I’ve attempted the multi-display lifestyle a few times over the last thirty years. At first as a bourgeois indulgence, back when even having a single 17″ display was considered luxurious¹, let-alone two displays. Just because I could. Then sporadically over the years in more practical attempts to expand my screen real estate.

The debut of 5k displays in 2014 relieved that pressure for a long while. It’s hard to overstate how profound that first 5k iMac was.

But in the last year or so I’ve felt a bit cramped – particularly as I’ve spent increasing amounts of time in Xcode, which is okay on a 5k display but not great. Especially if you try to do GUI design, whether AppKit or SwiftUI. Let-alone if you start working with iPad Pro simulators and the like.

So I’ve been considering, yet again, my options.

Sadly:

1. I have an iMac Pro. Even if I were willing to waste the built-in display, I cannot – Apple does not allow iMacs to disable their internal displays.
   
   I wouldn’t necessarily mind replacing the iMac Pro (it’s been a pretty shitty computer since the day it was made) but Apple keep conspiring to discourage me from doing so².
2. There aren’t any great options for larger displays.
   
   Available 6k displays aren’t great³, although I’m glad there’s at least a couple of half-decent options. I never thought I’d be thankful that Dell, of all hardware companies, is still around and making better products than Apple.
   
   8k displays practically don’t exist – I don’t have the physical space to use an 8k TV⁴, which is otherwise actually the best way to go, and the one 8k computer display I know of is far too physically small for its resolution⁵.

As it happened, I had an extra 5k display left over from working at LinkedIn (they wouldn’t provide decent displays to employees while I was there, so I had to buy my own out of my own pocket⁶). So far as multi-display setups go it’s arguably ideal, since it’s basically the exact same panel as the iMac Pro’s display, so it should match quite well⁷. So a few months ago I went to some effort to rearrange my working space to accomodate it, and set to work with it.

And not a lot has changed in thirty years.

The Mac operating system still Just. Fucking. Sucks. at remembering where windows were, when relaunching apps.

For the first month or so it was mostly fine – a couple of apps would be occasionally problematic, but it was tolerable. Mostly. Xcode in particularly pisses me off in that it always forgets where the documentation window was, every time you open it⁸.

But then, something invisible to me apparently happened, and since then every single boot every single window resets its position onto the built-in display. Every single boot I have to spend a bunch of time digging buried windows out from the over-crowded main display and shifting them back to their correct positions on the second display.

I might dismiss this as particular bad luck, except I know from decades of experience that this is in fact normal. It always happens, sooner or later. And at some point it will unfuck itself and start [mostly] remembering where windows go. Only to inevitably repeat the vicious cycle.

Full-screen apps (mostly games) don’t handle the additional display(s) correctly.

This cuts both ways – some apps erroneously ignore the extra displays, while some erroneously don’t and do stupid things like put windows on the wrong display:

• Games are the most common offenders in the former category, as they usually fail to dim or turn off unused displays. It’s very distracting having a bright display right next to one on which you’re trying to play a game. Every time I launch or exit such an app I have to manually open System Settings, go to Display settings, click the secondary display, and manually changes its brightness.
  
  My secondary display (LG 5k) doesn’t have a power button, and I found out real quick that unplugging the Thunderbolt cable confuses the hell out of macOS, resulting in windows going wild and some apps outright crashing.
• In the latter, “WTF are you doing?!” subcategory are applications like Adobe Lightroom Classic, which will spontaneously move the entire window to a different display sometimes, and the only way to get it back is to quit & relaunch Lightroom⁹.

Side Docks aren’t practical.

When the Dock is on the side, it only appears on the display that is farthest to that side. Having to move the mouse across multiple displays just to get to the Dock is untenably slow and awkward.

I have the Dock set to auto-hide, because I’m not a monster. But that does mean I have to be careful about mouse movements near its edge of the screen.

I prefer having the Dock on the left-hand side because it’s the least intrusive place – there’s relatively little you have to mouse to or interact with on the left edge (the right side is second-best, but notably is the home of scrollbars). It’s also slightly easier to mouse left (or right) than down, because moving the mouse ‘down’ (towards me) has extra tension from the USB cable.

With multiple monitors (in a typical horizontal arrangement), I’m forced to use a bottom Dock, which is the worst place to have the Dock because so much stuff is placed right at the bottom of the screen – window resize widgets, toolbars & their buttons, horizontal scrollbars, etc. It’s immensely irritating to have to finesse minute mouse movements in order to avoid triggering the Dock while somehow still getting the cursor within a few pixels of the edge of the screen. Sometimes it’s necessary to move the entire window just to interact with its bottom parts – which can in turn require first resizing it from the top, in order to allow it to be moved upwards.

The menu bar is particularly petulant when multiple displays are in use.

I have the menu bar set to auto-hide, partly for reasons of visual cleanliness and to save a little screen space, but also because the menubar ruined my previous iMac’s display by burning in, hard.

