| Motion on a new MacBook Pro verses an old MacBook Pro - Be warned it gets ugly! |
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 By now if you have been reading my blog for a while, you probably have noticed I like testing new things out. This article is another "I wonder" - My old MBP verses my new MBP with Motion.The time had come for me to get a new MacBook Pro and yes I was that sad in ordering it straight after watching the webcast. Eager to try my new machine out, I thought I'd render out a few Motion projects to see what type of performance boost I'd get. I thought I'd use my popular Wedding Template as it involves a camera path past objects in 3D. I also set the export settings to 10bit uncompressed, Field Rendering on and Motion Blur on.
First Up was my old first edition MacBook Pro with the ATI RADEON X1600 card. This completed the job in 19 minutes, 43 seconds. Not bad.  Next up was the new MBP. I had already set the machine to better performance. Yes, the new machine comes with two graphics cards. The integrated card is a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and this is labeled not by that name but by 'Better battery life' in the system preferences.It did take me a while to twig that the card-swop feature was in the energy saving panel and also a bit peeved that to change you actually have to log out and then back in for the swop to happen. So if you are going somewhere with no power, make sure you do the swop before you unplug.
With the MBP set to use the 'fast card', the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT or 'Higher Performance' in Apple system pref speak, the template rendered out in 12 minutes and 14 seconds. My maths puts that at 37% quicker than a machine that is two and a half years old. Then I thought I'd swap the card back to the less powerful 9400 and try again. After 20 minutes of watching the screen, there was only one thing I could do, reboot. The Mac was frozen. Second render I thought I'd pay a bit more attention and was horrified when the whole screen started flashing black, that was followed by a forced rebot too. Third go and it finally managed a render at 16 Minutes and 7 seconds.  You have to love Keynote don't you? Well, there are a few worrying things here. First of all is the crash. I narrowed it down to the text flying on with a 'behind camera' behavior and blur. Maybe the card cannot handle images or layers over the texture limit. The second worrying thought is that this card is enabled by default when the Mac ships. I'd be expecting a lot of posts on forums starting "Why does my brand new MBP crash on rendering? Lastly is the fact that when it did finally render, it decided to include the orange artifacts that I've seen an NVIDIA 8800 produce.
I can hear you saying "Well why don't you just use the faster card then". I will do, but I'd like to think that in the not too near future that both cards might be able to be used together using SLI Technology or similar. With OpenCL in the wings, this might be of even more importance.  It is not all doom and gloom with the new MacBook Pro though, it is a truly gorgeous laptop and has people wanting to touch it when I get it out of the computer bag. The new glass trackpad is silky smooth and makes the old trackpad feel as rough as my cats tongue. (She has licked me just in case you wondered)Gestures! gestures! Will the new trackpad support gestures in Motion? No and no. The system based gestures like two fingered rotation don't work , a real shame. Also the Motion Gestures don't work either as you have to have a graphics tablet installed. This is a pity and I hope that the next update or version of Motion supports these somehow as I've always wanted to the Minority Report thing whilst making motion graphics.  When the new MBP does come out of the bag (I'm currently carrying around both) the question everybody asks is "What about the screen reflections" Hopefully this picture might illustrate the difference between the two. Yes, you do get reflections, but you did on the matte screen on the old model. The new screen is so bright you don't really see the reflections anyway.I thought I'd hate the new screen, but the new model makes my old MBP look very old and dull. One thought here, I haven't heard of anybody asking for the iphone in a matt finish! I will post updates if I find out any more info about the crashes :)
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