If you get the mid tier I-9 512 SSD is 2799 matches upper tier I9 512 SSD so you kind of get the 580 for free.
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Why people go for Vega 48?
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Ok on Starcraft 2, on 1440p all high settings my late 2014 m295x had around 60-70 fps
On my 580 (not 580X) i had around 95-100 fps ,same settings as always
Now with vega48 i have 125-130fps
Always on macos
So i dont know how much better is the 580X vs 580..but i got around 20-30 fps between 580 and vega
On my 580 (not 580X) i had around 95-100 fps ,same settings as always
Now with vega48 i have 125-130fps
Always on macos
So i dont know how much better is the 580X vs 580..but i got around 20-30 fps between 580 and vega
It’s only for driving the internal display that an app’s developer needs to add eGPU support. If an app can take advantage of the internal GPU for computational tasks, then it will automatically use the eGPU. (Likewise, in case you are interested in gaming, all macOS games will work on an external display connected to the eGPU.)
See the section “eGPU support in apps” in the Apple Support article Use an external graphics processor with your Mac.
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Only a very little. The Radeon Pro 580X is the exact same GPU as the 580, only clocked slightly higher (or so I’ve heard).
My current GPU is the M395X, which is barely faster than your M295X. I’m looking forward to the Vega 48!
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As @Rockadile pointed out here, aside from gaming, getting the Vega might have an impact when using photo editors like Capture One Pro. This picked my interest, as I'm using that program among others, so I looked into it and found this article that shows that Capture One indeed benefits greatly from GPU acceleration when performing certain tasks like exporting images. Reading more into it, I found that also other image editing programs, namely On1 Photo Raw and Luminar, but also Affinity Photo, use Open CL on the GPU to perform certain tasks. The article linked before shows that on the 2017 i7 iMac with Radeon 580, photo export in Capture One is 4 times faster when you activate GPU acceleration.
Now I wonder: how big of a benefit would the Vega 48 be vs. the 580X in that context?
The numbers I've found so far (e.g. here, pardon its French but there's always Google Translate
) state the following:
(1) 580X: 5.5TFLOPS, 2304 streams, Geekbench Compute mean (Open CL): 119240, Unigine Heaven approx. 1300
(2) Vega 48: 7.8 TFLOPS, 3072 streams, Geekbench Compute mean: 141077, Unigine Heaven approx. 1700
The Heaven benchmarks were taken e.g. from this thread.
This suggests the Vega would be somewhere between 18% (Geekbench) and roughly 30% (no. of streams, Heaven) faster than the 580X.
When I look at my intended configuration (i9, 1 TB SSD and either 580X or Vega 48), the Vega's 540€ would be 12% of the total price, so while the absolute value seems outrageous, the relative value doesn't look too bad. Of course, the gains by getting the Vega (in my case not used for gaming at all) would only be palpable in certain situations, like the ones mentioned above (exporting photos).
Bottom line: I'm still (or again, after @Rockadile pointed this out) unsure whether the Vega upgrade is worth it for me. If it accelerates photo export by 20%, ok, then I wait 5 instead of 6 minutes for photo export. But if it also keeps the overall machine cooler, and if software companies start to exploit GPU processing more in the future... many "if"s.
What do you guys think?
Now I wonder: how big of a benefit would the Vega 48 be vs. the 580X in that context?
The numbers I've found so far (e.g. here, pardon its French but there's always Google Translate
) state the following:(1) 580X: 5.5TFLOPS, 2304 streams, Geekbench Compute mean (Open CL): 119240, Unigine Heaven approx. 1300
(2) Vega 48: 7.8 TFLOPS, 3072 streams, Geekbench Compute mean: 141077, Unigine Heaven approx. 1700
The Heaven benchmarks were taken e.g. from this thread.
This suggests the Vega would be somewhere between 18% (Geekbench) and roughly 30% (no. of streams, Heaven) faster than the 580X.
When I look at my intended configuration (i9, 1 TB SSD and either 580X or Vega 48), the Vega's 540€ would be 12% of the total price, so while the absolute value seems outrageous, the relative value doesn't look too bad. Of course, the gains by getting the Vega (in my case not used for gaming at all) would only be palpable in certain situations, like the ones mentioned above (exporting photos).
Bottom line: I'm still (or again, after @Rockadile pointed this out
) unsure whether the Vega upgrade is worth it for me. If it accelerates photo export by 20%, ok, then I wait 5 instead of 6 minutes for photo export. But if it also keeps the overall machine cooler, and if software companies start to exploit GPU processing more in the future... many "if"s.What do you guys think?