I also use the menubar a lot more than for just activating menus with the mouse – I have iStat Menus and a host of other monitoring utilities in there as well. So I’m frequently mousing up to the top of the screen to reveal the menubar. Which is not a burden in itself – flicking the mouse to the top of the screen is a completely trivial operation.

But it doesn’t work half the time, when you have multiple displays, because the menubar will only deign to reveal itself on the “active” display, which is often at a glance visually indistinguishable from the “inactive” display (thanks to Apple’s long-running war against clarity).

That defeats the instinct and muscle-memory to just flick the cursor to the top of the display in order to see the menubar. Worse, since macOS has some design flaws regarding menu bar reveal (e.g. it refuses to reveal if the frontmost application’s main thread runloop isn’t idle, and whenever an application is launching), you can’t immediately tell if it’s refusing to reveal itself because the cursor’s on the “wrong” display. So inevitably there’s wasted, distracting moments of pause and investigation, and possibly movement to a whole different display. For an operation that happens hundreds of times a day, wasted seconds add up.

Windows appear on the wrong display sometimes.

Enough said, really. I have no idea why they appear in the wrong places, but then so much about macOS’s window management is inexplicably buggy like this, such as why some modal dialogs appear behind all existing windows.

Multi-display ergonomics tend to suck.

If – in a typical horizontal arrangement – you give the two displays equal priority in placement, you end up with one to your left and one to your right, with a very irritating gap between them in the one place it’s natural to look – straight ahead of you. Neither display is aligned with the keyboard or mouse, which I find impairs typing and mousing accuracy (especially with a treadmill desk where I’m constantly moving). And I find I get a sore neck no matter what, because I’m spending all my time looking anywhere but centre.

If you keep a “primary” display front and centre, and put a second one off to a side, the second display becomes much less useful because it’s even more uncomfortable to actually look at. Which couples with the fact that…

Splitting work across multiple displays is hard.

More so than it seems it should be. In practice there’s a big difference between two windows side-by-side on one display, and two windows on separate displays (especially if the displays aren’t identical, or aren’t aligned on horizontal or vertical axes). Maybe it’s as a simple as the difference between moving your eyes and moving your head.

Whatever it is, I just cannot get comfortable moving between displays frequently. That then forces me to not put anything important on the second display (especially if it has an ergonomically inferior position compared to the primary display), so it ends up being kind of a dumping ground for stuff I don’t actually use that often – e.g. calendar, clipboard viewers, calculators, etc.

And since I don’t actually use them that often, there’s really not much advantage to having them on a second display, versus just bringing them to the front on the main display and then hiding them again when I’m done. In fact, sometimes it’s counter-productive as irrelevant animations on the second display distract me, whereas they’d be safely out of sight behind other windows on the main display.

The only meaningful use-case I have so far for genuine simultaneous use is moving information references – e.g. Xcode’s documentation window – to the second display. In fact that was the specific use-case that made me go to the trouble of hooking up the second display, since it’s practically impossible to fit a non-trivial Xcode project into just half a 5k display, and having to constantly toggle between code & documentation is irritating and a little disruptive – there’s often a lot of rapid back-and-forth between code & docs, which is of course much easier if they’re simultaneously visible.

Follow-up

There’s a surprisingly long thread on HackerNews about this post. And I was pleasantly surprised to find mostly commiseration and honest attempts to help, as opposed to vitriol. It’s worth looking over if you want to dive even deeper into this topic.

Addressing a select few points raised in the HackerNews comments:

• I’ve been a Mac user for about thirty-five years, and always focused on the Mac. So assertions that I’m “doing it wrong” because I’m secretly a Wintel or Linux stooge are misguided. 🙂
• A lot of folks also brought up problems with even getting external displays to work reliably, which I can definitely relate to – that LG 5k I’m using was a real bitch, frankly, before I replaced what turned out to be a faulty Thunderbolt cable that it came with. Even then, it never worked reliably with my work MacBook Pro, for some reason. Seems to work just fine with my iMac Pro. 🤷‍♂️
  
  I chose not to go there in this post because somehow I’m not having those sorts of issues right now (🤞) and because I feel like that’s a whole other can of worms. But yes, it’s definitely a big problem for the Mac, too.
• One or two folks suggested that my problem is that I should just get a bigger single display. To which I agree, that is my problem. That was covered in the opening of the post. 🙂
  
  Quite a few people suggested or at least evangelised using ultra-wide displays. I’m open to it, if one is ever released with decent pixel density. e.g. 5k is a decent number of pixels in 23.5″ (the horizontal width of a conventional 27″ display) but is way too few on a display that’s like 50″ wide. Abysmally few. I touched on this topic tangentially in the footnotes, but to reiterate: a decent display has a pixel density of at least 100 PPD (pixels per degree) at a reasonable working distance. Apple’s “Retina” displays all have this. To my knowledge no ultra-wide display ever made has this – not even close.
• The specific setup I’ve been using recently is with my iMac Pro in its traditional place front and centre, and the LG 5k off to the left side by about 45°.
  
