Extremely slow performance when using Motion titles on new Mac Pro

Hey guys. I'm new here, and new to FCP X, as well, so please go easy on me! My problem is that I'm using Final Cut Pro X, version 10.1.1, on a brand new 2013 Mac Pro cylinder . . . Quad-core, 3.5 Ghz, 32GB of RAM, dual D300s, and am getting absolutely horrid performance when working with complex Motion titles that use particle-emitters, etc. My project is located on an external drive, I've trashed preferences, I've reinstalled Mavericks (10.9.2) and have tried creating a new user account. But all to no avail. Currently, it's background rendering . . . and FCPX shows that it is using about 10% of the CPU. Which I guess is to be expected, since Motion relies primarily upon the GPUs. HOWEVER, AtMonitor and iStat confirm that it's only taxing ONE of the two D300s, and not the other one. Is this normal? And as to the performance — what can I do to increase it? Currently, rendering a 10 second Motion title is taking 30 minutes . . . granted, it's fairly complex with a lot going on, but surely it shouldn't take THAT long, should it?

Yours truly,
Andy H.

What version of Motion are you using? Only 5.1 will work with dual graphics cards, I believe.

Yeah, it's Version 5.1, but the more that I think about it, this might be normal . . . after all, Apple did say that one GPU will drive the display(s), and the other will do all the OpenCL heavy-lifting . . . so I wonder if what I'm seeing isn't simply the natural division of labor? Could be, right?

Shouldn't be. Doesn't take much horsepower at all to simply drive a display.

Well, performance issues continue. I’ve got just 4 layers of video in a 1080p timeline (23.98 fps) — two stock footage clips looped a few times, a scrolling title, and some footage I shot with my Canon Vixia HFG20, with a Keyer effect and one of MotionVFX’s “mLooks” color correction plugins applied. The Mac Pro should be able to chew through this in minutes . . . but so far, it’s only got 7% of it done, and has been rendering for over 40 minutes! Activity Monitor says it is using around 220% CPU most of the time. Memory usage is steady at about 2.5GB. I’ve tried trashing the Preferences, cleaning my user & system caches, fixing disk permissions, restarting, etc. All the footage is stored on an external drive connected by a Thunderbolt-to-FW800 interface, in a Library I created in 10.1.1 on that drive. Right now I’m content to blame it on the fact that I’m using a BETA of OS X 10.9.3 (I’m in the “beta seed” program). But surely, a beta this close to release quality shouldn’t be causing this much of a slow-down, should it?

Curiouser and curiouser...

Particle effects are notoriously labour intensive, certainly when you use a large number of them in settings.
But I understand your frustration.
I think its time to talk to a Mac Genius.

Sorry to say you are not get any support from an Apple Genius for Apple Beta software.

Why would you use Beta software of a working system?

Is this rendered or unrendered timeline?

So if you remove the MotionVXF stuff everything is dandy?

I'm a big fan of MotionVFX.com they are masters at what they do, but the definitely push the limit of what Motion can do.

I was just about to post that mLooks can eat up a lot of computing power. I stopped using them because of that. But, it is a nice plugin. Just very power hungry.