I don't know anything about how Capture One exploits a gpu. The conventional wisdom was that, with the exception of exporting files, the Adobe programs generally didn't do a great job exploiting many cores/threads and that a high end gpu added very little performance once you went past a mid-level gpu with 4gb vram. Adobe just added an AI feature to LR which apparently makes much more use of the gpu. I know On1 Raw runs better with a gpu, but I'm not sure how much benefit one would get from having a higher end gpu? My GUESS is that we'll see photo editing software increasingly use gpus. The person writing this blog is a photographer and there are a lot of informative articles on it: https://diglloyd.com/
He basically says that if you're choosing between an i9 and Vega, buy the i9. I haven't figured out what I'm going to opt for either. I think that right now, any performance difference between the 580x and Vega would be completely unnoticeable for my current needs. But I do wonder if I'd say the same thing in 4-5 years. OTOH, I do think there's something to be said for buying lower spec machines and upgrading more frequently. No matter what we buy today it won't be state of the art in 2 years. It might do everything we need it to do, but it won't be state of the art. The price difference for the Vega is a pretty big deterrent to me, but I've not ruled it out.
I'm in pretty much the same boat here. The i9 is set for me, as other software will definitely benefit from the faster CPU. Now I have to decide for the GPU. The Vega combined with the other stuff pushes the total price well over my comfort zone, but I intend to use this machine for at least 8 years (currently typing this on a 2011 MBP with i7@2.2GHz, which is still fine for most of the stuff I'm doing with it). Never change a running system (if not absolutely necessary)...
I'm in pretty much the same boat here. The i9 is set for me, as other software will definitely benefit from the faster CPU. Now I have to decide for the GPU. The Vega combined with the other stuff pushes the total price well over my comfort zone, but I intend to use this machine for at least 8 years (currently typing this on a 2011 MBP with i7@2.2GHz, which is still fine for most of the stuff I'm doing with it). Never change a running system (if not absolutely necessary)...
Yep, I have a 2012 Mini. Never intended to keep it this long. I actually bought it with the intention of upgrading it in 2-3 years. Of course they didn't really offer a meaningfully upgraded Mini till last fall. My mini is starting to struggle with editing software and I don't think my Fusion drive has much life left in it. I generally keep stuff like this a long time. But sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't be better off buying less computer up front and simply allowing myself to upgrade sooner? And i5 w 580x is $850 less than the the i9 w Vega version. With 512k SSD the base version is $2,399. So the upgrade adds over 1/3 to the cost. So in the long run you can go through 4 lower spec machines for about the price of 3 higher spec machines. And in 3-4 years the new lower spec machine will likely outperform the current i9 w Vega. I also think we're going to see some radical changes to the iMac line in the not too distant future. Assuming they actually move to an ARM based platform. Though that could come with some interesting growing pains too. I think this largely incoherent ramble also proves that I'm way overthinking this.
I don't think you're overthinking it. The possible radical changes to the system are exactly what make me think getting the highest spec'd one now and be "safe" to use my current software for a couple more years might be the right thing to do.
For example, I have hundreds of documents I need for work written in Office 2008, which was the last version to feature the "Formula Editor" app. Currently I'm running OS X 11 because that version of Office still works with it. I don't need all the shiny features of the current Office (except maybe the Retina Display support), which IMHO don't give much benefit even over what I could do with Office 2004... I don't need even more funky transitions in Power Point, I just need the software to work for writing documents (heck, even the features available back in the nineties would suffice for that), and still let me edit my files I've created 15 years ago. So the choice is: use my old Office in a VM that hopefully will still be supported by Apple for a while, or edit all the formulas in all my documents to the new format (which has disadvantages to the formula editor), or pay a $40/yr subscription for the successor to the formula editor (just to retain functionality I had for free since 2008). Or Logic 9-still have it, runs fine and has everything I need. When upgrading to the new iMac with Mojave, I'll have to shed out 230€ for the new version, just to be able to do what I've done for over a decade.
So, new software is not always what I need, at least if it just adds functions I don't need anyway, while cutting off functions I rely on. Therefore, I'd want my new Mac to last me as long as possible. It's not like in the nineties where the new PPC-powered machine suddenly could do stuff I couldn't do with the previous gen, or in 2006 when the change to Intel brought the ability to run Windows at "full" speed in a VM. A "simple" bump of processing speed is not as attractive a reason to upgrade my system anymore, even the lowest spec iMac available today would offer everything I need from my desktop computer. I could even continue working on my 2011 MBP, it's just that I've been jealously looking at these beautiful 27" retina screens for quite a while now...