  In prior attempts at the multi-display lifestyle I’ve used many other setups, including symmetrical horizontal arrangements, stacked vertical arrangements, and even ad hoc “diagonal” arrangements with things like my iPad Pro or laptops. I don’t think there’s a reasonable layout that I have not tried.
• I don’t use Spaces. I’ve used it in the past (mostly way back when it was new to Mac OS X, and earlier on Linux) but it just never really felt nor worked right. It also has its own family of window management problems & bugs, with things like new windows (particularly modal dialogs) silently opening in the wrong space. 😔
• I don’t full-screen apps (except in very limited circumstances, such as some games which only run full-screen).
  
  For years I did, on my work MacBook Pros, but only because I felt forced to by the small laptop screen – there are so many bugs around full-screen mode in macOS. And it makes very little sense for most apps when you have a decent-sized screen, as you end up with massive areas of wasted space in margins etc. In fact I got so sick of the bugs that even on my little 12″ MacBook Air I don’t use full-screen mode anymore, and just suffer through the loss of screen real estate. And, more importantly, I don’t do any real software development or photo/video work on laptops anymore – mostly just writing and web browsing.
• A few folks seemed surprised that I use the Dock at all, which I found surprising in turn. I’d never really considered not using the Dock.
  
  Reflecting on it, I mostly use the Dock for:
  • Switching applications.
    
    I use ⌘⇥ too, of course, but with multiple displays it’s unpredictable as to which screen the app palette appears on, making it hard to efficiently use the mouse with it (and merely hitting tab over and over again is far too slow when you have tens of apps open).
    
    I do use Spotlight to launch & switch apps, but I try to avoid it for commonly-used apps as Spotlight is very unreliable:
    • Sometimes it takes a non-trivial amount of time to show the floating text input window, and keystokes in the interim may be silently ignored or go to the wrong place.
    • Sometimes it just doesn’t work. I type some letters and nothing happens, or it just shows me that infuriating “indexing” indeterminate progress bar. Try again later, apparently.
    • It randomly changes what frequently-used character sequences mean. e.g. I might have been using “te” for TextEdit for months, and then suddenly it decides that “te” means some random fifteen year old PDF file. It’s absolutely infuriating and inexplicable, and there’s no apparent way to fix it when this happens.
  • Accessing minimised windows. I don’t know of any other way to get at these.
  • Accessing the contextual menu for an app’s Dock icon – most often to force quit it, but also some apps put important functionality there which isn’t readily accessible through any other means. And I know that I can ⌥⌘⎋, which I use sometime too, but for whatever reason I prefer going via the Dock.
  • Monitoring (e.g. unread message counts).
• A lot of people tangentially critiqued the Mac’s lack of window tiling and gesture functionality, particularly those coming from Windows it seems. These are fair and broadly accurate critiques, but they did seem to overlook that while macOS doesn’t have a lot of such gestures & tiling features, it does have some (e.g. what Apple calls “Split View“).
  
  But, “Split View” is essentially a specialisation of full screen mode, with many of the same design problems and bugs.
• There were a lot more display and window management utilities than I thought – many people come forth with suggestions and recommendations I’d not yet encountered (e.g. Stay, Display Maid, Phoenix, Rectangle Pro). I might look into some of those, and will perhaps do a follow-up post if they substantially improve things (but, keep in mind that problems like Dock and menubar accessibility, let-alone fundamentals like the ergonomics, aren’t addressed by these utilities).
• A few people responded with essentially “huh, none of this happens to / bothers me”. Which is fair to say, but not surprising – different strokes for different folks. I was pleased to see that most weren’t trying to dismiss my opinion out of hand, merely noting that there are other opinions. Which is totally fine and important to remember.

1. Apple’s first so-called 17″ display (it was actually only 16.5″) was the Apple Multiple Scan 17, released in 1994 for USD$1,100 (not counting taxes). That’s equivalent to about $2,500 today. For a display that could do just 1024×768 – but, in a time when 640×480 was the vastly dominant standard, so that was a huge leap up in display resolution – 156%! It’s the same as going from a 4k to 6k display. ↩︎
2. I say that with some sense of humility and humour, of course. But the effect is real, even if arguably irrational. Nobody likes buying something that they know is about to be replaced, nor something that’s a bit outdated even at its start, irrespective of whether it’s functionally sufficient for their needs. ↩︎
3. Apple’s 6k display is stupidly over-priced, even by Apple standards, and uses a severely compromised design with its coarse backlight zoning system. That results in significant blooming, which is annoying even for casual use but particularly problematic for photography and videography. I’d rather have a uniform display with lower contrast – like existing 5k displays – as the lesser of the two evils, since that more faithfully reproduces images.
   
