Nicholas Salzman
nsalzman
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Recent Forum Posts
Ideal Hardware Setup for Houdini (MacOS) Nov. 20, 2019, 7:32 p.m.
Hey AWWilson,
There are elements of your question worth further discussion. I use Houdini and Davinci Resolve, both of which are demanding of graphics hardware. My compromise (i.e. the sweet spot) was the 10-core iMac Pro (refurbished). This works well enough, with the following caveats:
- I bought the 8g Vega 64. If I could I would have purchased the 16g Vega
- the 10 core model boost speed is not sufficient for some plugins, so I use external GPUs and DSP. In this case 2 eGPUs for video and a wavesgrid server for music plugins
The relevant ideas:
- Houdini uses the built in Vega 64 and an external radeon vii eGPU with 16g vram for openCL. I am content with the performance. Off topic but resolve uses all 3 GPUs and my use case is 4K proxies and matchmoving.
- 10 cores seemed like a good idea, but the Xeons are not so competitive with fewer threads.
What would I do differently?
- in my case the xeon single processor performance actually prevents my using acustica plugins (for example), and there definitely other apps where an i9 may be better.
- As above, I’d get the 16g Vega. This addresses a concern that some apps only use the amount of vram available to the card with the least onboard.
As with many people here, I am just waiting for a modular Mac Pro… and spending as little as possible except on GPUs and DSPs which can be used with that next machine.
There are elements of your question worth further discussion. I use Houdini and Davinci Resolve, both of which are demanding of graphics hardware. My compromise (i.e. the sweet spot) was the 10-core iMac Pro (refurbished). This works well enough, with the following caveats:
- I bought the 8g Vega 64. If I could I would have purchased the 16g Vega
- the 10 core model boost speed is not sufficient for some plugins, so I use external GPUs and DSP. In this case 2 eGPUs for video and a wavesgrid server for music plugins
The relevant ideas:
- Houdini uses the built in Vega 64 and an external radeon vii eGPU with 16g vram for openCL. I am content with the performance. Off topic but resolve uses all 3 GPUs and my use case is 4K proxies and matchmoving.
- 10 cores seemed like a good idea, but the Xeons are not so competitive with fewer threads.
What would I do differently?
- in my case the xeon single processor performance actually prevents my using acustica plugins (for example), and there definitely other apps where an i9 may be better.
- As above, I’d get the 16g Vega. This addresses a concern that some apps only use the amount of vram available to the card with the least onboard.
As with many people here, I am just waiting for a modular Mac Pro… and spending as little as possible except on GPUs and DSPs which can be used with that next machine.