Shoulf I get a retina macbook pro?

#126

which MBP would have that low resolution? The 15" retina displays are 2880-by-1800

#127

If I really choose the apple way, ill be going with the regular 15" mbp but antiglare high res display. Ill also replace the optical drive for an hdd.

that way im free from bootcamp resolution issues, no eye strains and no lack of storage.

#128

ah - ya, I have a 2011 17" and did an optical HD swap with a cheap kit I got on eBay. Works great. Just make sure that you can get a kit for the current lineup.

#129

Yay alright, I think I finally decided to go with the mac then!

Now, should I get the ssd from apple or I could save some cash by getting it from somewhere else?

Also if the mac comes with a regular HDD, will there be any trouble swaping that for a SSD?

#130

also, you should opt for the 1GB GPU/2.6GHz option for the MBP. The base model is 512MB/2.3. It comes with a HD by default so buy the SSD separately. Is the RAM upgradeable later? I don’t know if these are like the retina internals, where it’s not.

But this might be a bad time to buy, with Haswell just around the corner.

#131

Wait before you buy. All macs are approaching or are close to their end-of-life cycle, so if you can: wait for the update.

I always check this: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

#132

Yes, the ram is upgradable and I also have the option to customize it and include a SSD straight form apple. What Im not sure is whether getting the SSD from them is mandatory or I can replace the regular HDD for a ssd later. Maybe they have some kind of special mount for the ssd, dont know.

And I was hoping to buy it by the beginning of July, but really, if they release the next gen before August, I’ll sure wait!

#133

ya, I’m sure the new machines will be out before August. As for their SSDs - they are standard

#134

Techno,

What sector within the CG industry are you servicing?

Is it film/visual effects? Architecture? Real time gaming? Product visualization?

#135

Im still studying/building a portfolio but right now im aiming towards gaming. However if anything in other areas show up I wont hesitate in doing it.

So an all-round notebook is what im after. I think the mbp will do it fine.

#136

well, if you’re looking to get into gaming and realtime assets for game engines, I don’t recommend you get an OS X machine. While OS X has Unity, Windows has more game engines like Unity, UDK, Cryengine, etc. If you were looking at doing architectural visualization or character animation, OS X would be fine.

You can develop game assets on a Mac though, if you’re dead set on it.

#137

Actually I was already going to use 3ds max most of the time and I still ended up choosing the mbp after all these 9 pages of discussion. The real problem was the retina resolution in bootcamp but since im getting the regular one, I dont see any other issue that might get in the way when running windows in a mac.

#138

well, as I noted previously, you will be getting limited SSD disk speed in Windows because Boot Camp loads with IDE mode for all disks, not AHCI mode. I’m a Mac guy but if you’re going to run Windows, get another machine because that cuts your disk speed in half.

#139

As noted previously though I’m curious to know if you tested that.
IDE mode isn’t enough to drop SSD performance significantly for common app use on a single SSD.

Sequential read and artificial cases between two top shelf SSDs? Yes, it will cap you lower than the 400+ MBps an 840 pro can do.

Actual app use, paging and random fetch an SSD is worth using as a system/app drive for? You seldom get anywhere close to a 170-180 average and 280 spikes, and IDE can cope with sequential reads in the 250s, and will actually slightly outperform AHCI in page writing.

The performance loss would be unnoticeable IMO, and all tests I found of IDE vs AHCI indicate as much (in those common cases, I’m making no argument for where you can actually peak out two SSDs consistently, or if there are genuine issues with bootcamp’s handling of IDE mode).

Point in case, I had my SSD on IDE for the longest time and only took notice when benchmarking some time ago, switching to AHCI did improve the sequential read benched considerably, pointing to the switch being successful and not culled down the pipe, but general performance and handling in dealing with day2day use was absolutely and completely unaffected unless I was hammering the controller by hogging 130MBps off it with a big move from my online to my NAS.

#140

As noted previously though I’m curious to know if you tested that.
IDE mode isn’t enough to drop SSD performance significantly for common app use on a single SSD.

ya, I only discovered it after testing 3 drives (one over Thunderbolt with the proper driver loaded, one over eSATA, and one on internal SATA 3) and wondering why all were performing way under in Windows. I loaded Samsung’s software in Windows for my 840 Pro SSD and it showed that it was running it in IDE mode, which lead me to me read about this limitation. The whole reason I found the technical info was because I benchmarked it for an article about ExFAT.

I was using commercial cross-platform disk benchmarking software called QuickBench. The performance is significantly worse for all read/write speeds:

OS X :

Seq. Read	Seq. Write	Ran. Read 	Ran. Write
   4 KB	39.139	64.152	26.29	75.704
   8 KB	88.541	96.483	40.88	131.478
  16 KB	157.842	159.39	73.222	214.971
  32 KB	233.567	221.87	122.004	298.154
  64 KB	299.304	277.587	188.819	374.214
 128 KB	313.626	289.947	248.953	421.801
 256 KB	364.823	350.19	292.326	404.607
 512 KB	404.311	394.429	374.917	450.632
1024 KB	424.754	416.462	428.553	474.305
Standard Ave	258.434	252.279	199.552	316.207

Windows:

    4 KBytes    	013.067 MB/sec    	013.099 MB/sec    	016.663 MB/sec    	028.684 MB/sec    
     8 KBytes    	022.410 MB/sec    	024.020 MB/sec    	033.809 MB/sec    	070.918 MB/sec    
    16 KBytes    	041.692 MB/sec    	042.619 MB/sec    	058.866 MB/sec    	099.266 MB/sec    
    32 KBytes    	071.311 MB/sec    	070.698 MB/sec    	099.836 MB/sec    	142.423 MB/sec    
    64 KBytes    	126.793 MB/sec    	129.636 MB/sec    	160.867 MB/sec    	241.861 MB/sec    
   128 KBytes    	198.192 MB/sec    	184.029 MB/sec    	194.913 MB/sec    	270.551 MB/sec    
   256 KBytes    	241.253 MB/sec    	231.010 MB/sec    	230.217 MB/sec    	240.809 MB/sec    
   512 KBytes    	263.783 MB/sec    	258.423 MB/sec    	200.748 MB/sec    	255.080 MB/sec    
  1024 KBytes    	278.284 MB/sec    	273.096 MB/sec    	207.127 MB/sec    	239.889 MB/sec    

Test Average:      	139.643 MB/sec    	136.292 MB/sec    	133.672 MB/sec    	176.609 MB/sec

It’s not just ExFAT either. NTFS, FAT32, etc. all have this limitation.

#141

I get that much, it’s the same thing I mentioned (benching it revealed the difference), what I’m asking about is if you actually found real use differences in day to day use.

The difference between an SSD and a spindle drive, even capped by IDE, is considerable enough to pick the former, and in turn hit by enough things that its topmost performance is practically never significant.

On top of that, while a benchmark will test sequential read and write in an Utopia scenario by bitsequencing a file on the same drive, how often do you actually move data from SSD to SSD (which implies having two, because locally it would just retable the file in real world scenarios), or in day to day use perform big enough sequential reads to notice the difference?

Things like loading an app, paging the memory in or out in the background and so on will not really show difference you can appreciate in terms of feeling it as a user.
Copy to or from the disk will always be limited by the spindle drives or the network you will be going through (again, unless you use dual SSDs, like having an external TBolt SSD drive, which is fairly uncommon).

I’m not debating your findings, they are well founded.
I’m saying that this statement “that cuts your disk speed in half” is too blanket-y. It cuts some of your benchmarks down 40%, the rest is likely to be between 0 and 10% impact :slight_smile:

In the use case scenario mentioned here, 3DSmax, I’ll hazard a guess that if there even was any difference, it’d be well contained in the single digit percentage realm.
I’m really not a Mac kinda guy, and I actually agree that if all you want to do is use Max and VRay you might as well go for a cheaper option with USB3 over a MBP, but I don’t think the forceful IDE mode is such a determining factor.

#142

It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t revealed earlier in the thread.

If game assets are what you will be working on primarily, then you WILL be spending ALL your time in Windows. There’s no question about this.

Many industry standard tools that help facilitate the creation of game assets which Windows users take for granted are unavailable in OSX. In fact, the lack of game oriented content creation tools has meant that even developers favor Windows over OSX for 3D based iOS games; a highly embarrassing predicament for which Apple seems only too happy to ignore given their focus on the consumer market.

I have a 2011 MBP 17 inch myself and for well over a year I have tried to find a decent workflow that would allow me to create content for games without having to flip through half a dozen different applications or resorting to bootcamp. The realization that there are no decent texture baking tools at all was especially alarming. The closest I came to was Maya with Mental Ray - hardly an ideal solution. Other applications including Lightwave3D, Modo, and Cinema4d force you to perform a bizarre array of rituals to accomplish the same end result that could be reached much quicker with 3dsmax on Windows.

Fortunately for me, I run the gamut of everything from 3D to photography to motion graphics to video and this is where OSX is at its best. So I kept my 2011 MBP. However, if your focus is aimed primarily at 3D where you’ll be working in only a few choice applications, OSX loses most of its advantages.

Had you elected to go a different route such as architectural visualization, you would have been fairly safe sticking to OSX but the opposite is certainly true with game assets.

At this point, I can’t recommend an Apple laptop. You will only be gimping yourself in the end. It was a bitter pill to swallow for me as it probably is for you but trust me when I say you will get so much more for your money with a PC laptop because Windows is where you’ll stay.

#143

Not that it goes against your point, since it’s true that game dev is, for many reasons, very windows centric, but just in case it helps:
http://www.topogun.com/

Cheap, amazing for retopo, has respectable tools for generating maps of several types from differentials built in (elevation, normal, ambocc etc.).

In case it saves you a few boot-overs :wink:

#144

Indeed.

Topogun is a fantastic tool for retopology. I have version 1.xx of the program.

I was never able to get the kind of results I had hoped for with the baking toolset offered by Topogun though. I use xNormal on a VMware install of Windows 7 and I’ve had much better luck with that. The bakes can take awhile but I don’t need to spend an awful lot of time in the application so generally a VMware fusion solution is tolerable - ditto with 3dsmax for converting .max files.

I have yet to check out Topogun 2.0.

I will say that if only Autodesk had included the Turtle renderer with Maya for OSX, then a lot of my woes would have been solved.

#145

Turtle is included in Maya 2014 on all platforms.

I get that much, it’s the same thing I mentioned (benching it revealed the difference), what I’m asking about is if you actually found real use differences in day to day use.

well, considering the OS can’t get around the limitations, then of course there would be a noticeable difference. You’re launching apps at half the speed, paging at half the speed, etc. I don’t use Boot Camp for work - I only use it for the occasional game on the road, so I can’t compare it directly but it’s obvious that subjective experience is irrelevant given that you have numbers to tell you exactly what to expect - significantly worse performance in Windows for anything file system related.