   Dell’s 6k display is a better option, having made better decisions on key design compromises, but it’s still a bit pricey and it’s a bit dim at just 450 cd/m². Good enough for coding in a not too brightly lit room, but it’s pretty useless for working with HDR imagery. ↩︎
4. The smallest I can find is 65″, which would mean sitting at least a metre away from it to avoid seeing its individual pixels. Not impossible, but deeper than most people’s desks. And a corner desk (like mine) has a lot less usable depth due to the angle of the walls, making it completely impossible to fit a 65″ display at all, let-alone while maintaining a practical viewing distance. ↩︎
5. Apple pretty much nailed it with their 5k displays, right from the start; 27″ is a good size for them. At a healthy viewing distance of about 70cm, it’s about 111 PPD (pixels per degree) which is close enough to the limit of even excellent human vision (~130 PPD) to make it genuinely a ‘retina’ display (where you can’t typically distinguish individual pixels) for most people without wasting a lot of pixels. And if you have exceptionally good vision, situating yourself a little farther away is plausible in most setups.
   
   Dell’s 8k display, on the other hand, is a mere 32″, yielding a PPD of 143 – way higher than necessary and meaning you can’t actually utilise its full resolution at typical viewing distances – it’d require being within 50cm, which might not sound all that bad but try it; 50cm is really close to any computer display, let-alone a relatively large one at 32″.
   
   8k displays should be about 44″, to be optimal. ↩︎
6. And lest you think I was just a fussy princess, know that quite a lot of my colleagues did the same. You could look around the office and get a pretty good idea about who really cared about their work (or at least their eyes), by looking at whether they had the company-issued displays or not. ↩︎
7. In practice it doesn’t – they differ substantially in temperature, with the LG display being too warm, but I could probably fix that by properly calibrating the LG display… I just haven’t bothered. I used to obsess over monitor calibration, years ago, until I became more aware of just how incredibly situational and subjective human colour perception is anyway (and how well-calibrated Apple’s displays usually are already, out of the box).
   
   It’s largely pointless stressing over small errors in colour when you have no control over the viewing context anyway – let-alone the fact that most people view content on tiny little phone displays that are comically not colour-accurate, and can’t see anything anyway. ↩︎
8. But then, it essentially forgets the windows contents themselves, anyway. It preserves only the first open tab, not any of the others. When I’m in the middle of development and I accidentally close the documentation window – losing a dozen open tabs that were very precisely tied to what I was working at that exact moment – I want to throw my whole god damn computer through a wall.
   
   So, Xcode is an infuriating piece of shit even on one display, in that respect. Somehow that’s little consolation. ↩︎
9. Yes, Lightroom’s Window menu has a “Move to <other display>…” item, but it doesn’t do anything. ↩︎

On maximum settings – 2560×1440 Ultra with 8x MSAA – both machines average about 20 FPS in the built-in graphics benchmark.  And the AI benchmark yields similarly indistinguishable results, with average turn times of about 23 seconds.

With VSync off there’s maybe a very small increase in frame rate – closer to 24 FPS, than 20 FPS, but it’s visually indistinguishable to me.

And that’s despite the iMac Pro having, in addition to the beefier CPU & GPU, use of its very fast built-in flash storage, vs a regular SATA SSD on the 2014 Retina iMac.  Load times were noticeably faster, but only in the 10-25% range perhaps – nice, but not impressive all things considered.

In actual gameplay, I did feel like the iMac Pro offered a smoother experience overall – maybe not higher average frame rates, but fewer stutters or skips.  Hard to say, though, if that’s a real effect or just a misimpression.

So, definitely don’t buy an iMac Pro for playing Civilization VI – any iMac from the past four years will be just as good, sadly.  Whatever Civilization VI is bottlenecked on, it’s clearly not the CPU throughtput, GPU anything, storage anything, or memory anything.  Which I guess just leaves CPU single-threaded performance. 😞

• The fan control algorithm is a bit amateur.  It oscillates back and forth in frequency at a high enough frequency (0.1-0.2 Hz) – and with significant range – that it’s quite noticeable, audibly, and sometimes distracting.
  
  

• For some reason the full-load CPU frequency on my machine has dropped from 3.6 GHz to 3.4 GHz.  I have no idea why.  The inlet temperature to the case is actually lower now, too.  The workload isn’t identical, so perhaps this is a natural result of subtle workload differences (e.g. use of AVX512 vs not, or something like that – most Skylake Xeons have significantly lower clock frequencies when the AVX512 unit is in use, though AFAIK the relevant data-sheets aren’t available publicly for the specific SKUs Apple use in the 8- and 10-core iMac Pros, so I can’t be sure).
  