You see, everybody has their own rambles, no worries there...
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Yep, everything i read basically states to do the upgrades in this order
- Upgrade to SSD from Fusion
- Upgrade to i9 from i5
- Upgrade to Vega 48 from 580x
What makes the Vega a hard decision is that it runs a little bit cooler from what I read(i haven't researched this too much). I would say it's probably worth getting the Vega just for mental reasons lol as you won't be second guessing this down the road BUT if you can score a really good sale on a i9 with a 580X from a place with no tax it's probably worth just grabbing that instead. Saving $450 plus the tax is a lot of money and will help you recoup this cost in the event Apple releases something very ground breaking with a new display next year. If Apple does that these older gen iMacs are going to take a hit in resale.
*Edit*
I think this video sums up the Vega 48. "Vega 48 is a polarizing upgrade. While the i9 decently priced the Vega 48 is way too expensive.It does not provide $450 worth of performance improvements. Even its newer cooler architecture can't make up for the fact that its not as powerful as it should be over the Radeon 580X "
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The Radeon 580X/Vega 48 will likely be replaced by RX590/Vega 56 down the road for iMacs, while retaining the i9-9900K when Apple does incremental refresh 6-12 months from now.
I'd be surprised if the RX590 ever sees the inside of an iMac. It seems to be very power hungry and heat producing for the performance. I just don't see much of any comment or use of that gpu. But I do suspect Apple will move completely to some variant of Vega.
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The other thing I'm thinking here is, and a reason why I might go for the i9 and vega 48 even if not fully needed is that, IF apple comes up with the ARM chips fully for the iMacs, will we be able to run bootcamp with windows on those or will we be stuck without it. For me is kinda useful for certain things to be honest.
Hmm, I’m not seeing quite the same Geekbench 4 Compute results. Simply taking the average of the lowest and highest scores (throwing away some extreme outliers), we have:…Capture One indeed benefits greatly from GPU acceleration when performing certain tasks like exporting images. Reading more into it, I found that also other image editing programs, namely On1 Photo Raw and Luminar, but also Affinity Photo, use Open CL on the GPU to perform certain tasks. The article linked before shows that on the 2017 i7 iMac with Radeon 580, photo export in Capture One is 4 times faster when you activate GPU acceleration.
Now I wonder: how big of a benefit would the Vega 48 be vs. the 580X in that context?
The numbers I've found so far (e.g. here, pardon its French but there's always Google Translate
(1) 580X: 5.5TFLOPS, 2304 streams, Geekbench Compute mean (Open CL): 119240, Unigine Heaven approx. 1300
(2) Vega 48: 7.8 TFLOPS, 3072 streams, Geekbench Compute mean: 141077, Unigine Heaven approx. 1700
…
This suggests the Vega would be somewhere between 18% (Geekbench) and roughly 30% (no. of streams, Heaven) faster than the 580X.
iMac19,1 580X: 116,325
iMac19,1 Vega 48: 142,632
Roughly a 23% difference.
Everything I’ve read suggests that the number of cores (aka “streams”) and compute units (there are 64 cores per compute unit) is the biggest factor in a GPU’s compute power. The Vega 48 has 3072 cores and 48 compute units, or 33% more than the 580X’s 2304 cores and 36 compute units.
The difference in 32-bit floating point performance is even greater (~44%), and the Vega can perform 16-bit floating point operations at twice the speed of 32-bit operations, an ability that it seems Polaris GPUs (like the 580X) do not possess.
So you’re likely to get somewhere between 23% and 33% or even more GPU compute power (possibly much more if half-precision floating point operations are used) for the extra $450 (which in the configuration I ordered came to 14% of the total price). It might be worth it for what you want to do.
See this page at Bare Feats, under “Pro 580X versus Pro Vega 48.” See also AMD Radeon Pro 580X and AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48.
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No, not the RX590/Vega 56...more likely 7nm Navi (RX 3060, RX 3070, RX 3080) and possibly a Vega 48/56/64 successor once it is released.
The RX 590 runs too hot and uses to much electricity for what you get in terms of performance increase.
If this is the last iteration before Apple moves to ARM, then we will probably be seeing this iMac around for the next 2 years essentially unchanged.
