SHOOTOUT: iMac Retina 5K

versus other Quad-Core Macs

Posted Wednesday, October 22 2014 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

October 24th, added Single-Core Cinebench results

The iMac with Retina 5K Display arrived yesterday so we rushed to get you some speed test results. In this first round, we compare it to the fastest 'late 2013' iMac Quad-Core i7 and the 'late 2013' Mac Pro Quad-Core Xeon.

GRAPH LEGEND

4c nMP 3.7 D300s = 'late 2013' Mac Pro 3.7GHz Quad-Core Xeon; dual FirePro D300 GPUs

4c iMac 4.0 R295X = 'late 2014' iMac Retina 5K 4.0GHz Quad-Core i7; Radeon R9 M295X GPU

4c iMac 3.5 G780M = 'late 2013' iMac 3.5GHz Quad-Core i7; GeForce GTX 780M GPU

Cinebench R15 -- Render 3D Model using all cores. (RED graph bar means FASTEST CB Rating.)

Final Cut Pro X 10.1.3

We imported a 1080p ProRes 422 clip. The first effect we rendered, Aged Film, is CPU intensive. (RED graph bar means FASTEST in SECONDS.)

The second effect we rendered is GPU intensive.

LuxMark

This is an OpenCL benchmark. We rendered the Sala scene using GPUs only. (RED graph bar means FASTEST in Thousands of Samples per Second.)

Tomb Raider

Using the HIGH preset at 2560x1440, we ran the built-in benchmark. (RED graph bar means FASTEST in FRAMES per SECOND.)

Diablo III

Using the best settings with no vsync at 2560x1440, we entered the game at the same location and observed FPS. (RED graph bar means FASTEST in FRAMES per SECOND.)

INSIGHTS

The top iMac with Retina 5K Display is clearly faster than the fastest 'non-Retina' iMac in every speed test we featured here.

In four out of six tests, the '5K' iMac was faster than the 'late 2013' Quad-Core Mac Pro. However, in the two tests where the Mac Pro was faster (LuxMark, FCPX Gaussian Blur), both D300 GPUs were used for rendering. The iMac only has one discrete GPU. If LuxMark was forced to use only one D300, the iMac's M295X would be faster.

Though the 5K iMac is capable of 5120x2880 resolution, we ran Tomb Raider and Diablo III at the 'Best for display' 2560x1440 scaled setting. Not only did that make it a 'fair fight' but Tomb Raider is unable to run at the highest resolution. FYI, Diablo III was able to run at 5120x2880 which cut the average framerate in half (31 FPS).

OTHER ARTICLES ON THE iMAC 5K

Go to our INDEX page for a list of several pages featuring the iMac with Retina 5K Display compared to other Macs.

Comments? Suggestions? Feel free to email me,

Follow me on Twitter @barefeats