  
  Note the 4500 (Hz) limit on the Y axis.  Still merely aspirational, as far as I can tell.  Even under the lightest loads I’m still yet to see it exceed 4.2 GHz, according to iStat Menus (or Intel’s Power Gadget).  Though I don’t put too much stock in those, as alluded to in my first impressions post – I doubt they’re relying on actual turbo bin residency counters, but rather just an average over a relatively large period (e.g. using MPERF & APERF).  (I’m not actually sure, off-hand, if Skylake has proper residency counters for this purpose)

• ‘System’ power draw as reported by the the machine’s own “Total Power” sensor maxes out at about 350W, but (including some external hard drives and other such devices) my UPS says 550W is being drawn.  For comparison my prior 2014 Retina iMac reported just over 200W for the approximately same sensor (though alas I never checked what the UPS reported).  In any case it clearly, and as expected, generates significantly more heat than the non-Pro iMacs, as immediately evident by its much improved ability to heat the room. 😄

• The login screen at boot is super sluggish and buggy – it lags behind keyboard input by up to several seconds, and often after you select a user and it transitions to showing just their picture + the password field, it’ll then inexplicably go back to showing all the users’ pictures – but with the password field still visible.  The first ten keystrokes into the password field are almost always ignored & lost.  And sometimes, upon hitting return in the password field, it just obtusely removes the field and goes back to showing just the initial list of users, requiring you to select your user account again and start over.  It’s a plausible hypothesis that whatever is implementing this under the hood is significantly different from on prior Macs.  Perhaps due to integration with the T2 SoC for security & flash access.  And it’s not implemented well.
  
  Whatever the cause, it’s kind of infuriating and baffling, that such an obvious & egregious flaw exists, given this is literally the first thing you experience every time you turn an iMac Pro on.

Relatively briefly, and in no particular order:

• I don’t see why the very slightly different colour scheme, vs the regular iMacs, is such a big deal to some people.  Yes, it’s fairly obviously a different colour.  No, it doesn’t really look any better (nor worse) than the regular iMac’s colour.
• It’s disappointing that it comes with such crappy input devices (the mouse & keyboard at least).  They’re the usual ergonomic & general usability disasters that Apple’s infamous for as of recent years.
  
  Digression:  I also recently got a new MacBook Pro 13″ with Touch Bar for my work machine, which has an even worse keyboard than the iMac Pro, if such a thing is possible.  It’s literally painful to type on.
• According to Intel’s Power Gadget tool, it basically sits at 3.6 GHz permanently.
  
  On the upside, it doesn’t seem to ever drop below that, despite nominally having a 3.0 GHz base frequency, even under the heaviest loads I can throw at it (including heavy, concurrent GPU use).
  
  On the downside, it’s supposed to turbo up to 4.5 GHz, but I’ve never seen the tool report that.  It does get up above 4.0 GHz if you only have one or two threads actually active, but only barely.  Intel’s tool only has 20ms sampling resolution, so it’s quite possible it is bursting to 4.5 GHz in very short stints.  In fairness, the regular iMacs exhibit basically the same behaviour – my 2014 Retina iMac nominally boosted up to 4.4 GHz, but in reality rarely if ever hit that.  Under load, that iMac struggled to reach 4.0 GHz.  Unless the ambient temperature was uncomfortably cold, it’d easily fall down to not much more than 3.0 GHz under any kind of sustained load, and sometimes even further, into the 2.x GHz range.
• The fan is quite audible under any real load, even though I have some loud Thunderbolt disk bays and other things even closer to me than the iMac Pro.  I have no idea what some reviewers have been talking about w.r.t. the fan being “whisper quiet” or outright “inaudible”, because it definitely is not quiet.  It’s not loud, to be sure, but you can’t miss it.
  
  Under basically no load, there is indeed very little fan noise, but that’s both an unrealistic use case and certainly no better than the regular iMacs.
• It does feel dramatically faster than a non-Pro iMac.  I did not expect this.  Certainly I expected significant objective improvements in parallel workloads – mainly batch photo & video editing in my case – but in fact the speed improvement is very noticeable even in single-threaded workloads.  I’m not sure why yet… the internal SSD is faster than the SATA SSD in my prior iMac, but the difference I’m seeing doesn’t seem plausibly explained by that [alone].
  
  I’m also seemingly seeing it perform significantly better under load, w.r.t. user interaction.  Even with all CPU cores completely busy, and the GPU likewise, interactive use remains basically as fast as when it’s idle.  This is a pretty big difference – and very pleasant improvement – over the non-Pro iMacs.  It’s really nice to not have to just walk away while CPU-intensive tasks are running.
• The screen doesn’t immediately appear much different – in terms of colours, contrast, brightness, etc – to my old 2014 Retina iMac.  But it’s very clear which is which, because the iMac Pro has no image retention issues, whereas the 2014 iMac has pretty severe ones.
  
