Old question, but new variables - MAC or PC in 2016

[Warspite]

Back in 2012 it was very simple: only Mac. Syphon+Quartz was great addition. Macbook Retina offered 3 video-outs of thunderbolt capture. And it is just my opinion, but for me Resolume was much more stable under Mac and video+audio clips played smothly on Mac and it was very hard to play with audio buffer size on PC to get some sort of smooth playback.

But everything is changing. Now we have vvvv and spout for PC, Resolume is more mature under PC, MacBook are too thin and tend to overheat, while big gaming PC laptops run stable fps and also can offer multiple videoouts + thunderbolt (even 3.0).

So what do you think? Is there a serious reason to stay on Mac?

[pfelberg]

I usually produce and run my shows on PCs and notebooks.
The only macbook pro I had/have was bought not because of the capability or performance. Just due to hardware confiability.
If I would say a computer would give up on me during a gig, that would be a pc.

Paulo

[jureeesh]

Probably PC has more diversity than MAC, would go with high PC anytime.

[Oaktown]

I use both MacBook Pros and Custom PCs with Arena 5 and they both have there pros and cons.

We are still using MBP with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB GPUs because I don't want to have to deal with AMD GPUs anymore and sometimes run big projects on them such as this one without any problems. I love using the MBP because of thunderbolt 2 and the ability to expand the system and also because I can take a whole rig on the plane with a couple of small pelican case but this is not a system I would want to leave behind for someone to run a show or for a permanent installation.

As far as PC's goes, all of our servers are custom made and we don't have any gaming laptops so I can't comment on those. I would say most of our media servers get reconfigured on a per project basis to create both a powerful and stable environment but we have a couple old ones we use for small projects that have run like clockwork for years. We still have a few AMD cards such as HD 5770 Eyefinity 6 and R9 270X that used on occasion, but as of 1.5 years ago we've switched to Nvidia 980GTX 4GB or better for medium to large projects and we've had no GPU related issues since.