PRO APPS: iMac Retina 5K
versus other Macs
Posted Tuesday, October 28th, 2014 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist
October 31st corrected characterization of iMac 5K compared to Mac Pro Quad-Core.
We tested three popular pro apps on the iMac with Retina 5K Display against the fastest 'late 2013' iMac Quad-Core i7 and three 'late 2013' Mac Pros.
GRAPH LEGEND
nMP 8c = 'late 2013' Mac Pro 3.0GHz 8-Core Xeon; dual FirePro D700 GPUs
nMP 6c = 'late 2013' Mac Pro 3.5GHz 6-Core Xeon; dual FirePro D500 GPUs
nMP 4c = 'late 2013' Mac Pro 3.7GHz Quad-Core Xeon; dual FirePro D300 GPUs
iMac 2014 5K = 'late 2014' iMac Retina 5K 4.0GHz Quad-Core i7; Radeon R9 M295X GPU
iMac 2013 = 'late 2013' iMac 3.5GHz Quad-Core i7; GeForce GTX 780M GPU
RED means fastest Mac. ORANGE indicates the iMac Retina 5K.
DaVinci Resolve 11
Using the popular Candle benchmark project (1920x1080), we measured playback frames per second with 8 blur nodes being rendered on-the-fly.
Next we used the "Deliver" function to export a 289 frame RED Digital Cinema clip (4800x2700 with 5:1 compression ratio) to QuickTime ProRes 4444 in HD 1920x1080 with both "Force sizing to highest quality" and "Force debayer res to highest quality" enabled.
After Effects CC 2014
We use a sample project created by Total Training for benchmarking various Macs and PCs. It is one of our real world ways of maxing out the CPU and memory. We enable Multiprocessing in the Performance preference panel and specify 1.5G of RAM per background spawned sub-process.
Photoshop CC 2014
We timed how long it took to Reduce Noise in a sample RAW image.
Again, RED means fastest Mac. ORANGE indicates the iMac Retina 5K.
INSIGHTS
The iMac with Retina 5K Display was able to beat the 'late 2013' Mac Pro Quad-Core in two out of four tests. It essentially tied it in the Photoshop test. It beat the 'late 2013' iMac in all four tests.
Obviously the iMac Retina 5K can't compete with the 6-core and 8-core 'late 2013' Mac Pros in terms of Pro App performance. Then again, you can't connect a Retina display to any model of Mac Pro.
We are in the process of testing the above Macs using Logic Pro X. We will add that to this page soon.
OTHER BARE FEATS ARTICLES ON THE iMAC Retina 5K
Go to our INDEX page for a list of several pages featuring the iMac with Retina 5K Display compared to other Macs.
Comments? Suggestions? Feel free to email me,
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