Instead of me making a block of text, here are some other blocks of text but with chartsAs @Rockadile pointed out here, aside from gaming, getting the Vega might have an impact when using photo editors like Capture One Pro. This picked my interest, as I'm using that program among others, so I looked into it and found this article that shows that Capture One indeed benefits greatly from GPU acceleration when performing certain tasks like exporting images. Reading more into it, I found that also other image editing programs, namely On1 Photo Raw and Luminar, but also Affinity Photo, use Open CL on the GPU to perform certain tasks. The article linked before shows that on the 2017 i7 iMac with Radeon 580, photo export in Capture One is 4 times faster when you activate GPU acceleration.
Now I wonder: how big of a benefit would the Vega 48 be vs. the 580X in that context?
The numbers I've found so far (e.g. here, pardon its French but there's always Google Translate
(1) 580X: 5.5TFLOPS, 2304 streams, Geekbench Compute mean (Open CL): 119240, Unigine Heaven approx. 1300
(2) Vega 48: 7.8 TFLOPS, 3072 streams, Geekbench Compute mean: 141077, Unigine Heaven approx. 1700
The Heaven benchmarks were taken e.g. from this thread.
This suggests the Vega would be somewhere between 18% (Geekbench) and roughly 30% (no. of streams, Heaven) faster than the 580X.
When I look at my intended configuration (i9, 1 TB SSD and either 580X or Vega 48), the Vega's 540€ would be 12% of the total price, so while the absolute value seems outrageous, the relative value doesn't look too bad. Of course, the gains by getting the Vega (in my case not used for gaming at all) would only be palpable in certain situations, like the ones mentioned above (exporting photos).
Bottom line: I'm still (or again, after @Rockadile pointed this out
What do you guys think?
https://techgage.com/article/a-look-at-phase-one-capture-one-performance/
https://www.peterguyton.com/c1p-hardware-acceleration
However, neither took into account the RAW's preview rendering speed when you do adjustment changes. This is more important to me than exporting since I can just go make tea after starting the export. So this was the main reason why I thought Vega was more useful to get than the i9 if I had to pick one.
I took my scores from the OpenCL Benchmarks page, I'd suppose the numbers on that page should be the average over all benchmarks they got sent by users?
The thing I don't know is if the GPU-accelerated tasks performed by software such as Capture One run on the GPU only or if the GPU is simply used for an additional "thread" (I hope this makes sense). In the former case, having a 30% faster GPU would certainly have a significant impact, in the latter, not so much.
And then, if the real benefit will be that high, is questionable. In the French review, in some tests they are comparing a 2019 i9/Vega with a 2017 i7/580 iMac (among others). Leaving the gaming benchmarks aside, e.g. in the Cinebench R15 Open GL test the Vega scores 152 vs. 129 for the 580, 18% better, in the LuxMark Open CL benchmark, the Vega reaches 3280 vs. 2908 for the 580, 13% better. This does not sound like an improvement worth the asking price, IMHO... Unfortunately, they haven't used the i7/580 in all the tests they did with the i9/Vega.
However, there are many factors to consider if shelling out the additional 540€ (over here, including sales tax...
) is worth it. The uncertainty of what will happen with the OS when they switch to ARM CPUs is one of them, the "real-world" (besides gaming) benefit of having 30% more GPU power another, and the often mentioned (but so far not underlined by any figures) cooler operation of the Vega the third.I'd love to see some figures illustrating that last point-the Vega running cooler than the 580X. Does anyone have a link? Or maybe someone who already has his/her machine could measure the GPU temperature during e.g. Heaven? And-how would that impact the iMac's overall performance (apparently there was some measurable difference in the 15" MBPs last year?-I hadn't followed that discussion)?
Thanks all for your contributions to this topic, it's really interesting and helpful for me! Though I still sway between getting the 580X or the Vega at least 5 times per day...
Yes, you have to wonder how close they are to releasing ARM based iMacs. At this point I'm sort of starting to think there will not be any major redesign of the iMac till we have a radically redesigned iMac with ARM processors. Would make little sense to release a redesigned iMac next year if ARM based iMacs are coming in a couple of years. Interesting times. I'm at the point of needing a new computer so waiting 2-3 years to see what's coming down the road is not really an option.
All excellent questions!…However, there are many factors to consider if shelling out the additional 540€ (over here, including sales tax...
I’m a bit sceptical about the prediction that Apple will ditch Intel for their own ARM-based CPUs within the next couple of years, but in case they will, let me share my upgrade rationale in a similar situation.
For us Mac gamers, the 32-bit Apocalypse is coming this September. This isn’t mere rumor or speculation; Apple have announced that macOS 10.15 will not run 32-bit software. Any new Macs released after September won’t run any macOS older than 10.15.
