> Why outsource to cloud when make a one time purchase from Apple?
Because I can scale the cloud as much as I want. I can purchase 100x the compute power of this Mac, and I stop renting it as needed. The Mac Pro will need to be upgraded over time, the cloud will automatically upgrade what HW I can rent.
Also, there's a difference between rendering previews and rendering in real time. This machine is not going to render a production frame workload in real time. You do that kind of stuff with offline rendering. A machine that's 4x faster represents a marginal increase in workload that can be rendered in real time, because 3d rendering isn't O(n). And if you want real time rendering previews, there are PC workstations that will still smoke this Mac.
I feel like once again, people are trying to justify Apple pricing by appeal to edge case, when the reality is, people can put together a professional PC workstation for 3dsmax that performs about the same and costs half the price or more.
Up to 3TB of RAM, 48 TB storage, 56 CORES, and this was shipped in 2017! Starting price $2400 (vs $6k for new Mac Pro). And you can't even get NVidia cards for the Mac Pro. An NVidia RTX 2080 or Titan RTX can be up to 2x faster than a Vega II Pro in DCC apps. If you want really fast rendering, Nvidia has actual racks of GPUs that are far more cost effective than sticking 4 expensive Vega II Pro's into this Mac.
A fully decked out Mac Pro is likely to cost $36k. An NVidia RTX Rendering server, which can give you real time desktop previews and contains 8 Titan RTX cores with 24GB VRAM, and 16 Xeon Cores, also costs $36k, and it can be scaled as needed.
If you really need to scale up massively parallel workloads, then commodity compute HW is far more cost effective and less limited.
Because I can scale the cloud as much as I want. I can purchase 100x the compute power of this Mac, and I stop renting it as needed. The Mac Pro will need to be upgraded over time, the cloud will automatically upgrade what HW I can rent.
Also, there's a difference between rendering previews and rendering in real time. This machine is not going to render a production frame workload in real time. You do that kind of stuff with offline rendering. A machine that's 4x faster represents a marginal increase in workload that can be rendered in real time, because 3d rendering isn't O(n). And if you want real time rendering previews, there are PC workstations that will still smoke this Mac.
I feel like once again, people are trying to justify Apple pricing by appeal to edge case, when the reality is, people can put together a professional PC workstation for 3dsmax that performs about the same and costs half the price or more.
Look at the Z8 for example, not even the top of the line custom built PC workstation: https://petapixel.com/2017/09/13/hp-z8-pc-can-upgraded-insan...
Up to 3TB of RAM, 48 TB storage, 56 CORES, and this was shipped in 2017! Starting price $2400 (vs $6k for new Mac Pro). And you can't even get NVidia cards for the Mac Pro. An NVidia RTX 2080 or Titan RTX can be up to 2x faster than a Vega II Pro in DCC apps. If you want really fast rendering, Nvidia has actual racks of GPUs that are far more cost effective than sticking 4 expensive Vega II Pro's into this Mac.
A fully decked out Mac Pro is likely to cost $36k. An NVidia RTX Rendering server, which can give you real time desktop previews and contains 8 Titan RTX cores with 24GB VRAM, and 16 Xeon Cores, also costs $36k, and it can be scaled as needed.
If you really need to scale up massively parallel workloads, then commodity compute HW is far more cost effective and less limited.