22 replies to this topic

[Cutty Pastey]

Has anyone ordered and received the new retina macbook pro yet? If so can you enlighten us on how the non optimized adobe apps are displaying - especially After Effects?

I know C Smith said he was taking the plunge. Anyone else? I ordered, but it won't arrive till mid July. I'm curious if we'll all need to work from external monitors until the apps are updated to see our videos at the proper - non pixel doubled resolution.

I mainly ordered it for the dual thunderbolts and USB 3 - to essentially go mobile and replace my aging mac pro tower - didn't give much thought to resolution issues until I started reading reviews and blogs on it.

Article on the display res: http://news.cnet.com...k-pro-displays/

Edited by Cutty Pastey, 19 June 2012 - 09:09 PM.

[C.Smith]

I have been checking around as well. In the keynote, I think Phil said it still works with legacy apps but just does a 2x thing on them. So the conversion is mostly to enjoy the difference of the retina display. Looks like AJA makes a thunderbolt to SDI doodad. And BlackMagic has the UltraStudio3D which is a thunderbolt to everything converter including plugs for Premiere and AE for acceleration on effects. And it works with Resolve. I filled my Apple cart the other day and almost hit buy, but then stalled to see if anyone else has posted their findings. I'm mostly curious to know for a fact that CS6 fully utilizes the CUDA in the onboard 650M GPU.

[kitkats]

Mine should be arriving today - if you want me to post render speeds for a CS6 raytrace project or something let me know Chris.

[C.Smith]

Thanks, KitKats. More of just an impression of response for AE. And if you have Premiere CS6, I would love to know if the Mercury playback engine is working in GPU mode with that 650M.

[kitkats]

Well, after a number of kernel panics and OS reinstalls, it appears I have a dud SSD in mine. So any impressions will be delayed whilst it functions as a beermat.

[Colin@movecraft]

How's the beermat functionality? I've been thinking of going heineken-tosh.

[Basic]

How's the beermat functionality? I've been thinking of going heineken-tosh.

haha this took me by suprise! very funny though!

[C.Smith]

Well, after a number of kernel panics and OS reinstalls, it appears I have a dud SSD in mine. So any impressions will be delayed whilst it functions as a beermat.

Wow. That sucks. Sorry to hear.

[kitkats]

Wow. That sucks. Sorry to hear.

Yeah, it really does. Apple are saying the replacement will be higher priority than a normal purchase but if it arrives later than end of this week I will have to rent or something until it does.

All I can say about the brief experience I did get is this - whilst the screen is definitely glossy, the glare is pleasantly reduced over the regular MBP's. Bright window reflections etc just aren't as bright. And the extra screen real-estate is really nice - I immediately flipped it onto the highest setting as I've always found OS X to be too big and fat, and maybe I sit quite close to the screen or whatever. And, of course, it's a very nice piece of kit physically.

[mario5]

For expansion....

MAGMA is coming out with a Thunderbolt PCI expansion box that has 3 PCI slots: http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp

Belkin & Matrox are coming out with Thunderbolt expansion docks:
http://www.belkin.com/thunderbolt/
http://www.matrox.co...station/en/ds1/

[_gl]

Dunno if you guys have seen this but, here are some CS6 Raytrace Cuda comparisons, including the Retinabook, from @rendernyc: Cuda CS6

-gl

[C.Smith]

Well, just makes me want a MacPro more than ever after seeing those results. I'm intrigued by the PCI expansion cages, but I *thought* I read where they are better suited for adapter or interface cards where speed isn't hyper critical. That having GPU may defeat some purpose when the speed is cut through Thunderbolt. I would be curious to see GPU speed tests through PCI expanders. But also, the host still adds a lot to the equation. Like there is a hell of a speed hit when you get to the Retina laptop and I don't think it's only from GPU performance.

[AromaKat]

All GTX cards blowing the quadros out of the water??? Why are we supposed to get quadro again?

[C.Smith]

All GTX cards blowing the quadros out of the water??? Why are we supposed to get quadro again?

