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MP 7,1 What GPU options are you looking at and why?

chfilm

chfilm

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Nov 15, 2012
3,451
2,133
Berlin
Hey,

so I‘m trying to get ready for the 7.1 Mac Pro.

Currently at a 2013 D700 8core which is really sluggish and slow in Premiere Pro due to two Dell 5k Displays attached via dual TB.
During my everyday work in Premiere or After effects the second GPU sits Idle 99% of the time sadly, only during rendering it kicks in and then of course accelerates things.

So I‘m wondering what the right setup would be for me. One Vega II? Two Vega II? One Vega II Duo?
Anybody got any ideas what the difference between these two variants will be? I suppose one Vega II Duo will be equal in performance bit just more expensive somehow because it saves you physical space inside the machine?
Maybe even one Vega II will be enough for me?

What are you looking at and why?
 
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I am no expert and I may be completely off base but I seem to remember reading that the One Vega II should be 40% faster than the D700s in the 2013 Mac Pro.
 
Depending on the price, I'm hoping to get one Vega II Duo to start, and add one a couple years down the road or upgrade depending on what else, hopefully, comes out.
 
JesterJJZ said:
Depending on the price, I'm hoping to get one Vega II Duo to start, and add one a couple years down the road or upgrade depending on what else, hopefully, comes out.
Click to expand...
What is your sphere of work? What do you need so much power for?
 
Vega II. I have an RX 580 in the 4.1/5.1, so it seems more than a bit daft to spend ££££ on a new Mac and have exactly the same GPU in it. Vega II's about triple the performance, so that should do nicely. There might be Navi options sooner or later of course.....
 
Can anyone please elaborate what the difference between two Vega II vs one Vega II Duo would be? I don’t get it.
 
bob_stan said:
I am no expert and I may be completely off base but I seem to remember reading that the One Vega II should be 40% faster than the D700s in the 2013 Mac Pro.
Click to expand...
It should be faster than that! The 2 d700s together are only 7 TFLOPs.

OP If possible, take a Thunderbolt SSD loaded with some projects to your local Apple store and find out yourself.

chfilm said:
Can anyone please elaborate what the difference between two Vega II vs one Vega II Duo would be? I don’t get it.
Click to expand...
Depends on your application. Does your app benefit from infinity fabric vs. talking via PCIE? If so, the duo would see massive advantages. If not, performance should be similar in most cases.
 
I will avoid dual GPU card at the beginning. Often have trouble for this kind of setup. Not necessary crash, but may be same as the 6,1, one of the GPU rarely does anything.

A single Vega II is stronger than dual D700. This is from my Radeon VII. Should be quite a bit ahead of dual D700.
10.14.6 HBM 1100MHz.png


7,1 should be user upgradable. Therefore, my suggestion is to start with a single Vega II. Then add a second card if you really need more later. Unless you already have a plan on how to fully utilise all the PCIe slots. Otherwise, I don't think it's good idea to go Vega II duo before knowning it can really work as expected.
 
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At this point, I'm waiting for BTO pricing. Cannot make any solid decisions until then. If we're talking about a relatively cheap upgrade to dual GPUs with an MPX module, I'll absolutely consider.

Also want to see prices of aftermarket components individually. And want to confirm things like the MPX module and afterburner are indeed available post-purchase. I can only assume the answer is yes, it's available as post-purchase component.
 
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[QUOTE="h9826790, post: 27935275, member: 884762"

7,1 should be user upgradable. Therefore, my suggestion is to start with a single Vega II. Then add a second card if you really need more later. Unless you already have a plan on how to fully utilise all the PCIe slots. Otherwise, I don't think it's good idea to go Vega II duo before knowning it can really work as expected.
[/QUOTE]This is a known quantity. If your app supports multiple GPUs, at all, then we have a really good idea of what performance will be like. Multi GPU benchmarks are everywhere.
 
