Still Waiting on a New Mac Pro? 2012 iMac Beats Mac Pro in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere

nofilmschool by Dave Kendricken

Oh where, oh where is Apple’s “Pro” line of products going? Okay, I admit the words don’t work as well with the song as the actual lyrics, but it’s still a fair enough question to ask. There’s speculation that Apple is slowly but surely consolidating its professional products line with its consumer one — in terms of both software and hardware — but whatever the reason for the delay, the fact is that the Mac Pro has been ‘on hiatus’ for two years at this point. If you’re a Mac User looking to upgrade, what are you to do in the mean time? You’ve got a few options. Bare Feats has recently performed a number of benchmark tests on the new 27? 3.4GHz Core i7 iMac, with some impressive results.

As always, you’ll have to filter these findings by your own applications — performance sufficient for some of us may simply not cut it for those of us running or rendering the most hardcore of tasks — and concordantly, you may require even less brainpower of your machine than the tests performed for these benchmarks. Keep in mind that these tests were balanced between CPU and GPU-stressful activities, split right about half and half.

In their two-part test, Bare Feats pitted the late 2012 27? iMac 3.4GHz Core i7 (with 32G RAM and a GeForce GTX 680MX GPU) against five other recent Macs in shootouts by both Apple and Adobe & Blackmagic Design — among the competitors is the ‘mid 2012' Retina display Macbook Pro and the latest (mid 2010) Mac Pro — the latter of which, by the way, still performs admirably, and even the best in some cases. In the first part of their test, Bare Feats found that the iMac 3.4GHz performed the best out of all machines in a number of tasks, including an automated Aperture export of 50 RAW stills to full-res JPEGs (CPU intensive), rendering FCPX‘s ‘Directional Blur’ effect on a 30 second 1080 ProRes 422 HQ project (GPU intensive), and a test which forced Apple Motion to RAM preview a project (in which the ’12 iMac won out, able to render up to almost 41 FPS for this preview — GPU intensive, pictured above-left). read more...