vega 48 upgrade vs egpu with nvidia gtx

[Silenus3]

I'm about ready to buy the 5k i9 imac but still have some doubts about the graphic card to choose.

the 580x seems fine for what I need - which is music production along with some game development and some games.
but suppose that I would like to enjoy some high end gaming occasionally , then should I go for the vega 48 or an egpu with a gtx card along with a proper gaming monitor ?

it is cheaper going for the vega 48 and thunderbolt have its limits but so does the vega 48..
since it allow 4k gaming but only the most bare minimum of it according to some benchmarks and that 5k screen is not intended for gaming anyhow.

so it makes more sense just to go for 580x and play on the "antiquated" resolution for a while , until I find a good deal for the egpu combo - also because of TB bottleneck there seems to be a sweet spot - I think it was the gtx 1060 ti ?

it will cost less then a gaming console and this way I could enjoy both mac os for music and windows for gaming , seems like a win to me , what do you think ?

 

[ruslan120]

I’m not sure how the Vega 48 compares with the Nvidia card, you can google Vega 56 vs 1060 Ti benchmarks (since the Vega 56 is a card that people can buy as opposed to Vega 48). Subtract a few percent from the Nvidia since it’s over thunderbolt and from the 56 (since you would have a 48).

Not sure what you should do, but you should also keep in mind that the Vega will accelerate Mac applications while the Nvidia will only work under bootcamp. Another thing to keep in mind is that eGPU in boot camp is harder if you have an iMac with discrete graphics - there’s finagling with drivers involved.

 

[Silenus3]

for about 150-200% of the gpu upgrade price I can get a whole gaming desktop with ryzen and an RTX card and stream it to the imac.

I'm thinking maybe I overlook something but I can't find any good reason not to go with 580x for music production , some basic video editing and gaming on lower resolution , along with some 2d game development on bootcamp.

the vega 48 does compute much faster but I doubt I will notice any diffrence for my use case.

 

[Silenus3]

for about 150-200% of the gpu upgrade price I can get a whole gaming desktop with ryzen and an RTX card and stream it to the imac.

I'm thinking maybe I overlook something but I can't find any good reason not to go with 580x for music production , some basic video editing and gaming with the not-best resolution , along with some 2d game development on bootcamp.

the vega 48 does compute much faster but I doubt I will notice any diffrence for my use case.

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also I think the base model will have better re-sale value in 2-3 in comparison if and when I decide to sell it since there will probably be better and cheaper graphics cards option by then for the new imacs.