“We have been following closely the published reports on the AMD Vega GPU along with the early testing on Windows PCs,” Rob Art Morgan reports for Bare Feats. “When an eGPU mad scientist reported getting the RX Vega 64 to work with a MacBook Pro under macOS, we decided to give it a go.”
“What did we learn?” Morgan reports. “The RX Vega 64 is not ready for prime time under macOS. Though OpenCL apps and Metal benchmarks ran okay, there were serious issues with OpenGL apps. We did get TW: Warhammer (Metal) to run but it had shader issues. Average frame rate fell between the two NVIDIA GPUs. Hopefully the AMD driver will ‘magically mature’ when the official release of High Sierra occurs.”
“The RX Vega 64 is the fastest AMD GPU under macOS. The Radeon RX Vega 64 is clearly the fastest AMD GPU we have ever tested,” Morgan reports. “Though it beat the NVIDIA GPUs in the Resolve OpenCL Noise Reduction test, when we selected CUDA, the 1080 Ti attained 54 FPS and the 1080 attained 36 FPS.”
Read more, and see all of the benchmarks, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s clearly a (power hogging (see full article)) beast.
Give me Nvidia please in the 2018 Mac Pro. Or at least the “pro” option to pick my own damn video card. Tired of Apple making the choice for us.
True that
True that. Intellectually, I understand that Apple had economic reasons for anointing certain manufacturers of their components, and those reasons were usually contract-related, getting better deals on advance bulk purchases, buying guarantees of just-in-time delivery, tying up scarce resources, insuring volume availability, etc.
Those reasons contributed to a fat bottom line by inflating shipments and margins — but at the cost of trailing behind the slicing edge of technology. And so I could never agree with the Tim Cook philosophy of amplifying production to please the stock market and enrich the company.
To me, and I think to a majority of professional computer users, Apple’s focus should have remained on quality, innovation and timeliness, and less on volume — the way it was when Steve Jobs was at the helm. That was what made Apple great — making the best, not the most.
The majority of pro users don’t seem to own lots of AAPL shares. If we did, we might be schizoid in our enthusiasm: pumping a fist when Apple exceeds quarterly expectations, because Apple made money for us by selling a lot of machines to other people, but then plunged into a black mood over their awful lackadaisicalness about the machines we wanted to buy from them, but that they didn’t bother to design. — To a working pro who is also a significant Apple shareholder, it must be an ugly love/hate relationship.
I look forward to a one more thing kick ass pro machine that shuts everyone up for at least a day
I would like to see what an AMD CPU could do in a Mac, but after the bounds that Ryzen leaped, the new AMD GPUs are still lackluster. Herself makes some good points on how we got here, and why it is no longer acceptable. Time to step it up, Apple.
There’s competition in the market. That’s one good point.
Being able to take advantage of it? We wish.
Get Mac busy again, Apple.