gettting a battery of MacMinis as render slaves.
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Fuser88

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Re: Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostThu Dec 02, 2021 1:55 pm

Thanks for the responses. I don't think waiting for an M1 edition of Mac Pro is an option.

We would be using it mostly for finishing work and some color. Probably more on the end of 4-8 layers of 4K compositing work. Comping, clean up, vfx, and versioning. Need speed and real time performance for client supervised sessions.
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Harold Tomlinson

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Re: Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostFri Dec 03, 2021 11:51 pm

As Sander said, the answer will be 'it depends'. It won't be "overkill" but it may not be worth the extra depending on what bottlenecks you have and what it takes to overcome them. Renders are still slow on mine, but I don't know if they are slower or faster than someone else's configuration. I hope that I can overcome my bottlenecks with a larger, faster GPU that has more memory. It really depends on what you are doing and how you configure the box. I have an NVMe drive that gives me great speed for loading files, but it does not matter if I am rendering particles.

If you have a small composition that you want to compare, post it and I will test it and tell you the render time.
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Vapidslug

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Re: Top of the Line Mac Pro Worth it for Fusion?

PostFri Dec 24, 2021 3:57 pm

If you are going to drop that kind of money, I believe you would be better served assembling a custom system with an AMD Threadripper which can go up to 64 cores and a GTX 3080-Ti. I believe the GTX 3090 was recently edged out by the 3080-Ti. If you are looking for speed, you would want to go with a Linux build. I have been using RockyOS 8.5 (it's the off-shoot from the discontinued CentOS project). With Linux, you can enable direct I/O from an application to your SSD--something neither MacOS or Windows is able to do.

But as others have said, you can only decide if it's worth it by your own accounting. Do you spend a significant time waiting for laggy scrubbing, do you have to wait too long for exports? If you feel these wait times are intrusive to your day then maybe it will be worth it.

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