Flint Ironstag said:
I bet for the majority of people, on the majority of apps, performance will be pretty similar. Let's revisit when benchmarks are available.
Click to expand...

I am not talking about the performance difference when it works, but does it really work.

e.g. a 7990 is very different then two 7970. A Titan Z is very different then two Titan.

macOS has poor track record for dual GPU graphic cards.
 
At worst, we should see Premiere Pro performing Metal acceleration with multiple GPUs early next week. Maybe we’ll be lucky and see actual MP7,1 components in action.

One thing I’m sure of, Apple will make FCPX and their own software tailored to higher configuration options. I’m not 100% positive if they’re “ranking” dual lower end GPUs ahead of higher end single GPUs, or if there’s an actual tradeoff to either setup with their recommendations. It’s something we’ll need to wait for tests on, or even a “which one should I choose” option in the BTO configuration for guidance.

Metal did change things from older macOS multiple GPU setups, but MP6,1 never REALLY properly took advantage of their dual GPUs properly. Hopefully that continues to change, especially when driving higher resolution displays and compute becoming “required” tasks.
 
h9826790 said:
I am not talking about the performance difference when it works, but does it really work.

e.g. a 7990 is very different then two 7970. A Titan Z is very different then two Titan.

macOS has poor track record for dual GPU graphic cards.
Click to expand...

The Vega Duos seemed to be smoking it at the World Wide Conference using FCPX ~ so it's not a completely 'unknown' GPU commodity. Like someone said earlier ~ there will be a ton of new data about performance on numerous applications and setups soon after release. For the skittish ~ wait a few months. The avalanche of comparisons will be overwhelming in number.
 
OkiRun said:
The Vega Duos seemed to be smoking it at the World Wide Conference using FCPX ~ so it's not a completely 'unknown' GPU commodity. Like someone said earlier ~ there will be a ton of new data about performance on numerous applications and setups soon after release. For the skittish ~ wait a few months. The avalanche of comparisons will be overwhelming in number.
Click to expand...

I never said it's an unknown GPU.

I said, better to wait until we know it can work as expected. Which means, same as your suggestion. Wait for a few months.

Flint said we can "revisit" the benchmarks which already available. It's completely different than your suggestion about "there WILL be" tons of performance data soon after release.

I agree with you that there will be lots of data soon. But at least, at this moment. We don't know.

Remember the 6,1? It can also work well in FCPX, however, then after release, review shows the 2nd GPU can't display anything but only compute. Apple never say anything about that. So, until the full review come up, we don't know if the Duo will do the same thing. If yes, then OP just switch to a newer computer, but remain the same situation "During my everyday work in Premiere or After effects the second GPU sits Idle 99% of the time sadly, only during rendering it kicks in and then of course accelerates things". And I believe that's what he want to avoid.
 
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h9826790 said:
I never said it's an unknown GPU.

I said, better to wait until we know it can work as expected. Which means, same as your suggestion. Wait for a few months.

Flint said we can "revisit" the benchmarks which already available. It's completely different than your suggestion about "there WILL be" tons of performance data soon after release.

I agree with you that there will be lots of data soon. But at least, at this moment. We don't know.

Remember the 6,1? It can also work well in FCPX, however, then after release, review shows the 2nd GPU can't display anything but only compute. Apple never say anything about that. So, until the full review come up, we don't know if the Duo will do the same thing. If yes, then OP just switch to a newer computer, but remain the same situation "During my everyday work in Premiere or After effects the second GPU sits Idle 99% of the time sadly, only during rendering it kicks in and then of course accelerates things". And I believe that's what he want to avoid.
Click to expand...
Exactly!
Well or let’s put it that way- I have no issue if the one GPU sits idle, as long as the other one is strong enough to handle my dual 5k setup appropriately! And if the second GPU is taxed during rendering I’m fine.
I think for playback, the Afterburner will be more valuable than more GPU power.
 
