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Why people go for Vega 48?

jonatious

jonatious

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 29, 2016
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Vega 48 is not enough for people who really need the graphics right? So why don't people go for 580X and buy an eGPU which is much more powerful than the Vega 48? Added to the power, Vega 48 upgrade is just over priced.

Is it just to save space on the desk? After all, iMacs are not portable.

Am I missing something here?
 
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Several people believed the Vega 48 would run cooler than the 580x in a meaningful enough way that it would help keep fan noise at a minimum. That idea really had no basis in fact. It may indeed run cooler, but not enough to affect the thermals.

Personally I did not believe it was worth the cost as you'd still be in the all-in-one GPU category even with the upgrade. eGPU would be the only true way to add a meaningful amount of power at a decent price.
 
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The BlackMagic Pro is $1199 for the Vega 56. I guess there are other options out there but that is a lot of money to spend.
 
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say DIY is the way to go here. You probably want to avoid the eGPU Apple sells in their own stores. :)
 
Some reasons why I'd suppose people go for it over an eGPU.
- They want an all Apple solution
- They want an all-in-one solution
- Don't trust or avoid non-apple hardware
- Concern over reliability of eGPU/OS updates breaking the setup.
- Setting up an eGPU and having it use the internal display is too technical
- Lack of awareness of the option
 
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jonatious said:
Vega 48 is not enough for people who really need the graphics right? So why don't people go for 580X and buy an eGPU which is much more powerful than the Vega 48? Added to the power, Vega 48 upgrade is just over priced.

Is it just to save space on the desk? After all, iMacs are not portable.

Am I missing something here?
Click to expand...

To me the key question is how much of a benefit does the Vega 48 actually provide when compared with the 580x, and in what applications does it provide that advantage? And, how much if any does the Vega actually reduce heat? I've not really seen much real world data that actually answers those questions. My thought (and that's all it is really) is that it won't be of much or any benefit to most users, at least not now. The integrated gpu on Intel cpus is perfectly fine for most most of the things most of us most of the time. Future software could take more advantage of gpus and thus the advantages would be more compelling in the future. And it would obviously be of benefit for anyone wanting to do much gaming or anyone doing extensive video editing or rendering.
 
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hence why many here are still sitting on the fence waiting for someone to provide real data that indicates the gains
 
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SkiHound2 said:
To me the key question is how much of a benefit does the Vega 48 actually provide when compared with the 580x, and in what applications does it provide that advantage? And, how much if any does the Vega actually reduce heat? I've not really seen much real world data that actually answers those questions. My thought (and that's all it is really) is that it won't be of much or any benefit to most users, at least not now. The integrated gpu on Intel cpus is perfectly fine for most most of the things most of us most of the time. Future software could take more advantage of gpus and thus the advantages would be more compelling in the future. And it would obviously be of benefit for anyone wanting to do much gaming or anyone doing extensive video editing or rendering.
Click to expand...

It's the last part about the future that interests me. I kept my last iMac for 8 years.
 
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adamjackson said:
The BlackMagic Pro is $1199 for the Vega 56. I guess there are other options out there but that is a lot of money to spend.
Click to expand...

I obviously wasn't talking about the eGPU apple provides. But yeah DIY would have its own issues as well
 
Shivetya said:
hence why many here are still sitting on the fence waiting for someone to provide real data that indicates the gains
Click to expand...
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/compute/compare/3846496?baseline=3866879

580x is better at RAW and Histogram Equalization

Vega48 is particularly good at SFFT.

AMD was pushing Vega's advantages in Deep Learning. (FP16 operations are twice as fast as FP32, but are very imprecise)

The format is assumed to have an implicit lead bit with value 1 unless the exponent field is stored with all zeros. Thus only 10 bits of the significand appear in the memory format but the total precision is 11 bits. In IEEE 754 parlance, there are 10 bits of significand, but there are 11 bits of significand precision (log10(211) ≈ 3.311 decimal digits, or 4 digits ± slightly less than 5 units in the last place).
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-precision_floating-point_format
 
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Everymac says the mid 2010 imacs have

iMac "Core i3" 3.06 21.5-Inch (Mid-2010)3.06 GHz Core i3 (I3-540)
iMac "Core i3" 3.2 21.5-Inch (Mid-2010)3.2 GHz Core i3 (I3-550)
iMac "Core i5" 3.6 21.5-Inch (Mid-2010)3.6 GHz Core i5 (I5-680)
iMac "Core i3" 3.2 27-Inch (Mid-2010)3.2 GHz Core i3 (I3-550)
iMac "Core i5" 2.8 27-Inch (Mid-2010)2.8 GHz Core i5 (I5-760)
iMac "Core i5" 3.6 27-Inch (Mid-2010)3.6 GHz Core i5 (I5-680)
iMac "Core i7" 2.93 27-Inch (Mid-2010)2.93 GHz Core i7 (I7-870)
Click to expand...

