Anyone Running a New 2018 MacBook Pro?

[br3ttman]

I've been waiting 5 years to get into a new MacBook Pro, and the new ones that came out in July are looking attractive.  Any KeyShot users out there have one yet?  Could you share your performance?

Cheers!

[Furniture_Guy]

Sorry but you should keep waiting. Been on Macs for 20 years but had to switch to a PC because they just don't have the necessary cores for Keyshot. Windows 10 is not bad ( hardly a rousing endorsement I know ) but the performance just doesn't even come close. Maybe the new MacPro in 2019...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

[hnax]

I don't agree https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=21162.0

I have both Mac and PC https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=20835.0

I use the Mac more with keyshot because of better color calibration.

[mattjgerard]

As another fellow 20+ year mac user, I had to jump ship as well. I still use my 2015 Macbook Pro for everything I can, its a beautiful and functional machine. I love it, and mostly I love OSX.

But-

$9k for 18 cores is hardly a good deal, especially when all Keyshot cares about is cores. My IT dept just acquired a new HP Z8 G4 Workstation
2x Xeon Gold 6142 2.6GHz
32 Cores/64 Threads
32 GB ram
for about the same price and it runs the Keyshot Camera Benchmark Scene at 464.9 FPS.  And that includes a pretty hefty GPU that we don't use at all, since it runs headless, so I'd drop the price off that and put it towards a really nice LG 5k Monitor and you'd be right back up there.

All this to say this- In general if you are looking for raw performance and aren't married to a past history of purchased apps you need to use, windblows is the way to go, dollar for dollar its the better deal.

That being said, I'm a stickler for the user experience and interface, and I'm a sucker for OSX hands down over windows. Work computer is Win7, home workstation is Win10. Not a big fan of either, but once you get into your apps, they are almost identical, so doesn't matter to me. OSX is so much more enjoyable to use that I would give up a little performance to be able to not hate my OS and use OSX. Thinking of turning my home machine into a hackintosh.

THAT being said, the new macbook pros aren't built for horsepower. They are built for slickness, thinness and looks. In fact Apple just released a oSX update that took care of a huge thermal throttling issue that a YoutTuber discovered when his brand new MBP was throttled SLOWER than his previous MBP when exporting a movie from Premiere. All due to the cores being whacked to 100% and overloading the thermal dissipation system that the MBP has. Apple took a chance that a laptop user wasn't going to push his machine to 100% for more than a few minutes at a time, so they underdeveloped the capacity of the Thermal dissipation system and decided to throttle the CPU to keep it in check. That is a common tactic for CPU manufacturers to protect the hardware, but this went overboard as this guy found out. Apple only fixed it after the video went out and a huge kerfuffle was made of it by bloggers and tech websites.

So, here are your options, which depend greatly on many factors- budget, ability, protability, willingness to work around shortfalls-

1) Get the new MBP, and just use it for what it is. You will have subpar CPU performance in a beautiful machine that runs OSX and all your other apps wonderfully. Don't look for high numbers for Keyshot, and be happy with a system that has a great user experience and UI.

2) Get the MPB and invest another 2-3k in a threadripper 1950x render node. Do your development work on the MBP, then shoot to the TR system to be rendered quickly. If you don't want to spiff for 2 licenses of KS or the network render plugin, you can deactivate the software on the laptop and acitvate on the workstation for overnight rendering or whatever. Or you can get a 32 core license of the Network Render plugin for the TR system. Then you can keep working on the MBP and render away speedily on the workstation.

3) Hackintosh- Build a fairly killer system for a reasonable amount, and use compnents and build guides from Toms Hardware to create a pretty powerful PC running OSX. As always, this runs risks of breaking, and you need to be fairly adept at troubleshooting PC's and OSX to get it up and running. You can do this on a pretty powerful PC laptop as well, if the laptop thing is important.

And like Perry said, windows 10 isn't horrible, its actually quite amazingly adequate. It does the job perfectly mundanely with being able to mimic OSX with the installation of a dozen or so utilities to make it behave properly.

I really miss my 17" macbook pro.

[Furniture_Guy]

Matt - I could not have said it better...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

[hnax]

$9k https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=21162.0 working at 291 FPS with 5K screen not bad at all.

You don't have to switch between two computers. When working on a PC I used to do my photoshop on my Mac.

Rendering directly on a Mac with an amazingly calibrated 5K screen, I don't even need to do a photoshop pass. This by itself saves tons of time.

Laptop in general are not meant for keyshot

[benacio]

Hi All,
Longtime KeyShot user, first time poster here!

Was checking the benchmarking thread before ordering a new MBP, and since I didn't see any posted yet, I decided to be the guinea pig. That, and I was using a 2012 MBP that was starting to show its age...

Here's my new setup:
Make: 2018 MacBook Pro 15"
OS: High Sierra 10.13.6 (with supplemental throttling patch)
CPU: 2.9GHz i9 6-Core
RAM: 32GB
FPS: 100 (was bouncing around between 98-101FPS)

I also ran a real-life render test against the 2013 6-Core Mac Pro (3.5GHz Xeon E5, 64GB RAM) that I use at work. I rendered a scene for a product that I'm designing, and the new MBP completed a rendering in 23min 30sec that took the Mac Pro 20min 5sec. I'm taking that as a big win, since that deems the new MBP good enough to replace the Mac Pro for most of my workflow (how SolidWorks performs in VM is still TBD, and a big factor for my work). We also have a 2012 3.46GHz 12-core Mac Pro that we use for large render queues, that I'll hopefully run the same test on when I'm back in the office.

Something that I found interesting was that before installing the supplemental update for the OS, the benchmark was bouncing between 85-115FPS, with dips as low as 26FPS. Pre-update, the rendering from the same test above took over 35 minutes!

Looking forward to seeing other 2018 MBP results.

-b