Hi there! I’m going to bye a new MBP to be mobile and want to hear some comments about performance in Maya and Zbrush. Basically it would be used for modelling and texturing.
Specs:
-2.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
-8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
-750GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
-15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
-AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5
my new 2.5GHz 17" MBP arrives this week - it has that GPU but a higher-res screen than the 15" (get the anti-glare screen for the 15", it’s higher res). I can post ZBrush and Maya benchmarks (my main 3D apps too) but only compared to my Mac Pro 12-core Westmere Xeon. If you’re wondering how it performs in Windows, just extrapolate based on these tests I did:
I just got the machine so I’m setting it up. My 16GB of RAM hasn’t arrived yet so here are the Cinebench 11.5 results for now:
MacBook Pro 2011 i7 quad core Sandy Bridge 2.5GHz: 5.81 pts
Mac Pro 12-core Westmere Xeon 2010 2.66GHz: 13.95 pts
Considering that desktop is not that old and has 3 times as many cores, that’s a very good score.
OpenGL:
AMD 6770M in MBP: 43.11 fps
AMD 5870 Mac Pro: 34.98 fps
I was not expecting that. Same screen resolution (1920x1200) and RAM.
Thanks for results! I’ve just tested my overclocked Phenom x6(up to 3.8Ghz per core), its result is 6.8 pts. So for such a low price for AMD, it shows some good performance!
Can you please test Open GL on MBP, mine is about 40 fps on desktop, want to compare.
Hey Dave,
How’s the fan situation with that laptop using ZBrush? The last two generations of MacBook Pros that I’ve owned start their fans even on a fairly low polycount. Dynamesh almost guarantees it. I bought one of these:
Am not sure it how much good it does. At the least it disguises the fans, with it’s own fan. But it makes the laptop a lot heavier so I can only use it in a chair with supporting arms.
the fans spin up when you sculpt in ZBrush (it uses all cores) but the machine doesn’t get noticeably hotter. not like my old 2008 MBP, which got really warm.
My MBP is a 2010. Don’t know if it gets dangerously hot, but the fans drive me too crazy to ever find out. At least yours doesn’t get hot, but I think I’ll give up on using a laptop for ZBrush. Just can’t handle those fans.
Going to have to figure out a lounge type setup with a giant screen, wireless keyboard and a wacom with a really long cable. My current MacPro makes no noise, however it’s getting pretty long of tooth. Will wait and see if Apple is or isn’t going to come out with a new MacPro.
get some noise cancelling headphones and forget about the fans. Just get some work done.
note - I’ll run a benchmark on Maya and ZBrush today and post it for others if they want to run it.
just a note that I bought one of these two swap out the DVD drive and replace it with a big HD for my stock and textures:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290605214827
I have an SSD as the system/apps disk.
Create MME displacement map from ZBrush 4R2b
Mac Pro 12-core: 54 seconds
MBP 17: 23 seconds
produced the same exact map, so this shows how much faster the single or fewer-threaded operations are on Sandy Bridge MBP. ZBrush is faster on the Mac Pro for sculpting because it uses all cores but this doesn’t.
There’s no way this is normal behavior. It’s a bug. If you look at the activity monitor ZBrush uses 100% CPU when doing the most basic tasks such as rotating the view. Using ZBrush on Mac in this state is a good way to fry your laptop. Funny thing is that using the Windows version on Mac via Parallels works fine. Pixologic obviously doesn’t pay as much attention to the Mac port…
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=140&t=1082916
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?174268-Macbook-Pro-i7-CPU-Fan-100
it won’t fry your laptop. I use my MBP for overnight renders even and it’s fine. That’s what the fans are for. And rotating ZBrush meshes in Windows only uses a tiny bit less CPU:
You’re running ZBrush inside a virtual machine via Parallels, so that view of the task manager might not be your actual cpu usage reading, but the virtual machines. Try it again, and instead view the cpu usage via the activity monitor in OS X.
I tried the Windows version on my MBP using Crossover and it works as it should, hardly using any CPU for the same basic tasks. The Mac version of ZBrush does not work correctly since the processor usage is not normal compared the the Windows version.
Please show me any other app on OS X that uses as much CPU as what ZBrush is. In the screen capture that I took, it’s using 750% cpu, and that’s simply rotating the view with a basic mesh. It’s hammering the CPU harder than any render engine and it’s definitely not normal. It causes the fans to start immediately and will certainly cause damage. Other apps that uses high CPU like rendering are controlled, then will not try to use more CPU than what’s there, but this bug seems to try and use more CPU than anything available and is hammering the processor. Definitely not useable like this.
Doing the same thing in Windows via Fusion… not a problem. However the problem is that I’m supposed to be able to use ZBrush in OS X and not have to use the Windows version…
You’re running ZBrush inside a virtual machine via Parallels, so that view of the task manager might not be your actual cpu usage reading, but the virtual machines. Try it again, and instead view the cpu usage via the activity monitor in OS X.
It was exactly the same I was checking my menu bar CPU monitor at the same time. It’s not an emulator - it’s a VM so the CPU indication inside a VM is perfectly accurate. It might just not give you 100% of actual performance relative to a native boot of the OS, but that’s different. I happen to know a bit about virtual machine software - I review them for Ars Technica.
You don’t have to use the Windows version. Yes, it seems to redline less, which is nice, but I have been using ZBrush on my various MBP laptops for years and never had any issues with heat. Apple hires these guys known as “engineers” and they’re paid cash money to not be idiots. Like I said, I have been using my 2011 17" unibody MBP (and earlier ones) as an added render node for long jobs and my computer never once overheated.
It’s using more CPU for just rotating the view than any other app on my system. There’s no way I’m trusting that it’s safe. Pixologic has already acknowledged that it’s a bug a while ago from what I found on the forums, but they still haven’t released and update that addresses this yet. From my own experience of running the mac vs windows versions the difference is drastic and there is definitely something wrong with the mac build.
well, the performance is only a tiny bit better on Windows, so any perceived difference is placebo effect:
http://polygonspixelsandpaint.tumblr.com/post/3353016788
A program can’t break your system just because it’s using excessive CPU cycles to do something like mesh rotation. Your paranoia is kind of excessive.
Not really, the performance difference between the Mac and Windows version of ZBrush is excessive. That link that you supplied is not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about Mac vs Windows. I’m talking about the difference between the ZBrush build for Mac and Windows. Please take another look at the two screenshots that I supplied. The difference is not a ‘tiny bit’, it’s HUGE. It might not be on your system, but there is a very big difference on mine and on other’s.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?139628-OS-X-Lion-and-Zbrush&p=917896&viewfull=1#post917896
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?174268-Macbook-Pro-i7-CPU-Fan-100
No other 3D apps cause this problem for me besides ZBrush and Sculptris. Pixologic has apparently acknowledged this issue, so it is definitely there. They just seem to be incompetent when it comes to Macs apparently. It took forever for them to release the Mac update to ZBrush 3 when the Windows version was out for months, and apparently now they take on a new app, Sculptris and whatever they are doing is really weird considering that it has the same issue as ZBrush with it causing the CPU to go out of control.