Mac Pro Sluggish

OK, first the specs: Mac Pro 4,1 8 core; 48gbRAM, GTX680, CalDigit RAID 0 4 disk array, SSD Bootdrive, OS 10.9, FCPX 10.0.9

I've noticed that scrubbing and playing from a spacebar tap is now really wonky. It takes a good 3-4 seconds (1 mississippi etc.) to have a simple, rendered timeline play. It makes it kind of a drag to edit swiftly.

My events/projects are a on a sparse bundle. I only have one job open at a time.

Here's the crazy part: as an experiment, I mounted the sparse bundle disk over a gigabit ethernet network on my MacBook Pro mid 2012 Retina i7 (16gb RAM, also running 10.9). Then I opened FCPX and played the footage straight from my MacPro over the network. Scrubbing/playing was instant! Across the network!

Locally, my MacPro is a dog, despite everything being hooked up directly.

This tells me a few things:

1) my disk array is playing back correctly.
2) the amount of RAM does not matter (I have 48 gb on the Mac Pro and only 16 on the MacBook Pro)
3) I have a GTX680 on the Mac Pro and the GT650M/Intel 4000 on the Macbook, you would think the GTX 680 would still kill it.

I'm wondering if the Macbook wins because of the i7 or the dual graphics cards or something else. Whatever else is going on, you'd think the MacPro would at least keep up with the MacBook. But it's not close!

Any thoughts as to why its so sluggish? I'd switch to my MacBook, but my RAID and Black Magic cards are there, so I'm not really into reconfiguring so close to the new Mac Pro coming out. Am I hosed?

Check the boot drive of your MacPro. Run Disk Utility or (better) Disk Warrior on it. Also make sure you have plenty of space left on that drive. And most important do not have any background processes, or backup utilities such as Time Machine, running while you work with FCPX.

- Ronny

I'd start debugging with the graphics card. How confident are you that it made the move to 10.9 without issue? Can you run anything else that's likely to exercise it? OpenCL benchmarks, perhaps?

I'd start debugging with the graphics card.

Good idea.

- Ronny