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Pro 580 vs M395X - chalk and cheese"

I

imacken

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 28, 2010
1,250
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A couple of days ago, I upgraded from a late 2015 iMac 27" 4GHz i7 32Gb M395X to a 2017 27" 4.2GHz i7 24Gb Pro 580, and, wow, what a difference in terms of the GPU performance!
See attached for some benchmarks.
Geekbench 4 - unsurprisingly, not a huge difference given the CPUs involved, but still significant.
Look at the others though, 50-100% improvement in frame rates. Amazing! (all @ 1440p)
That table doesn't tell the whole story either. I'm seeing the same level of improvement in Hitman, Dishonored 2 and (most importantly for me) DCS. (I couldn't see any benchmarking facility in these.)
I was hoping for a 30% improvement, so I am very pleased and impressed.
Unfortunately, the one thing that stands out, is that macOS is still way behind Windows in terms of performance. I know these BMs don't use Metal, but Hitman does I think, and the difference is the same in that. Plus Deus Ex: HD showed a similar pattern for me.
sn.JPG
 
Metal games by Feral are within 80% of Windows performance on my 580 iMac (tested on Hitman, DiRT Rally and Deus EX MD with Windows 10 Fall creator and latest drivers installed from bootcampdrivers). I haven't tested hitman recently, but it used to show the smallest performance delta, and it ran just as well as on Windows at high resolution (4k).
I don't know about F1 2017, but I've found that performance in DiRT (which also uses the EGO engine on Metal) is much worse if MSAA is enabled, as there appears to be a MSAA bug in Metal right now.
 
We’ve had this discussion before in another thread. Strange that on my 2 different iMacs we see different - and yet similar pattern - Windows vs macOS performance gaps.
What CPU and RAM do you have? Could you run Valley and Heaven and post results?
However, the main point of my post was to demonstrate the huge improvement the 580 is over the 395X.
 
I can post results after updating to 10.13.4. I can also report on Deus Ex and Hitman.
But I need to know the settings you use.
I have 24GB ram and a core i5.
 
For Heaven and Valley, I just use default 1440p settings.
Interesting that we have different CPUs. I believe that the i7 gives much better results in some games when the multi threading kicks in.
 
The unigine results are pretty good, so I don't think we'll see any difference with my system.
 
I wasn't talking about Unigine in that context, more games/sims like DCS. Still be interested to see your results.
 
imacken said:
For Heaven and Valley, I just use default 1440p settings.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what these are. The settings that appear upon launching the app may well be those used of some previous tests. Because in Heaven, I'm getting only 32 fps.
 
jeanlain said:
I'm not sure what these are. The settings that appear upon launching the app may well be those used of some previous tests. Because in Heaven, I'm getting only 32 fps.
Click to expand...
DX11, Quality High, Tessellatio, Stereo, 3D Multi Monitor disabled, anti-aliasing off, fuull screen, 1440p.
 
As above Tessellation disabled. I need to review this as the Mac default appears to be Medium Quality and System resolution.
I need to rerun these tests making sure the settings are EXACTLY the same on both platforms.
Same with Valley.
Run them both with Quality High, everything else off or disabled and at 'system' resolution.
 
I'm getting lower numbers than yours on macOS, and I remember seing larges differences between openGL and DX11 for the unigine test in general. I suspect your macOS tests used lower-quality settings.
 
Yes, I think you're right. I didn't notice that the default settings for Win and Mac were different!
Anyway, I've just rerun Mac version and am now getting 47/1951 and 38/957 in Valley and Heaven in High Quality.
I'll retry Windows.
[doublepost=1522434252][/doublepost]So, the Windows results I initially posted are still valid. Pity, as this makes the situation with the Mac even worse.
On a level playing field @2560x1440 and high quality, the results are:
Valley - Mac 47/1951 Win 63/2606
Heaven - Mac 38/957 Win 59/1464
Hmm...
 
Yeah. Unigine on macOS is pretty bad, mainly due to the openGL implementation. I'm more curious about the Metal results. But I can't test F1 2017 as I don't have it...
EDIT: I'm getting 37 and 45 fps in Heaven and Valley.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm.. yes, I agree these tests are not ideal on Mac. What were your results on Windows?
 
Not tested yet, but I expect similar results to yours.

EDIT: on Heaven, I get 57.9 fps in DX11, 47 in openGL
On Valley: 61.9, 54.2.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm.. interesting, I guess these tests are almost 100% GPU based as we have almost the same results.
Would be good to do a game comparison. Do you use DCS?
 
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