iMac Pro slow performance

Report · Feb 23, 2018

I just bought a new 2017 iMac Pro, 3ghz 10core processor, 64 gb ram, 16 gb GPU. I set the new iMac Pro up next to my 2014 5K iMac 4 ghz quad processor, 32 gb RAM, 2 gb GPU and they literally had the same exactly playback with RAM preview. The iMac pro could not even play full resolution playback. Both set to 1/3 and they both stuttered in the same places. So I'm just wondering did I waste $7,000. My projects are mostly animations with characters from high res photoshop files. Please help! Thank you!!!

Report · Aug 09, 2018

So are high end Windows machines better in general than iMacs? This was a pretty depressing thread for a 2017 iMac owner to read.

Report · Aug 19, 2018

Not really. high-end isn't best for Adobe software. Only fast ram and fast storage for scratch disks. Apart from that a fast low core CPU and a good GPU is good for adobe programs. That's not particularly high-end - it's more what gamer PCs custom builds looks like. But the good thing with PCs is that you can customize the hardware to take as good advantage of the software you use, while Apple doesn't offer builds which are perfect for Premiere or After Effects or anything like that. But instead makes machines that are optimized for FCPX and for what their vendor deals are. Apples only offer in the pro market Xeon CPUs which are all ready overpriced and outdated compared to AMDs threadripper lineup. And on the other hand Apple only offer AMD GPUs which were slower and more expensive than Nvidia cards when they got released. (amd even seem to accept their GPUs were a fail) But luckily for them, at least they have a good deal with Apple to get rid of them in Apples overpriced FCPX iMac Pro machines.
If you stick with Mac OS, I would hold on to your 2017 iMac for now, there's nothing more to gain from a iMac Pro in the Adobe software suite (quite the opposite).

Report · Sep 30, 2018

I'm an older guy who began with Premiere in 2003, using it to edit corporate video productions. I have built more editing computers than I can count. I retired but got a call from the doctor I used to work for last week. His media person suddenly quit and the doc asked me to come back to work. I had a wonderful PC there I had custom built to Adobe specs. It has a best-value i7 processor, a solid state system (C) drive with two additional 7200 rpm internal drives. It has a best-value Nvidia video card for the Mercury playback engine, and a Gigabyte Ultra Durable motherboard with 64GB of RAM. The guy who replaced me after I retired bought an iMac to edit video on because he hates Windows. Years ago when I spent time in the Adobe hardware forum a solid golden rule was, don't use an iMac with Adobe Premiere Pro. The main reason being, you need more than one internal hard drive to edit video. The secondary reason was, the video cards in the iMac didn't support the Mercury Playback Engine which was developed by Nvidia and Adobe. The doc I work for is a Mac person and I'm not. I wouldn't mind getting accustomed to Mac OS, but the issue of editing video using Premiere CC with only one internal hard drive remains. A possible solution would be to connect additional drives externally. Don't know a lot about Thunderbolt but that appears to be the best and only option to improve performance on an iMac. The PC I had built two years ago cost $3,100. I was just on the Apple Website and a maxed-out iMac can set you back $13,000! I think my $3,100 PC would work better with Premiere and export video faster than a $13,000 iMac, sorry to say.

Report · Sep 30, 2018

I have an iMac pro. Save your money and buy something else.

Report · Sep 30, 2018

What starts to become a mac bashing thread should actually be Adobe bashing, or am I wrong?

Report · Sep 30, 2018

Valid point but I bought the iMac pro thinking that Adobe and Apple had collaborated on its design to help build a killer editing machine when actually that doesn’t appear to have happened.

Report · Sep 30, 2018

Indeed.

basically modern high end computers increases cores because we seem to hit a cap on single core performance. And the more cores you add the lower single performance becomes (currently). And the adobes suite seem to take the biggest hit in performance of any program I can think of on lower clock speeds. Which is basically the reason for all of this. Unless adobe is able to catch up, people will need to stick with old gaming rigs solely for adobe work To get the best possible performance. So yeah it’s not apples imac nor Intel or amd cpus that’s the problem...

Report · Sep 30, 2018

There are things I already like better on the Mac OS, than on a Windows PC, so I'm not bashing Macs. There are however fundamental requirements that need to be met, in order to quickly and efficiently edit video on a computer. iMacs don't appear to meet those requirements. I say "appear" because I don't know if attaching two external hard drives via Thunderbolt will successfully remedy the problem of the iMac shipping with only one internal hard drive. Apple should build a video editing computer specifically designed for video editing. Not sure where Final Cut is in 2018, but back when Final Cut "upgraded" to Final Cut X, professionals I know told me it was a major downgrade that pissed them off.

