iMac Pro and Pro Tools Users

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Sardi

Really?

My Mac Mini and MacBook Air both boot in under 10 secs.

That's REALLY slow. Where did you see that?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It's in the article linked to above. One of the people mentioned that boot time.

[jpellizzi]

Got my 8 core base model iMac Pro yesterday, and I've been putting PT HD Native through the ringer for the last few hours...

Boot time is definitely a little sluggish... but not that much of an issue for me.

What is definitely putting me off though, is there is still a noticeable amount of GUI lag, even with this beast of a machine not even being pushed. It 100% absolutely has to be something with the Retina 5k displays, and the way Pro Tools renders the edit window.

It's way snappier than my Late 2015, but there's still a little bit of stuttering when you scroll left>right or up>down, and if you zoom in and out quickly with R/T, there's still a pretty sizable delay.

Same workaround as before - if you run in Low Resolution mode, it's snappy and perfect. The major trade-off is that the UI and text are blurry, along with some other little weirdness. If I'm going to sacrifice and run it that way, I may as well go back to my older 2015 iMac.

If you lower the display resolution (scaled), or even shrink the size of your Edit window, you can see and feel a difference in performance.

The odd thing is, even my Macbook Pro 13" doesn't have this issue, and it's a retina display (albeit a much lower resolution). It seems Pro Tools doesn't really use the GPU at all...

I'm seriously debating returning this thing, as much as it would pain me to do so, and just holding out for a new Mac Pro that I can use with a non-retina display. I can certainly live with it and it's a huge step up from my older machine, but I'm not sure if it justifies a $5k price tag without being flawless...

Edit: After opening some big feature sessions and doing a bunch of A/B comparisons between Low Resolution & normal, I'm going to live and work with it for the week and see how I feel. It may be something I just get used to, and the other benefits make it worth it. It's completely usable in every way, but that bit of GUI latency/sluggishness is going to be in the back of my mind until I adapt from running Low Resolution for so long on my older machine.

[jarettholmes]

Is it possible to get an updated opinion on this after your week of use?

Thanks!

[lesbrunn]

Originally Posted by Popmeise

I have a new iMac 2017 8GB i7 and it works nice. But I only used PT 12.8. with 7 tracks, not many. But I like it and it is in my opinion so much better handling than with Windows.

Is the RAM upgradeable to 3GB and above?

[lesbrunn]

Originally Posted by lesbrunn

Is the RAM upgradeable to 3GB and above?

Sorry about that. I meant 32GB and above, and I posted before reading the entire thread.

[ronwasserman]

Got one. Been running PTHD software but using Apollo Twin for audio. So far, and I say this cautiously, it's been rock solid. Went with the standard model that Apple had in stock 1TB Flash, 32GB Ram..... Nice machine. Makes about the same amount of noise as my 2013 Mac Pro which is very quiet. Benchmark is around 32,000 multi-core. Mac Pro was around 17,800 on a 6 core.

So far I like it.

PS - definitely has a slight GUI 'stutter' when I have video running AND the midi editor window open. If I close the editor, it's smooth as can be.

[Cutlerbri]

Hey Ron...lucky you! You get to update your signature now. Sounds like a rocking' new computer.

[Azureless]

Any news on the imac pro with the retina resolution?