For creative professionals, that’s not such a big deal. Most of the tools you use will be updated to 64 bits by their developers if they haven’t been already. Not so with games. The vast majority of 32-bit Mac games will never be updated to 64 bits.
A current Mac model, however, will always be able to boot into macOS 10.14 Mojave (from an external volume, allowing newer releases of macOS to be installed on the internal drive) to play 32-bit games.
Given that I don’t really want to have to keep two 27-inch iMacs on my desk (my current 2015 model just to play 32-bit games, and whatever iMac I might buy after the 32-bit Apocalypse to play 64-bit games and to do actual work), I decided to get the most powerful 2019 iMac that my budget could reasonably justify.
(An iMac Pro with sufficient internal storage for both the macOS boot volume and a Boot Camp partition for Windows, since neither do I want to have to buy or keep a second computer on or near my desk just for Windows gaming, was just two expensive. The 2019 iMac with a 3TB Fusion Drive is half the price.)
With the 2019 iMac with the core i9 and the Vega 48, I’ll have one machine that can run older 32-bit games and software and also have the power for new, graphically demanding games, and when a few years from now the newest games become too taxing, I can upgrade via a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU.
If Apple do ditch Intel for their own custom ARM in a year or two, then you may find yourself in a similar situation, since converting Intel-based macOS apps to ARM is likely to be a lot more work than converting 32-bit Intel-based macOS apps to 64-bit Intel-based apps. With such a big leap, even the developers of expensive professional software may lag behind.
Will the Vega 48 help with rendering in Final Cut Pro? Basically when I export my video project in FCP to 1080p, a 2 hour video can take 3 hours to render to a new file. Is this largely reliant on the CPU or does the Graphics card play a big part in FCP rendering?
Not a gamer at all, just video editing so trying to decide if I would get a substantial benefit from the Vega 48 in FCP.
Not a gamer at all, just video editing so trying to decide if I would get a substantial benefit from the Vega 48 in FCP.
Yes, the Vega 48 will definitely help.
Edit: The first result in a DuckDuckGo search for "Final Cut" "Vega 48" 580X is this article.
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Yeah and you probably don’t want the first generation headaches that may come with that. I upgraded and am happy now and hopefully macOS on Intel keeps getting updates for at least 6 years from now but I think last time PPC was only like 4 years? But ARM probably won’t be until 2020 at the earliest but at the same time why wait this long to upgrade the Mac Pro? If it’s Intel then I expect to get macOS updates for some time.
In the article by Peter Guyton, he refers to a document by PhaseOne, explaining which processes are GPU-accelerated at all. RAW preview generation (on import) benefits mostly from more RAM, according to this document. It says nothing about GPU acceleration of adjustment changes, so I guess these will be CPU-based?
I keep my fingers crossed for this...
There are similarities but also differences to the PPC/Intel switch. The similarity being that in 2003-05 IBM/Motorola had problems getting more performance into the PPC line, they had massive problems with power consumption, which affected especially mobile CPUs. The Core Duo processors seemed like a "godsend" back then: higher performance per Watt and the first dual core processors in notebooks. Today, it's a bit different: Although Apple's own processors seem to gain more processing speed from generation to generation, Intel already has the roadmap to faster processors (10nm), they only need more time for development. Which is ok with me-I don't need my Mac's CPU to be surpassed by the next model every two years, and I'd like Hardware and Software quality over newer-faster-shinier every year. I don't think the switch to ARM processors will gain performance as drastically as the Core Duo CPUs back in '06. Of course, I'm no expert on this.
The other difference is: back then, Mac users gained a big thing with the Intel switch (besides dual core CPUs)-running Windows in virtual machines, which still today is a big plus for professionals who work with Mac software mostly but need to run some Windows-only apps from time to time, and especially gamers who want to play under Bootcamp. With the move to ARM, I think it's reasonable to suspect we will lose this option. This could bite deeply into Apple's Mac sales... I guess we'll see in the next months, maybe the next 1-2 years, if and how Apple will address this issue.
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The previews you looked through since you had CO open would be held in RAM.
Doing an adjustment change would be “Process time” (CPU/GPU/RAM) and than “Fit Image to Screen” (GPU) to display the newly rendered preview on screen.
IIRC, if you’re not on Fit but instead on 50% or 100% zoom when doing an adjustment change, it will pull up the RAW file as the source instead of the preview made during import which would be a more demanding load.