Brake Dive, Acceleration Squat, Body Roll Works LLC
On 2/7/14, 10:44 PM, Alan Baker wrote:

Alan Baker
...the problem was foolish assumptions about what the Mac Pro could do:

'In our recent review of the late 2013 Mac Pro, one of our sticking points was the OpenGL performance that trailed Windows on the same hardware. A particularly damning case was the high-polygon-scene performance in Autodesk Maya showing how OpenGL viewport 2 performance fell off a cliff when you pushed into very high polygon counts of over 20 million with the D700 in OS X.

While this issue still needs to be resolved for some programs like modo, some quick sleuthing by Apple and AMD shows that the problem was on the Autodesk side. Maya was not simply querying the GPU RAM; for some reason, it was using a hard ceiling on OS X, so the brutal performance hit was the result of that ceiling. Once you explicitly tell Maya to use your available VRAM with the environment variable MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT=6000 in ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2014-x64/Maya.env, performance is perceptibly the same as in Windows in Boot Camp with very large scenes:'

<http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/02/2013-mac-pro-firepro-d700-opengl-is-better-than-we-thought-it-was/>

Brake Dive, Acceleration Squat, Body Roll Works LLC
Who gives a flying fuck. Bottom line is this: while on a full tower PC you can swap the graphics cards to work around bugs and features in (expensive) suite such a maya on new Mac Pro you'd suck your own dick while it's sorted out between the 3rd party (expensive) sw maker and apple.

Desktop OpenGL drives are insanely complicated (as is the underlying hariball of mess that is the GPU chip as you can probably tell from the transistor count).

And it serves you right to get a problem such a this to specify exactly why apple sucks as making "pro" desktop offerings.

What is a stellar idea in mobile (no extensibility, tight control on the platform) is UTTERLY idiotic in desktop space.