Anybody else experiencing slow performance on the new Mac Pro?

[Anonymous]

Hi everybody!

This is my first post here, so please be gentle with me.  I just bought one of the new cylindrical Mac Pro machines -- quad-core Xeon 3.7GHz, dual AMD FIrePro D300 w/2GB VRAM each . . . and yet, in Preferences, Maya says that my Gpu memory is limited to 1024MB.  That can't be right, can it?  I tried a supposedly well-known "fix" for this by going into my Maya.env file and adding the line MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT=2048, but Maya seems to just ignore this and keep on trucking the way it has been . . . which, with textures turned on in the viewport, is exceedingly, disappointingly slow.  I know that Autodesk hasn't built in support for these new FirePro cards into Maya yet, but still, I would've expected WAY better performance than I'm getting.  Anybody got any other ideas?

[n8skow]

Maya is not yet able to utlize both your video cards.

As for why only 1GB is seen, I'm not sure. The new MacPro's have not yet been tested for use with Maya...

How are you gauging the performance of your new rig though? Are you seeing performance issues in the viewport or utilizing some sort of benchmarking app?

[Anonymous]

Well, I tried loading in a Collada file created by Daz Studio (a character with a lot of morphs — or blendshapes, in maya parlance), and it took nearly forever.  But, in every other way, performance has been very zippy, unless you turn on textures in the viewport with very large scenes.  Then it slows to a crawl!  Not using any benchmarking software; just "eyeballing" it.  I'm going to load Windows onto a bootcamp partition and try Maya there, since Windows has Crossfire enabled for this Mac's default config, and see what happens.