Update:

The render performance using the Mac Pro’s twin GPUs at the same time varied between roughly 20x and  28x faster than using its very good 6 core Intel Xeon CPU.

When restricted to using a single GPU as the render device, the render performance varied between roughly 11x and  16x faster than using its CPU.

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Lets make some bets. With its dual high end GPUs that are optimized for GPU Compute, the new Mac Pro should be a kick-butt flame fractal renderer. It should excel at making fractal animation videos!

Depending on the GPU option selected for the Mac Pro: D300, D500, or D700 we might see rendering speeds that are 10 to 30 times faster than the fastest mobile GPUs found in current iMacs and Macbook Pros.

See:  Render Performance on Macbook Pro’s

Fractal Architect is the ONLY full featured Flame fractal app that uses the GPU for rendering fractals. Users of Apophysis, Chaotica, and JWildfire will be crying as they wait on slow CPU renders while the Mac Pro renders the exact same fractal in a itty-bitty fraction of time.

Flam4CUDA rendered Flam3  fractals 100X faster than with CPU based renderers (based on a high-end PC with dual top-of-the-line gaming GPUs) . In other words, if an Apophysis render takes 30 minutes to render a fractal at very high quality, Flam4CUDA would render it in 18 seconds for the exact same render quality !!!

Fractal Architect is Flam4CUDA in fact – just with a ton of features added on. (Fractal Architect now uses OpenCL – not CUDA – because of app sandboxing issues.)

We won’t have a Mac Pro to test with till mid February or so. We will post the results then.

If you want to submit your Mac’s render performance, just render the fractal called Worlds.fa that is in FA 3D’s Gallery to a PNG file with size 1440×900 pixels at 300 render quality. Please post a comment with your results.