How does Mac Pro compare to iMac?

Question

Ok I'm Pisssed!
I just bought a mac pro with AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB to photo editing. I noticed that it's a bit sluggish with my 4k Dell monitor. I figured what I can do I already have the best mac there is guess I'll have to live with it.
And then BAM, the new iMac comes out with AMD Radeon R9 M295X. Will it perform better with photo editing?

Answer 1

Actually you are wrong.
You can change CPU in mac pro, but you cannot fit inside anything better or newer as you are limited to specific TDP and chipset. For instance, putting in new generation of xeon won't give you TB3 support and so on. It can also lead to instability of the system overall. So in basic words: you shouldn't change CPU you already have inside so no CPU upgrade there as well.
Also iMac is much better in single core performance than mac pro and 99% of applications don't use more than 2 cores and even if they do those actions are not so critical (rendering where you can wait or go get one coffee meantime,...) compared to for instance 3D modelling or animation, where you need smooth rendering and good CPU real-time computation.
Also new radeon R9 M290X and M295X is much better supported from AMD side and also in windows. We all know OS X 3D performance is miserable compared to windows and having one year old drivers for mac pro GPU's (13.25 version) compared to newest radeon drivers (14.9).
In addition to all, 4K monitors are very poorly supported on mac pro. For example sometimes when I start OS X half of the screen remains black on my dell UP2414Q and only solution is to restart my computer again. Dell says that they haven't tested with apple hardware and it should be apple to fix this while apple says dell should fix it while customers remain in the dark and with poor support. Thank you dell and apple.
And there is more bad news for apple: adobe has started to shift their support to nvidia and windows system as Illustrator CC2014.2 now supports hardware accelerated graphics rendering with nvidia GPU on windows! And even more, new GTX980 beats any AMD cards on the market and AMD probably won't make anything better because they can't. I never understood apple latest fascination with AMD. AMD is the worst company for GPU's and their support is so bad I'm considering selling my mac pro.
The release of new iMac with 5K was a big slap in the face of professional apple customers who paid big money for their pro machine which can only run final cut pro X in it's full power. Any other software is unable to utilize all that "power" that apple put into mac pro. It's a big shame and a good waste of money to have just a nice room warmer.
Instead of fixing old things apple went and made new version of consumer class PC that is better or at least equivalent to pro class PC's the sell.
What apple need to fix is:
-10-bit support for displays. I don't know why we throw so much money on good displays when computer only outputs 8bit at the end.
-drop AMD and pick up nvidia cards. Apple already supports openCL 1.2 with nvidia cards under OS X and nvidia offers physX and CUDA in addition to only openCL that AMD offers. Also nvidia drivers are much more stable and performance of nvidia cards is better in all aspects.
-give more support to developers like adobe and others to upgrade their software to take advantage of GPU's we throw so much money on. What good is it to have a good computer and then software that can't even use that computer in it full potential except only few operations while majority of operations are still slow and laggy.
-give better support for 3D under OS X. Right now I'm watching like 9-30 FPS in Maya and Unity, and sometimes I even run some games to free my mind. WoW hardly reaches 60FPS on low settings while under windows bootcamp on same hardware I can get easily 60FPS! OS X still only has openGL 4.1, while we have there 4.3 and 4.4 GPU's out.
There has been almost one year since the release of this mac pro and nothing pretty much changed. This "pro" computer is actually pretty slow compared to what competition offers and the only good thing on mac is now the friendliness of OS X, stability and good integration with everything which windows lacks. But overall it's a very slow system to work on. Apple promised much but we got nothing of it except high price tag and a lot of lost nerves!
I'm very very disappointed in apple right now and really considering switching back to normal PC where at least I get latest drivers for everything and things at least runs at normal frame rate I can work with.
And don't even let me start on new Yosemite "flat" look which they obviously copied from windows and it is ugly as ****. Instead of changing icons they should fix old mac problems and give us professionals more to work with. In reality we get slapped and pushed on the edge. Don't try and make professional multimedia computer if you can't support it!