[Chris Harlan] "Hey, I appreciate the insight. I'm trying to come to some of the same understandings that Aindreas is."
openCL GPU support is new in Pr cs6.
It's baby steps.
You will hear over and over from people who have switched to windows and Pr (to an i7 type tower, so current MacBook Pro/iMac in a tower config) with cheaper Nvidia GPUs, that Pr screams.
It's proven , it's mature.
Pr has system
requirements and there's also recommendations that you can find online. Most times, that recommend usually doesn't include Macs. They simply don't have many CUDA options. You will find the occasional Quadro 4000 Mac user, and they seem generally happy.
The new iMacs/MacBook Pros are really sweet computers, but they aren't powerhouses, and neither is the MacOS. It never has been. I've been trying to clamor that around these parts for a while now. Macs are not the fastest computers, all things considered, period. They are still nice computers, no question.
So, if you really want to stick with (Mac) OSX, your decisions are an older MacPro with a few "for real" CUDA cards, or newer and greener (in the experince sense) portable desktops. I, personally, am one of the people that's going to stick with OSX for as long as possible.
Then there's the Internet tea leaves, those bastions of hopes and dreams. Nvidia released new Lion based Cuda drivers. People are sticking "non Mac" supported pcie Cuda based cards in to MacPros and it sort of works. It's not highly recommended, but one could say its working better than ever. What does this mean? Where's it going? We (the royal we) still don't know for sure. One thing we do know, even though there's silence on new Mac hardware, we know it's not standing still. We (of the royal persuasion) can see the little development hints around here and there if you look hard enough, but there is no concrete foundation on which to build quite yet. So, if you need to buy now, the decision is a solid "maybe" of a Mac, to a solid "perhaps" on windows. Windows.
We are professionals. An OS switch wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But do you want to do it?