Report · Oct 24, 2018

Thunderbolt 2 or faster is more than enough for external RAID drive configurations in video editing. The more you separate out your cache, OS and apps, and rendering drive the better. I use multiple external drives on my iMac (2015 4.0ghz 32gram) with thunderbolt 2 connection and it's speedy, as speedy as the native SSD. I've been waiting to upgrade to a new system that will increase performance of the Adobe Suite, came here to see where things stood and nothings better. sigh.

Report · Oct 24, 2018

Probably a dumb question but will it be faster to use an external SSD to edit from as opposed to a 7200 speed hard drive?

Report · Jan 30, 2019

Well, it's nearly Feb 2019 and AE on my new fat iMac is still no better. Premiere is so much better but I swear AE was faster on my 2015 MacBook Pro!

Any news Adobe?

Report · May 18, 2019

Same same

iMac Pro 3 GHz 10 core etc, etc and a massive 128GB RAM. Preview in AE is exactly the same as my old 2013 iMac which has 3.5 GHz and 8GB RAM. So it looks like I just spent AUD$13,600 for nothing. Yay!

I'm also very surprised and disappointed at how little difference an extra 120 MB of RAM has on AE preview performance. I read so many articles stressing the importance of RAM in After Effects. From what I can see the difference is negligible.

So I'm probably going to return my iMac Pro, explain in great detail exactly why I'm returning it and get a full refund. My wife will be ecstatic, Tim Cook, not so happy.

Sure, my measly $13,600 dollars isn't going to send Apple spiralling into debt but by the looks of things I'm not the only person with this problem. If Apple and Adobe don't resolve this problem it will put a dent in Apples bottom line and CEO's don't like that.

Unlike me, If you're a smart person who does their re-search before buying products I should point out that the iMac Pro is an incredible machine. I did some stuff in Cinema 4D and it flies. It really is a delight to use.

Report · May 19, 2019

I've done extensive testing and made faulty investments myself and learned the hard way. But it is what it is, and I can tell you that the top of the line iMac Pro, which I assume you bought, is the slowest of all iMac Pro models in After Effects (and that's the way it will be, forever....unless Adobe start making AE from scratch in a different way).

Ram has hardly anything to do with speed. The only reason why a lot of Ram is good, is that it takes longer before the machine starts scratching to disk and it can hold more preview frames in memory which will feel like a faster machine. The speed of the ram doesn't make much difference in AE either.

AE prefer a machine the same way as games. Meaning few cores and fast cores. Which is the opposite of what you have bought, and in fact the cheapest option. Plugins in AE are being rewritten one by one for each update Adobe does, but they tend to make the new updates GPU dependent. If you buy a 5ghz intel CPU machine with a fast GPU, that would be the fastest option on the marked today, and it cost about 20% of your iMac Pro.

Honestly, Macs are the slowest and most expensive option you can get for Adobe programs. If you really want as much speed for your bucks as possible, you need to read up on pages like pugetsystems.com and see what hardware they recommend for which softwares and then build your own machine or order it from a company (like puget). If you by any means want to stick with a Mac, then get a regular iMac with a faster CPU and as much ram as possible, it would perform a lot better than your iMac Pro in After Effects, that's just how it is, sadly.
i.e. Mac Pro, the most expensive one of apples models, performs about 50% of the speed of an intel 5ghz CPU , thats approx 4X the price for HALF the performance!! (caugh, rip off)

Report · May 19, 2019

Message #5 in this thread is my original take on this, but I'll summarise here again.

After Effects is not enhanced by multicore machines. So it's better to buy a faster CPU than one with many cores.

The most important hardware considerations for AE are as follows, in order:

1 - CPU Clock Speed (not cores)

2 - Plenty of RAM

3 - Fast hard drives, SSDs are best

4 - Fast certified GPU

Sadly, the iMac Pro is built for other applications, not AE.

Report · May 19, 2019

Thanks Andrew.

Am I right in thinking that After Effects used to use multicore processing but it was removed in CC2015?

Report · May 19, 2019

It was but in a very crude way. Because AE used ONLY 1 core previously across the entire software, now some few plugins are using multicore (which is one of the reasons they removed this feature). But back in cc2015, when no plugin had multi core support, they could render multiple single frames per core. It would not impact the responsiveness of the program or when caching preview or working, but when you hit render button it could increase rendering speed based on core amount. So, back then you could have a ton of cores and render really fast. (it was crashing a lot though)

There are plugins that does the same today, such as RenderGarden.

But the main problem with slow CPU cores which makes AE slow and sluggish when working, is in my opinion more crucial than final render speed in itself. It is when you are working with the scene that speed matters - especially now when you can send a queue of renders to Adobe Media Encoder.