The i3s of that generation have two cores (plus hyperthreading, but that has limited benefits). If you have an i5, you still don't have quicksync-- which really helps with streaming video. Plus, the video card is behind the times.
 
aman88 said:
Specs? I have the lower end 21.5 2010 and she’s not working right :/...
Click to expand...
3.4Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 6770M

Though I am for sure going to upgrade to a maxed out 2019 iMac in the coming month or so.
 
bpeeps said:
3.4Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 6770M

Though I am for sure going to upgrade to a maxed out 2019 iMac in the coming month or so.
Click to expand...

I wish I could validate spending that but I really don’t do much more than home and office work... looking to get base 27” with the SSD upgrade... will add more RAM, eGPU with external monitor if I decide to game.
 
adamk77 said:
There's also that using an eGPU with the internal display does not work well. You need to connect it to an external monitor to get the promised performance.
Click to expand...
In macOS, support for using an eGPU to drive the built-in display has to be enabled by the application developer. Not many macOS games have this support enabled so far. (Of all of Feral Interactive’s macOS games, for example, only Rise of the Tomb Raider currently supports using an eGPU to drive the internal display.)

So if you want to game in macOS and you want to use the built-in display, the internal Vega 48 will give you the best performance. I ordered my 2019 iMac with a Vega 48 largely for that reason, but I’ll probably get an eGPU as well at some point.
 
Colonel Blimp said:
In macOS, support for using an eGPU to drive the built-in display has to be enabled by the application developer. Not many macOS games have this support enabled so far. (Of all of Feral Interactive’s macOS games, for example, only Rise of the Tomb Raider currently supports using an eGPU to drive the internal display.)

So if you want to game in macOS and you want to use the built-in display, the internal Vega 48 will give you the best performance. I ordered my 2019 iMac with a Vega 48 largely for that reason, but I’ll probably get an eGPU as well at some point.
Click to expand...

Just get an external display? Use the internal for everything else and the external to play games with the eGPU... that set up should work with an iMac too correct?
 
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aman88 said:
Just get an external display? Use the internal for everything else and the external to play games with the eGPU... that set up should work with an iMac too correct?
Click to expand...
Yes, an external display should work, and will give better performance (as adamk77 mentioned).

Some folks might not want two displays on their desk, which is why I mentioned the limitation.
 
Colonel Blimp said:
Yes, an external display should work, and will give better performance (as adamk77 mentioned).

Some folks might not want two displays on their desk, which is why I mentioned the limitation.
Click to expand...

I know it works with MBP and Mac Mini but you do not see very many people doing it with an iMac... that’s kind of the point of the iMac as you stated. So I was curious. I guess the eGPU is a good idea in a sense because you technically could buy a new GPU for it every couple of years... I know that was the first thing to be out of date with my current 2010 iMac (out of date gpu upon purchase lol).
 
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Colonel Blimp said:
In macOS, support for using an eGPU to drive the built-in display has to be enabled by the application developer. Not many macOS games have this support enabled so far. (Of all of Feral Interactive’s macOS games, for example, only Rise of the Tomb Raider currently supports using an eGPU to drive the internal display.)

So if you want to game in macOS and you want to use the built-in display, the internal Vega 48 will give you the best performance. I ordered my 2019 iMac with a Vega 48 largely for that reason, but I’ll probably get an eGPU as well at some point.
Click to expand...

I would never buy an iMac if I want to game ;)
 
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jonatious said:
I would never buy an iMac if I want to game ;)
Click to expand...

You can still buy an iMac, but you also need to buy a PC with a Nvidia card and a low-latency switch for the basement so you can screen-cast via Steam/NV-Play/etc.

My iMac plays games from my son's PC just fine.


;-)
 
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