  Though when specifically looking at sRGB vs Display-P3 examples, the difference is quite a bit moreso than I expected, which is of course a pleasant discovery.
• It’s so much better to have a proper, native VESA mount vs the hacks you had to do with prior iMacs.
• iStat Menus can’t read any sensors (except CPU frequency, once Intel’s Power Gadget is installed), though I expect this is going to be fixed fairly soon, in a future version.
• The ports on the back aren’t properly aligned with the case where they protrude, unlike non-Pro iMacs.  Meaning when you plug a cable in, it doesn’t align relatively flatly against the curved case, but rather tilts upwards a bit.  This is a really odd change – though obviously minor and practically insignificant.
• I don’t yet understand why, but Lightroom Classic CC is noticeably snappier.    Particularly in the Develop module as you make edits and then wait for the results to appear on screen.  In some cases it’s an order of magnitude faster – e.g. less than a second instead of 5-10 seconds.  It’s still not consistently fast by any means, but it’s no longer always infuriatingly slow.
  
  I’m unconvinced, regardless, that the laws of physics will allow creation of a computer upon which Adobe’s software won’t run agonisingly slowly.
• Officially it’s quite a bit heavier than the non-Pro iMacs, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually lighter for me… though that’s because with the stand removed – replaced by the VESA mount – it of course under-weighs the regular iMacs with their fixed stands still stuck in them plus a VESA mount adapter.

• Blender – BMW Scene GPU
• DaVinci – Playback/Render 3NR FPS
• Rise of the Tomb Raider – 2560×1440 High

Bare Feats – Rise of Tomb Raider: iMac Pro versus Mac Pro (8-core, Vega64)

• Rise of the Tomb Raider
  • 1920×1080 High
  • 2560×1440 High
  • 3840×2160 High

Bare Feats – iMac Pros versus Mac Pros running X-Plane 11 Flight Simulator (8-core, 10-core, Vega64)

• X-Plane 11
  • c4 test flight ‘1’
  • c4 test flight ‘3’
  • c4 test flight ‘5,4’

Bare Feats – 8-core versus 10-core iMac Pro: The Final Conflict (8-core, 10-core)

• After Effects – BenchTest Render
• Blender – BMW CPU Render
• Blender – Pavillon CPU Render
• Compressor – BruceX to HEVC
• Final Cut Pro X – BruceX 5K Export
• Geekbench – Single-core & Multi-core CPU
• Photoshop – Noise Reduction
• Premiere Pro – Export for Blu-ray
• Premiere Pro – Blur Render

Ars Technica – iMac Pro review: Expensive, hard to upgrade, but holy Jony Ive it’s fast (10-core, Vega64)

• Cinebench R15 CPU
• Geekbench 4 CPU Single-core & Multi-core
  • Native & in Windows 10 running in Parallels
• Geekbench 4 GPU Compute (Metal & OpenCL)
• GFXBench Metal Offscreen (1080p) – T-Rex, Manhattan, & Manhattan 3.1
• Quickbench Storage Test, Extended Test Average
• World of Warcraft: Legion FPS
• Xcode WordPress iOS app compile

Craig A. Hunter – iMac Pro 18-core Follow Up Review (18-core, 10-core)

• AVX-512 Vector Add Benchmark Parallel Performance
• LINPACK Shared Memory Benchmark Using Intel MKL
• USM3D NACA 0012 Airfoil Parallel Performance

9to5Mac – First 18-Core iMac benchmarks showcase obvious multi-core benefits (8-core, 10-core, 18-core)

• AJA System Test (SSD Performance)
• Final Cut Pro X 4K ProRes Export from 8K RED RAW (12:1)
• Geekbench 4

Bare Feats – What if the iMac Pro had THREE Vega GPUs? (8-core, Vega64)

• LuxMark GPU LuxBall
• LuxMark GPU Hotel
• Blender Pavillon Barcelona
• DaVinci Resolve Play/Render 3NR nodes

AppleInsider – iMac Pro vs 2013 Mac Pro (Part 4) – 3D rendering and thermals (8-core, Vega56)

• After Effects CC ProRes 422 Render
• Blender BMW CPU
• Blender BMW GPU
• Maya 2018 Model Village Render

AppleInsider – iMac Pro vs 2013 Mac Pro (Part 3) – video editing (8-core, Vega56)

• Final Cut Pro X BruceX
• Final Cut Pro X 1080p Render & Encode
• Final Cut Pro X 4K H.265 Encode
• Final Cut Pro X 4K Render
• Final Cut Pro X 4K Render & H.264 Encode
• Final Cut Pro X 4x4K Render & H.264 Encode
• Final Cut Pro X 4K Stabilisation
• Final Cut Pro X 8K Render & ProRes Encode
• Premiere Pro 1080p Render & H.264 Encode
• Premiere Pro 4K H.265 Encode
• Premiere Pro 4K Render & H.264 Encode
• Premiere Pro 4x4K Render & H.264 Encode
• Premiere Pro 4K Stabilisation
• Premiere Pro 8K Render & H.265 Encode

DPReview – Speed Test: iMac Pro vs Alienware PC, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro (8-core, Vega64)