Report · May 19, 2019

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

I agree the big issue here is preview speed. Thats where the time is wasted. Those valuable seconds add up very quickly.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out between Adobe and Apple; Will Apple start ramping up core speed rather than adding more cores? Or will Adobe re-engineer After Effects to use multicore processing. Or will we all just get sick of watching that green line and go live in a cave? Right now I'm thinking the cave is a pretty good option.

Report · May 19, 2019

I can't recall how many versions ago AE switched from multi-core capable to not. But all of donbarrum's posts above are spot on.

If you choose to stick with Mac OS (as I do) then the best value for dollar you'll get currently is a fully specced up standard iMac. Rumours are that Apple have a new professional machine in the works, but i wouldn't hold your breath.

As mentioned above, I strongly recommend RenderGarden to speed up your renders, but the most valuable time is the time you spend designing, not rendering, so get the fastest CPU you can, without worrying about cores.

Apple and Adobe have had a fairly tempestuous relationship for some years now, so I wouldn't expect the Earth to move in either camp.

Report · May 19, 2019

I agree with Andrew, don't expect much change in the years to come. Also, softwares are different, the same way anything else you do on a computer is - so one have to build the machine based on what you will use it for, which is why Puget systems are so great. And since Apple custom build the entire machine they have to pick components based on what they think their userbase wants primarily...and iMac Pro is very much based around Final Cut Pro X, which was rebuilt a few years back for modern hardware. Building a machine for AE is very different and if Apple would make a machine for that, it would feel like they are making machines that are good for the opposite of the rest of the Apple users want (since gaming and such are low priority for Apple).

The only way this would ever change is if Adobe scratched AE and started over and threw away the entire program. Something that is a HUGE undertaking, also because of all the plugins people are reliant on. It would take years before it would scratch the surface of what AE can do today...So yeah, not going to happen for a very long time.

If AE is your main tool, then you should return your iMac Pro and buy a regular top of the line iMac, you would get a LOT better performance for a cheaper machine.

Report · May 20, 2019

After several days putting the iMac Pro through its paces I've decided to keep hold of it.

Main reason being - it's just so fast. Preview in C4D is insane and I've also noticed some plugins and effects in AE seem to preview very quickly (Stardust being one of them). Also having 128 GB RAM seems to be beneficial while actually working on a project rather than just testing it.

Adobe Media Encoder is also a lot faster (and seems to use all cores) but as Andrew mentioned I'll have a look at RenderGarden.

I was also watching someone using AE on a high spec 5k iMac. Although I wasn't comparing speeds it didn't blow me away with AE's blistering preview speed.

You're right Adobe are not going to re-engineer After Effects to take advantage of multi-core processing but it seems like most other people are going that way.

When it comes to previewing in AE I've lowered my expectations and I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Thanks for all your help.

Report · Nov 12, 2019

so, would you rather buy an 4.2ghz (speedboost 4.6ghz) or an 3.6ghz (speedboost 5ghz) imac ?

hope you can help... thanks in advance.

Report · Jan 08, 2020

I can imagine you problems with single core CPU Speed, if i am not wrong, i think adobe killed Multi CPU Rendering in AE, i remember the time when you could switch it on an off in prefs and it was a mess, the computer could only render then, nothing else.

Little Tip: for your final render, use terminal rendering (ae render), there you can make benefit from your multi core a lot, you can open at least the number of cores you have (hyper Threading included) as terminal render windows. It can be very fast an useful for bigger projects.

Report · Jul 14, 2020

I do have an iMac Pro with the same 3GHz 10 Core Processor and 16GB Vega 64 GPU (only 32GB Ram though) and I do have the same problem. For me it seems to be overall performace though (benchmarks are fine) and I am not using Adobe but Final Cut Pro X. Guess what, same problem and Genius Bar said they can't do anything. I came in after the 14 day return policy so nothing they can fix or test. So here I am, having a 7100€ machine that is slower than my MacBook Pro when I need to edit 4k (with the "well optimized" Apple Final Cut Pro). Not sure if it is soley an "Adobe not optimised for Mac Hardware" Problem.

Report · Aug 15, 2020

I'm having the same problem running AE on my new 8-core 64 gb iMac pro (2017). Painfully slow. I still have my old 2013 Mac Pro tower and I'm thinking about switching back to it and using this iMac as a super expensive monitor.
Do you think the older Mac Pro can handle AE better?

Also, doesn't adobe know their audience? I would think a good majority of its users are on Macs.

Report · Feb 15, 2021

Same here. I got a fresh install with a similar iMac Pro configuration and it's almost unreal how bad it performs. Affinity Designers or Sketch work extremely well though. Seeing how long this problem already persists, I wonder if Adobe even cares. I guess I am gonna give the Affinity suite a serious try now.