2020 iMac conundrum
All of the newly released iMac 27" models have AMD Radeon 5000 series GPU. It is my understanding that there is an issue (debate over whether the issue is Capture One use of Open CL vs. Metal or AMD driver issues aside) using Radeon 5000 series GPU with Capture One hardware acceleration.
What are the options? Are there any other options than (1) staying with Apple hardware and moving back to Lightroom or (2) staying with Capture one and moving back to Windows hardware?
Assuming iMac Pro and Mac Pro are too expensive, are there any other options? Will a Mac Mini with hardware, CPU and memory upgrade plus a eGPU, monitor, keyboard, and mouse make Capture One perform well and come in at or under the cost of the iMac 27"?
I know that there is a problem but I am not the most technical person. I just need some help because my late-2014 iMac is not cutting it with Capture One. Not too bad with Lightroom and Photoshop but I really do like Capture One.
Help,
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FWIW Capture One on my 2019 iMac 5K with Radeon Pro 575X 4 GB graphics works with hardware acceleration.
Capture One still, IMHO, has performance issues, but it works well enough on my hardware.
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Thank you Marco. If I could get a 2019 iMac 5k that'd be sweet. The issue is all the available 2020 iMac have AMD Radeon 5000 series GPU with a known issue. I even contacted Apple and they acknowledged the issue. They offered me the option to buy a iMac Pro - but sadly I don't have that kind of money. I am wondering if all the web chatter about the Radeon 5000 series GPU is overblown but it seems to be consistently reported. Thank you very much for your response.
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This is by far the worst piece of software I have ever used on a MAC period (in 30 years). We have brand new iMac Pros and Capture One is just a spinning beach ball at every click. With the latest supplemental update for Catalina, the software will simply not start up. Unexpectedly crashes every time now. Uninstalling and reinstalling, clearing out cache/application stored information is not the answer. This is a huge waste of our time trying to manage huge photoshoots for a huge client. All it is a huge pain and money lost in hours waiting for the software to figure itself out.1 -
Help Desk, I've been reading that Capture One uses a "Open CL" framework and the future is "Metal". I don't know if this is the issue. As I said I'm not technical. I can tell you that I did upgrade to Catalina on my MBP a couple of weeks ago and all of my edited pictures have a corruption that won't allow any masks to render correctly. I've lost all my edits for this year. I was concerned about that. I opened a support ticket but the response was "we will look at it". In spite of asking for a timeline, I was not given any expectation of when the issue will be resolved. That was my first concern.
Now I can't find an Apple product to purchase that plays nice with Capture One - as your experience has noted.
Lightroom and Photoshop work completely fine on my rather old Late-2014 iMac. It's just that I shoot Fuji now and the photos render better in Capture One than Lightroom. I was hoping someone would have a silver bullet to help me figure this out. It is becoming clear to me that I may not be on the right road with the time I've invested in migrating my pictures of LR to C1. At least I am only half way done before I abort. It's disappointing.
I am very sorry for your frustration. With the cost of iMac Pros I can only imagine how absolutely disappointed you must feel. At most I have purchased a 28 TB drive I won't be able to use and some memory I can return.
Thank you for your input.
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It's just the recurrent and well known issue of the synchronisation between MacOS and Capture One. If you read the hardware/software requirements for having Capture One working smoothly, you'll see that the best way to use C1 is to wait and see before any updating of MacOS. Yes, I admit that when you just bought a new Mac, it comes with the last OS update.....
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You could go back to Mojave. Unless you have a TimeMachine back up or want too run from a separate bootable drive, it can be a bit finicky but there are lots of articles including this one: https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/downgrade-macos-3581872/
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I am not sure Mojave vs Catalina is the issue. I understood the issue to be the GPU and it’s driver in either OS. Are you saying that the Radeon 5700 XT driver with Mojave works where the Catalina driver does not? Don’t they both use Open CL which is what C1 continues to use in the face of better options?
Also, isn’t Apple the preferred hardware for photographers and C1 a photography app. I don’t understand why I’d risk moving forward with an application that doesn’t make nice with my hardware and OS on an ongoing basis. That is wasting the big bucks you lay out for Apple. Which is why I feel like this is a decision between Apple and Windows and whether or not C1 is worth it. I mean, golly, there is literally no iMac under $7k CDN that works with C1.
I’ve literally spent days looking at the Mac Mini and buying external monitors and eGPU to work around the problem. Then I hear from a gentleman on this feed that spent the big bucks on iMac Pro and C1 still doesn’t play nice.
I just don’t have money to throw away because I like an application when there are apps out there that work just fine and I might even get a few more years out of my late-2014 iMac/ Mojave machine.
It’s frustrating. I appreciate accepting and being patient is an option. Thank you for your input. I was hoping for a hardware solution.
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Thanks for the expanded explanation Darlene.
If you are prepared to spend some money on hardware to stay with C1 and Apple, why not buy a MacMini and load C1 and your library on to it? You can use your iMac keyboard and mouse and plug the mini into the iMac display.
I have a friend who is a retired software engineer and a C1 user who runs all his photo processing off an earler version of the mini wihtout any problems.
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Billtils, that is interesting. Use the late-2014 iMac monitor, keyboard, and mouse but use the Mac Mini for compute. What about GPU. The Mac Mini has no GPU upgrade and the native card is below C1 spec. Is your friend also using an eGPU? One or two cards?
Thanks,
D
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Darlene
I'll email my friend and ask him.
