Thought I'd get better hardware perfomance than this

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I recently replaced my 2009 MacBook Pro with a 2008 Mac Pro and upgraded the graphics card, but my animation playback performance is much slower than I expected. I am testing playback with a simple 1-character animation using oen of iAnimate.net's characters, getting only 3 fps during playback (Real-time 24 fps). Here's the system information:

Software: Maya 2016 SP5, running Viewport 2.0 w/Parallel Evaluation and GPU Override

Computer: Mac Pro (Early 2008)

OS: Mac OS X 10.11.3

Processor: 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Memory: 8GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 2047 MB

NVIDIA Web Driver: 346.03.05f02 (released 12/15/2015)

I bought this machine thinking that it would far outperform my old MacBook Pro, but it doesn't seem to make much difference for what I really needed it for - animation speed. I'm admittedly not a hardware expert, so any advice would be appreciated!

Thank you for your time,

Chris

[dgorsman]

First pass, what jumps out is that with dual quad-core processors (8 physical, 16 w/hyperthreading) you've bottlenecked your system with only 8 GB RAM.  You should have at *least* 16 GB, more if possible.  Dual-socket Xeon motherboards can support fantastic amounts of RAM so you should have no problem populating it.