Graphics

I am hoping for a new MacPro computer here at work. (I know, but we are a Mac group) I have been using Parrallels virtual machine to run Designer up to this point. I am pushing for a better video card because of the 3d nature of Xpression. What should I push for so that my supervisor can go over the specs? Thanks in advance.

Well, the current Mac Pro (aka the trashcan) has languished a bit and suffers from the inability to swap out GPU's. The next Mac Pro which most expect this year will likely eliminate this issue, and give us more choices in that regard. Until then, the best you could do is maybe an iMac Pro running an eGPU setup over TB3. In that case, I would go with a high-end NVIDIA GTX card. Since the underlying engine of XPression is basically tapping the same sort of resources a video game would, the key is choosing a card which is well suited for gaming.

I also wonder if maybe you'd get better performance if you made a bootcamp partition to run Windows natively on the hardware, eliminating any emulation bottlenecks.

I'm a mac guy as well, FWIW, but here the shop I spend most of my time at is PC so I haven't done much experimentation with your type of setup.
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Willie, we tried the bootcamp road and our IT security forces would not let me have admin rights to the computer so bootcamp was a no go. I meant to say iMac Pro not a Mac Pro. Thanks for the info.

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Ah got it... Well if you'er going the eGPU route, I'd say a GTX1080 would be the best bet.
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Yeah be sure to get a Nvidia GPU. I'm pretty sure XPression is optimized for Nvidia compared to Radeon and Vega. From what I've seen of people testing the external GPUs on the iMac Pro, you're not gonna lose a lot of performance using the thunderbolt 3 i/o, but it will still work better with a GTX 1080 than using an actual XPression chassis since I think they still use the old GTX 980 in the chassis. I'd also try an push against those iT guys for bootcamp, it works much better than Parallels since you are actually using the Windows OS compared to simulating it, along with the fact that Apple supports it with Intel CPUs.
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IT can be a stubborn lot...
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Bootcamp is the way to go, parallels or similar will really restrict your access to the GPU.
I haven't tried XPression with an eGPU but I imagine it would perform pretty well for Designer.

FYI latest XPression hardware uses GTX 1080 and has been around for over a year.
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Thanks Simon, but without admin rights, I am limited to parallels.
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