• After Effects RAM Preview
• Photoshop Radial Filter
• Premiere Pro 4K Render

AppleInsider – Apple’s iMac Pro vs 2013 Mac Pro (Part 2) – photo editing comparison (8-core, Vega56)

• Lightroom Classic CC
  • Convert 50 RAWs to DNGs
  • Export 50 JPEGs
  • Generate 50 1:1 Previews
  • Import 52 42MP RAWs
• Photoshop CC
  • 9 Shot HDR Merge
  • Noise Reduction
  • Open 9 RAWs

Bare Feats – iMac Pro Has A Thunderbolt 3 Storage Surprise For You (8-core)

• AJA System Test – 16G Sequential Read
• AJA System Test – 16G Sequential Write

Macworld – iMac Pro review: Mac Pro power in the shape of an iMac (8-core, Vega56)

• Forecast MP3 Encode
• Geekbench Compute GPU
• Geekbench Single-core & Multi-core CPU
• Handbrake 1080p H.264 Encode
• iZotope De-Echo
• iZotope Spectral Denoise B
• Logic Bounce
• Unigine Valley (High)

Cinema5D – iMac Pro Review – Is It Worth the Money? (10-core, Vega64)

• Final Cut Pro X H.264 HD 25p Export
• Final Cut Pro X ProRes 422 4K 25p Export
• REDCINE-X PRO 6K ProRes 4444 Export

AppleInsider – Apple’s iMac Pro vs 2013 Mac Pro with benchmarks and specs (8-core, Vega56)

• Cinebench R15 CPU
• Geekbench 4 OpenCL
• Geekbench 4 Single-core & Multi-core CPU
• Unigine Heaven

Bare Feats – What if the iMac Pro had TWO Vega GPUs? (8-core, Vega64)

• Blender – BMW CPU Scene
• DaVinci Resolve – Play/Render Noise
• DaVinci Resolve – Play 5K RED Clip
• LuxMark – GPU LuxBall
• LuxMark – GPU Hotel

DigitalArts – Apple iMac Pro review – this superbly designed workstation is most powerful Mac ever (10-core, Vega64)

• Cinebench R15 Render & Real-time 3D
• After Effects CC 2018 Render

Bare Feats – 8-core and 10-core iMac Pros Running Pro Apps (Part Two) (8-core & 10-core, Vega64)

• Motion – Render RAM Preview
• Compressor – BruceX HEVC 10-bit Transcode
• Logic Pro X – Maximum Tracks
• Blender – Render BMW Scene CPU-only & GPU-only
• DaVinci Resolve – Transcode 5K RED clip to ProRes 4444 XQ

Mac Performance Guide – 2017 iMac Pro (8-core & 10-core, Vega56 & Vega64)

• Scalability with CPU-Intensive, Memory-Intensive and Mixed Workload
  • diglloydTools MemoryTester: Scalability
    • CPU / No Mem
    • SHA1 Hash
    • Memory Intensive
• CPU Cores, Clock Speed, Turbo Boost
• Power Usage (Watts)
• Flash Drive (SSD)
  • disktester Speed vs Transfer Size
  • disktester 8 GB Sequential
• APFS vs HFS SSD Speed
• Grep (Search)
• Integrity Checker Verify
• diglloyd Photoshop Benchmarks
  • Photoshop CC 2018 v19.0
• Photoshop Filters
  • Photoshop CC 2018 v19.0
• RAW to JPEG
  • Photoshop CC 2018 v19.0
• Real World Photoshop: Make Multi-Res Image Series
  • Photoshop CC 2018 v19.0
• Lightroom Import and Export
  • Export 522 JPEGs
  • Import 522 RAWs with 1:1 Previews
• CaptureONE Pro
  • Export 352 JPEGs
  • Import 352 RAWs
• Iridient Developer
  • Iridient Developer 3.2.1, Reveal v4 Detail+
• Zerene Stacker
  • 20-frame Focus Stack DMAP & PMAX
• Helicon Focus (and subsequent follow-up with Helicon Focus 7.0.0)
• XCode Build C++ Project

DigitalFilms – Putting Apple’s iMac Pro Through the Paces (10-core, Vega64)

• Adobe Media Encoder 1080p ProRes to 4K H.264 Transcode
• Adobe Media Encoder OpenCL ProRes Render
• After Effects ProRes Render
• Compressor 1080p ProRes to 4K H.264 Transcode
• Final Cut Pro X BruceX Render & Export
• Final Cut Pro X Playback
• Final Cut Pro X Render & ProRes Export
• Premiere Pro Playback w/ Single & Multi-layer sequences

Bare Feats – Low End iMac Pro Running Pro Apps (8-core & 10-core, Vega64)

• After Effects CC Render
• Compressor Export
• Final Cut Pro X Export
• Lightroom Classic CC JPEG Export
• Photoshop CC Noise Reduction
• Premier Pro CC Export