I've always thought that was a racket. Somebody may drop a technical truth bomb to say otherwise, but it seems to me that Nvidia has their 2 card lines priced to each market. A Vid card manufacturer won't survive if they don't make the absolute fastest gaming card they can for under $1000. But at the same time they have the workstation market that has boo koo dollah to get the right thing. So they have 2 different products that have very little performance parity, but a huge price parity.

Kind of like how a plug-in for AE will be $300 but for a Flame or Avid DS that same plugin is priced at $2000.

They can quote technical reasons to say why you should be getting a quadro, but man, the benchmarks are not selling it.

[jeffreyrobert]

So my RMBP finally came in and I got everything installed as quickly as possible to give it all a quick run through.

Retina mode looks fine though some menu items are a bit blurry but nothing distracting. I find myself running in full native 2880 1800 res most the time by using a 3rd party app and the real estate is simply amazing, especially when cutting in Pr. It does get a bit tiresome having to get closer to the screen when browsing web pages or reading text but the more I use it that way the more comfortable it becomes.

The only odd thing I have noticed is in AE it'll occasionally kick the res down to the highest scaled option built into OSX which is 1920 1200.


Things pretty darn snappy.

[kitkats]

Since this popped up again I may as well weigh in and say DO NOT install Avid Media Composer 5 on a RMBP. I did have a faulty SSD, but even with the replacement unit, AMC caused some serious hangs.

Otherwise it seems good. I have also been impressing everybody with the 2880 res (via setres.app) although its a bit too fine for me to work like that so have been using 1920. It seems snappy enough, haven't done any raytracing or super high poly work yet though.

[C.Smith]

especially when cutting in Pr.

Things pretty darn snappy.

Yeah, I just got mine in a few days ago (2.7 Ghz, 16Gb of ram). It is way snappier than I expected. Like in DaVinci Resolve it will do 8 nodes running real time. Then only 23 fps at 9 nodes. That's not too different than the 2008 MacPro with 3 Quadro 4000s I had back in Texas. However, when I put the laptop in clamshell mode and drive the 2 27" Thunderbolt displays I get only 1 node. Beyond that it errors with no more GPU memory. So I think the laptop driving these two monitors has tapped all of it's resources which sucks. Then I see that Thunderbolt PCI doodads are out and they don't support GPUs. That kind of blows my mind. But I also see that they MAY run the GPUs, it's just that Apple won't *officially* support GPUs in those things because they can't be hot swapped. So we'll see where that goes.

I just signed up for the Adobe Creative Cloud and am officially diving into CS6 to replace my old Avid workflow I've had for years. I am blown away how snappy and fast Premiere is on this laptop. Like equal or better response than the Avid DS I had on a powerful HP machine that cost as much as a sports car when I got it. And considering, the GPU isn't yet "turned on" by Adobe for the Retina MBP yet. It's running on CPU. I know I can do the GPU hack, but I think with this performance I'll just wait until Adobe supports it correctly.

If the GPU via thunderbolt never gets resolved I will absolutely need a MacPro in 2013 when they drop. If the GPU gets sorted out, I could seriously consider skipping a tower. The conspiracy part of me thinks this is exactly why Apple would be in no hurry at all to fix it.

[ianfreeze]

Something to note as far as running newer MBP in clamshell: from what I understand there is a good chunk of cooling that happens through the keyboard, so running in clamshell prevents that cooling and may make the machine run at higher temps. I don't know if this is the cause of your problem, or if its even true for the newest MBP, but for all the other unibodies this is the case. Just something to keep in mind.

[Binky]

Just wondering what the concensus is, now a month down the road. Strongly considering getting one of these, but a display seems necessary with the truncated 15" retina screen size. So what issues are still at play for the RSMB tied to a thunderbolt display running adobe apps and c4d and all of that goodness?

Side note: how are the thunderbolt displays?

[C.Smith]

Sir Binkington,

I'm back in LA this weekend if you wanna drop by and see my Retina 15 connected to the 27" display. I have 2 displays but having it drive 2 taxed it. But I DEFINITELY prefer using a 27" display with it whenever I can. But concensus is, I wish it could drive 2 and have GPU power left over but it doesn't. It CAN drive 2 of them, but good luck asking the GPU for one cent more power from it.