FYI, my copy of C1 is on a 2017 4K 21.5 inch iMac updated a few months ago to run on Catalina. I've just downloaded C1 to my current model MacBook Air (2020 version) which has Catalina preloaded and it runs just fine there too. (Both are 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD). Based on that it seems to me that you can have pretty recent and reasonably hi-spec hardware without having to break the bank or revert to Windows.
As far as the other parts of your message are concerned, Minis ship without a keyboard, mouse or monitor so "borrowing" the 2014 gear should work.
B
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I have been using this software for years and it has never been this bad on the MAC side. The WINDOWS experience is night-and-day. But the WINDOWS file system is hampering the naming conventions of our camera RAW data. When we have critical timelines we rely on WINDOWS. When we want ease-of-use we go to the iMac Pro, but the ease-of-use is where the problems start. It's not easy to use anymore. The application code is flawed. The answer is not going backwards in technology, it should center around designing better software so your user-base grows and you bury the competition. If anyone at Capture One started over in Xcode and built the software with superior knowledge of the new MAC ethos, they'd be the go-to option. What is going to happen this fall when Big Sur is released? There are too many improvements utilizing the rest of the applications that take full advantage of Apple's latest OS/hardware direction to even think about downgrading (anything). C1 needs to catch up, then stay in front of it. I hate complaining about it, sorry you're all catching some venting. I'm just in need of a professional option that works.
@Darlene, I'm sorry to read about your troubles; that is simply an unacceptable circumstance from poor software development.1 -
Darlene
Heard back from my friend who it turns out now uses a MacBook Pro for his editing and has pensioned off the Mini. His advice is if you want to push it, and eGPU would be a good idea but it's not an absolute - see this re the Mini and LR/PS processing: kukP6sbfKoxs6X1
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@Help Desk the c20 release was so full of bugs and issues, they even removed functionality so I diced I will not go through this a second time. I too have the feeling that the mac codebase of c1 is outdated probably because the development team was understaffed for years and still is. catching up with adobe is not enough I would like to see real innovations to make my life easier but I have no high expectations
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It's super disappointing, the whole experience.
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Darlene, where do you see C1 gpu requirements? Their Minimum System Requirements page seems to eschew gpu recommendations.
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Darlene, another hardware option that may appeal more than the Mini is to buy a MacBook (whatever version you fancy) and hook it up to your iMac to get the larger screen for editing. The version is up to you - bottom end would probably be the latest iteration of the MacBook Air. I have one as my general use laptop (500GB SSD and 1.1GHz quad core i5), but recently added CaptureOne 20 as I was going to be away from home but wanted to have C1 avalable - it works fine.
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Thank you all. It appears the latest release of C1 v20 has a fix specific to the issue I was concerned about with the Radeon 5700 XT. But I agree with all the comments about C1 needing a re-write to come up to snuff re: mac os. I feel like I've just taken a huge risk to migrate from LR to C1. Fingers crossed. Thank you all again for your input.
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Glad it's been resolved and without you having to buy any new hardware.
As far as moving to C1 from LR it's going to be a matter of personal taste as much as anything. It may take some time to get right into the what and how of things but keep going.
I moved to LR about 9 months ago becasue I use Photoshop (not a lot but there are some things that it's pretty well essential for) and when PhaseOne hiked their price to £20 per month for CaptureOne20 it looked silly compsred to LR plus PS for half that. The recent release of C1 for Nikon flipped the value for money situation as far as I was concerned as for me CaptureOne knocks the proverbial socks off of LR but there's probably a lot of subjectivity in that conclusion.
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I was hoping to buy a new iMac but I am holding back because of the problems reported here.
After searching for Radeon graphics card problems I discovered an avalanche of reports of issues all relating to Open CL.
Perhaps the most relevant to us is this one
https://community.amd.com/thread/249797
It appears that the combination of Intel CPU Radeon GPU and Open Cl is at the heart of the problem.
So I am wondering if the crashing problems go away if Open CL is never utilised.
With Apple deprecating Open CL then we really need Metal support but perhaps a new iMac
with a maxed out cpu would be OK for now in terms of performance
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I certainly hope so. I thought the issue was resolved and ordered my iMac. Fully loaded. Arrives in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.
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Assuming, the issue with the Radeaon GPU and OpenCL has been resolved, which GPU in the new iMac modell would be the best choice for CaptureOne?
As I am using my macs for a quite some time (currently I am on a 2014 Retina iMac) I would normally just go with the fastest option (5700 XT) but this is also the GPU with the highest TDP, so I fear that the fans will be auudible more often. Would there be a noticable difference with the 5700 or 5500?
Thanks for your advice!
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Alex, hope someone can help you with that. I don’t have my new iMac yet to be in a position to comment. I ordered the 5700XT. I usually have my noise canceling headset on playing music while I’m editing.
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considering how manageable apple hardware is compared to the windows world it is unbelievable that almost every release in the last years came with some kind of GPU related bugs and problems.
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Hey Darlene, how did it work out with the new iMac? I am having problems with the mid 2020 27" iMac that I just bought in September. It has the little brother to the GPU you have (Radeon Pro 5500XT w/8GB). With HW acceleration enabled, the performance of the C1 editing features are virtually unusable. Very choppy and erratic with delays and weird artifacts appearing in the image. The problem goes away when I disable HW acceleration, but then it is just generally sluggish, I assume from disabling the GPU. I'd hate to think I have to disable the GPU in a brand new computer and live with sub par, sluggish behavior just because C1 has issues with the graphics card. How is yours working? Any suggestions? I've already tried the common fixes I've found in various forums. Deleting imageCore, setting preview size to match 5K display, etc...
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If only there were a more modern, superior framework to Open CL that they could utilize. Hmm, if only.
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