Bare Feats – Low End iMac Pro Running Games versus Other Macs (8-core Vega64)

• DIRT Rally 2560×1440 Average FPS
• Tomb Raider 2560×1440 High FPS
• Total War: Warhammer 2560×1440 High FPS
• Tomb Raider 2560×1440 High FPS

Bare Feats – Low End iMac Pro versus two Mac Pros and one iMac 5K (8-core & 10-core, Vega64)

• DaVinci Resolve 14 Noise Reduction
• Cinebench Multi-Core CPU
• Geekbench Metal Single GPU
• Geekbench Multi-Core CPU
• Geekbench OpenCL Single GPU
• LuxMark GPU LuxBall
• LuxMark Multi-Core CPU

Bare Feats – iMac Pro with Pro Vega 56 GPU
versus optional Pro Vega 64 (8-core, Vega56 & Vega64)

• Cinebench OpenGL
• Compressor Transcode (BruceX to Apple 4K)
• Final Cut Pro X Export (BruceX to ProRes 4444 XQ)
• Geekbench 4 Metal GPU Compute
• Geekbench 4 OpenCL GPU Compute

Bare Feats – iMac Pro PCIe-based Flash Storage: How Fast Versus Other Macs?

• AJA System Test 15G Sequential Reads & Writes

fcp.co – Testing the Apple Pro Video Apps on the New iMac Pro (10-core, Vega64)

• Compressor 4.4.0 H.264 & MXF Export (from ProRes 422)
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 4K Export to ProRes 422, H.264, & MXF
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 BruceX XML Test
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 Import Clips
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 Multicam Playback & Render
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 ‘Real World’ H.264 Export
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 Render Optimized Media
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 Render Proxy Media
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4.0 Timeline Render
• Motion 5.4.0 Emitter Export to H.264 & ProRes 4444 XQ
• Motion 5.4.0 Graphic Heavy Commercial Export to H.264 & ProRes 4444 XQ

AppleInsider – Putting the iMac Pro thermals to the test (8-core, Vega56)

• Cinebench R15 Multi-Core CPU
• Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Transcode 4K HEVC to Apple ProRes
• Unigine Heaven

Six Colors – The iMac Pro has landed (8-core, Vega56)

• ffmpeg WAV Conversion
• Handbrake Transcode 1080p to lower resolution
• iZotope RX 6 Spectral Denoise
• sidetrack Audio Sync

AppleInsider – Review: Apple’s powerhouse iMac Pro wows with stellar performance and design (8-core, Vega56)

• After Effects 2018 EQUILOUD Benchmark Sequence (inc. Export to ProRes 422)
• Cinebench R15 Single-Core & Multi-Core CPU
• DaVinci Resolve 14.2 Canon Cinema RAW Lite Playback & Export
• DaVinci Resolve 14.2 H.264 1080p & 4K Render & Export
• DaVinci Resolve 14.2 Motion Stabilization
• DaVinci Resolve 14.2 Red RAW 4.5K & 8K Playback, Render, & Export
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 4K Motion Stabilization
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 BruceX ProRes 422 Export
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 Canon Cinema RAW Lite Playback & Export
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 H.264 1080p & 4K Export
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 Intel Quick Sync H.264 Encode
• Final Cut Pro X 10.4 Red RAW 4.5K & 8K Playback, Render, & Export
• Geekbench 4 Single-Core & Multi-Core
• Geekbench 4 OpenCL GPU Compute
• Geekbench 4 Metal GPU Compute
• Lightroom Classic CC DNG Conversion
• Lightroom Classic CC Generate 1:1 Previews
• Lightroom Classic CC JPEG Export
• Lightroom Classic CC RAW Import
• Maya 2018 “Model Village” 640×480 Render to ProRes 422
• Photoshop HDR
• Photoshop Noise Reduction
• Premier Pro 2018 4K Motion Stabilization
• Premier Pro 2018 H.264 1080p & 4K Render & Export
• Premier Pro 2018 Red RAW 4.5K & 8K Playback, Render, & Export
• Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Transcode 4K HEVC to Apple ProRes
• Unigine Heaven Extreme

Craig A. Hunter – 2017 iMac Pro Review (10-core, Vega64)

• NASA TetrUSS CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) w/ NACA 0012 airfoil CRM transport aircraft
  • VGRID Surface Mesh Generation (237,660 Triangles) Single-core
  • USM3D Parallel Performance
  • USM3D Parallel Scaling
• Objective-C, C, & Swift Compilation w/ Xcode
• Vectorization Speedup – Simple Add

Lomesi – With the iMac Pro, Apple promised so lightning rates: Apple T2 chip (10-core)

• AJA System Test 64G Sequential Reads & Writes
• Black Magic Disk Speed Test

Sander Zwartepoorte – Disappointing iMac Pro performance with Motion 5… (8-core, Vega56)

• Final Cut Pro X Export
• Motion Playback
• Premiere Export