After Effects CC 2017 Mac Pro vs PC Performance

After Effects CC 2017 Mac Pro vs PC Performance

Participate:

Always look at history when reading hardware article. Some of the content in this article is likely to be out of date, as written on March 30, 2017. For the latest information, see the latest articles.

Table of contents:

Introduction

Test the setting

RAM Preview - Standard Projects

RAM Preview - GPU Heavy Projects

Submission of final - standard projects

Final submission - GPU heavy projects

Affiliate Movement

conclusion

After effects of workstations

Introduction

If you are thinking of moving an After Effects station from a Mac to your computer, it is likely to do so for one of the following three reasons:

The most powerful capabilities available on PC (integrated video capture options, VR headset support, hardware upgrades, etc.)

Low cost PC workstations

High performance of the modern computer workstation

In this article we will be specifically in number 3 - studying how Mac Pro compares (late 2013) in one of After Effects' workstations. This system is designed based on our extensive testing of After Effects and represents a great value (priced just over half the cost of your Mac Pro) as well as providing excellent performance in After Effects.

There is a wide range of tasks that we can test, but in this article we will specifically consider the RAM preview performance, final submission (export), and motion tracking. If you do not want to look at diagrams and data graphs, we also have a summary of this article available on Youtube:

Test the setting

To learn how to compare your current Mac Pro to a modern workstation, we'll test the following systems:

Mac Pro (late 2013) Puget Systems Workstation

CPU Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2

(2.7-3.5 GHz) Core Core i7 6900K 3.2GHz

(3.5-4 GHz) 8 Core

RAM 4x DDR3-1866 16GB ECC

(64 GB total) 4x DDR4-2400 32GB ECC Reg.

(128 GB total)

GPU 2X AMD FirePro D700 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX

Hard Drive 1TB PCIe-based Storage Flash Samsung 960 Pro 1TB M.2 PCI-E x4 NVMe SSD

OS MacOS Sierra Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

After Effects CC 2017.1

The system cost $ 9,399 $ 5,633

Starting with your Mac Pro, we'll use the best options available now including Core 12, 64 GB DDR3, and Dual D700. Since After Effects is able to use a GPU with OpenCL or Metal, we decided to test both to see if there is a significant difference in performance.

The PC workstation that we will use is a typical configuration that we sell for After Effects using the Intel Core i7 6900K and GeForce GTX 1080 8GB video card and 128 GB of DDR4 memory. This system comes with almost 60% of the cost of your Mac Pro, so it should be a great indicator of what kind of performance you can expect while reducing the cost of the workstation itself. Even if you have a large budget, editing $ 4,000 can open up a number of possibilities, including upgrading multiple workstations at the same time, upgrading monitors and other peripherals, increasing internal storage (not an option on a Mac) Pro), or taking a beautiful holiday to Hawaii.

One thing we want to point out is that although each of these workstations is used for one drive, this is not actually what we usually recommend to our customers. As part of our storage test, we found that using at least one drive configuration with cache on a secondary drive could have a significant impact on performance. However, since your Mac Pro is capable of owning only one internal drive, we chose to match this limit on your computer workstation to ensure that we do not overly prefer the PC.

In order to accurately measure the two work stations, we tested with both standard animation projects as well as working with 4K video files using heavy GPU-accelerated effects such as Lumetri Color. In addition, we have tested motion tracking with both 1080p and 4K footage. This will not test everything that can be done at all in After Effects, but by testing a variety of projects from different sources, we hope to find a number of directions That will help show performance difference between Mac Pro and PC workstation.

The projects we used (with their source) are:

Enterprise standard source length

Template People

(1920x1080) ~ 12.8 seconds

(30 fps - 384 frames) BlueFX

Grunge tires

(1920x1080) ~ 19.9 seconds

(24 fps - 469 frames) Free AE templates

Fiber particles

(960 x 360) ~ 8 seconds

(24 frames per second - 191 frames) Video CoPilot

Simple rings

(1920 × 1080) ~ 6.3 seconds

(24 fps - 150 frames) AE templates are free

Subscribers 5K

(1920x1080) ~ 10.2 seconds

(30 FPS - 307 frames) FX Channel House

Enterprise heavy GPU source length test effects

4K ProRes 4444 clip 16.5 seconds

(23.976 FPS - 395 snapshot) transcoded from R3D sample files

EPIC DRAGON 4K HD (3840x2160)

-Lumetri color correction

- Blurred camouflage

-sharpening

Track Source Source Length

H.264 1080p clip

4K ProRes 4444