Summary:

The render performance using the 2013 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 (using the Fractal Architect 3D OpenCL CPU renderer).

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.

Render performance improvement varies from fractal to fractal. 

The 2013 Mac Pro used for this test  has a 6 core Intel CPU and twin AMD D700 GPUs. (These are the best GPUs available for a 2013 Mac pro and mid-level CPUs from those available. This Mac is not the standard Mac Pro configuration.)

These tests were made on two fractals. One was the  same fractal used in the fractal forms.com discussions about Fractal Architect.

It is a 2D fractal and uses the Flam3 legacy variation set.

FA 3D  version 3.2   3/4/2014 ——————————–

CompetitionFractal.flame  800×800 Q 3000

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz – 6 core 

CPU ====   Supersample: 1x ====

Image Render: [800X800]  78.978 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1 

CPU ====   Supersample: 2x ====

Image Render: [800X800]  80.565 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

 AMD Radeon HD – FirePro D700 Compute Engine 6 Gb Vram 

D700 GPU # 1 ====  Supersample: 1x ====

Image Render: [800X800]  5.031 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1 

D700 GPU # 2 ===== Supersample: 1x  15.9 X  faster than CPU

Image Render: [800X800]  4.967 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

FA 3D-AV ——————————————–

FA 3D- Audio Video has not been released, but it can use multiple rendering devices at the same time. ( FA 3D only supports a single render device at a time)

Twin D700 GPUs =====  28.3 X faster than CPU  Supersample: 1x

Image Render: [800X800]  2.841 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

Twin GPUs =========  21.5 X faster than CPU  Supersample: 2x

Image Render: [800X800]  3.748 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

—— 3D Fractal Rendering Performance ——

FA 3D  version 3.1.2

Worlds.f  1440×900 Q 3000

CPU ====

Image Render: [1440X900]  112.753 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1 

GPU # 1 ====  11.1 X  faster than CPU

Image Render: [1440X900]  10.124 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

 GPU # 2 =====

Image Render: [1440X900]  10.355 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1

FA 3D-AV

Twin GPUs =========  20.3 X faster than CPU

Image Render: [1440X900]  5.553 sec  Quality:3000 Tiles:1