I’m fairy confident that Apple will have drivers solved by the time they release it, or most likely the release of the W5700XT will be when the drivers are updated. In an eGPU the 5700XT was outperforming the Vega 64 in our video editing tests and even the Radeon VII in some of the tests including Blender Benchmark (by just a tiny bit).
I’m fairly confident that it will SMOKE the 580. I compared the 2019 5K iMac’s Vega 48 to my 2017 5K iMacs 580 8GB and it was no not even close in terms of video editing, gaming, and 3D. And as I said the 5700XT beat out the Vega 64 in our tests which is faster than the 56 and
When AMD released the 5700 series they discontinued the Radeon VII because the 5700XT was faster in a lot of ways (not all) and cost $400 instead of $700, and the $2400 Vega II that’s in my 2019 MacPro is basically a Radeon VII with 6% more compute cores and double the memory.
Yes the 5700 has less compute units but they are a lot faster and more efficient. I’m really excited for this option and if it comes in at $1500 or less I think it will be a much better option for most compared to Vega II.
That should be especially true for video editors and those dealing with high Rez footage. The Vega II has the same outdated video engine that AMD has been making since 2016 with no 10bit hardware encoding and limited HEVC decoding.
The new Navi lineup finally is updated and can encoding 4K h.264 at to 150FPS which the currents graphics go up to 60FPS so that means exporting videos at more than twice as fast. Right now when I’m exporting h.264 my 12 core CPU is sitting at 10% or so usage and Vega II graphics at 15-20% because the bottleneck is the encoder. It’s still fast but will be much better.
Dealing with HDR video currently takes forever since there is no hardware encoder so even with the 12 core it takes about 35 min for a 5 min project. That should go down to less than 3min if Apple supports it. The W5700 will also be able to decode 8K video at 24FPS.
I’m personally REALLY looking forward to that GPU.