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chfilm said:
Exactly!
Well or let’s put it that way- I have no issue if the one GPU sits idle, as long as the other one is strong enough to handle my dual 5k setup appropriately! And if the second GPU is taxed during rendering I’m fine.
I think for playback, the Afterburner will be more valuable than more GPU power.
Click to expand...

I think it very depends on your workflow.

If you firm H264 / HEVC and edit them directly (with HWAccel, there is no need to transcode into ProRes anymore), then The Vega II itself should be strong enough. I created a thread about HWAccel at here.

forums.macrumors.com

Activate AMD hardware acceleration

[For existing OpenCore users, you can always download my latest OpenCore package at post #1314 for update] Full HWAccel achieved now! Everything is covered in the OpenCore thread. The step by step tutorial to enable AMD hardware acceleration is now at here, but I strongly recommend you go...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

And I uploaded few videos at there to show that even a RX580 is good enough to edit HEVC directly without transcoding (in fact, at the same time, the GPU was also encoding the screen to H264).

And after I upgrade to Radeon VII's, its video engine shows about 2x the RX580 can do. So, a Vega II should be strong enough for most video editing jobs.

According to Apple's page, the Afterburner only seems to accelerate the ProRes RAW. So, if you firm 4K or 8K ProRes RAW and need to handle multi streams at the same time. Then the Afterburner will help.

However, if you only need the power to handle just few 4K ProRes RAW at a time. Then the 7,1's CPU should be strong enough. Even my W3690 can decode 2-3 4K DCI ProRes Raw at the same time.

My understanding so far. For the 7,1

Decode H264 -> GPU
Decode HEVC -> GPU
Encode H264 (fast) -> GPU
Encode H264 (high quality) -> CPU
Encode HEVC (fast) -> GPU
Encode HEVC (high quality) -> CPU
Decode ProRes -> Afterburner (if installed, otherwise CPU)
Encode ProRes -> CPU (may be Afterburner, no idea yet)

So, pick the option that fit your own workflow.
 
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h9826790 said:
I think it very depends on your workflow.

If you firm H264 / HEVC and edit them directly (with HWAccel, there is no need to transcode into ProRes anymore), then The Vega II itself should be strong enough. I created a thread about HWAccel at here.

forums.macrumors.com

Activate AMD hardware acceleration

[For existing OpenCore users, you can always download my latest OpenCore package at post #1314 for update] Full HWAccel achieved now! Everything is covered in the OpenCore thread. The step by step tutorial to enable AMD hardware acceleration is now at here, but I strongly recommend you go...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

And I uploaded few videos at there to show that even a RX580 is good enough to edit HEVC directly without transcoding (in fact, at the same time, the GPU was also encoding the screen to H264).

And after I upgrade to Radeon VII's, its video engine shows about 2x the RX580 can do. So, a Vega II should be strong enough for most video editing jobs.

According to Apple's page, the Afterburner only seems to accelerate the ProRes RAW. So, if you firm 4K or 8K ProRes RAW and need to handle multi streams at the same time. Then the Afterburner will help.

However, if you only need the power to handle just few 4K ProRes RAW at a time. Then the 7,1's CPU should be strong enough. Even my W3690 can decode 2-3 4K DCI ProRes Raw at the same time.

My understanding so far. For the 7,1

Decode H264 -> GPU
Decode HEVC -> GPU
Encode H264 (fast) -> GPU
Encode H264 (high quality) -> CPU
Encode HEVC (fast) -> GPU
Encode HEVC (high quality) -> CPU
Decode ProRes -> Afterburner (if installed, otherwise CPU)
Encode ProRes -> CPU (may be Afterburner, no idea yet)

So, pick the option that fit your own workflow.
Click to expand...

Do you mind telling us the camera set up you are using to film in ProRes? There seems to be only one camera available at the moment that can do it internally.
 
True 4K+ ProRes RAW internally is one camera currently. Others do external or via Atmos.

The majority of people will not use Afterburner immediately, unless it can accelerate other codecs like Blackmagic RAW, Cinema DNG, etc.
 
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