MP 7,1 Adobe CC / Mac Pro 7,1 / W7500X

[choreo]

they did a background update on the 10.09 which installed 2 versions of XProtextPlistConfigData...

Not sure what you are describing?

Mine is still crashing - three times tonight - once in Illustrator, once in Quicktime and once in Quickbooks. After I turned off computer sleep I made it about a week without a single crash, but the past couple days it is all coming back - usually I get the login screen when I wake the displays about 30% of the time.

 

[bsbeamer]

Wonder how you guys are getting on... I had mine booked in with a service provider. Which is on hold due to live client projects. however in anticipation I put the W5700X back in the system. Interestingly there have been no Apple updates software in a while, but when checking, they did a background update on the 10.09 which installed 2 versions of XProtextPlistConfigData and since this, I've not had any panics after the system has been sleeping. Wonder if anyone else has seen these changes?

Did you use a new/different GPU with the machine before using the W5700X again? If so, which GPU?
Is there a possible firmware update that was applied without your knowledge?
Is it possible this firmware was not applied with the W5700X installed?

Asking because weird GPU firmware update issues have plagued Mac Pro's for years. Seemed MP6,1 was the "best" to deal with it over MP5,1 and prior.

 

[daveedjackson]

Did you use a new/different GPU with the machine before using the W5700X again? If so, which GPU?
Is there a possible firmware update that was applied without your knowledge?
Is it possible this firmware was not applied with the W5700X installed?

Asking because weird GPU firmware update issues have plagued Mac Pro's for years. Seemed MP6,1 was the "best" to deal with it over MP5,1 and prior.

as stated above, I put my 580 back in, as the panics were frankly annoying me. Alas as it was due to go to a service provider I had to put the w5700x back in before it could go.

There won't have been any firmware updates when the card was in it's box, so no. The only update I had on the system was the one I outlined above. That was an update done without me knowing, in the background.

I had massive problems with my 6,1 - to the point apple refunded me for the Mac. As they couldn't fix it.

 

[eflx]

Just got finished escalating and dealing with a business machine (Mac Pro) I purchased myself, with the W5700X.

It is my opinion that the 580X or Vega II at this point are the only viable options for solid performance. I would have to think that the 580X is probably more than enough for a user running a single display (up to and including the XDR) for graphic, design, audio and programming etc. type duties. If you have more demanding usage such as dual XDR displays, do video editing or have any compute usages then you'll do well with the Vega II.

If Apple fixes the issues somehow with the W5700X through some combination of firmware and driver updates, then I would say go for it as the W5700X is definitely from experience a bit snappier card for general usage and has hardware video encode/decode features the Vega cards do not. Waking from sleep is quite literally 2x faster with the W5700X in my experience vs. the Vega II. My Vega II does a couple extra screen flashes and takes a good 5-10 seconds longer to wake from a deep sleep. In my case, I was not experiencing sleep crash issues with two of my machines. 1 of the machines (an 8 core Mac Pro) did crash a couple of times with the W5700X sleeping, but seemed to be fixed with a completely fresh install of Catalina and a couple firmware updates that were installed for I believe the XDR as well as the thunderbolt bus on the video card.

**I would caution for users with graphics/design critical usage cases where per-pixel rendering and/or color accuracy is paramount, to steer clear of the 5x00 line especially if you're using the XDR display as from the DSC there are visually noticeable losses in visual fidelity. You would probably only notice as I have, after using the W5700X for a while like I did, then using a Vega II card side by side and comparing to see what I mean.

 

[Hotshoe]

steer clear of the 5x00 line especially if you're using the XDR display as from the DSC there are visually noticeable losses in visual fidelity

I had been wondering about this at the time I was considering dumping my W5700X for a Pro Vega II (due to the reliability issues). Nothing in life comes for free so I checked the VESA site, which states:

"The VESA Display Compression Codecs are designed to work with a wide variety of displays in a wide variety of use cases. They provide efficient compression and visually lossless quality for consumer and professional products."

The important words here are "visually lossless", which, of course, translates to "DSC is lossy". VESA Display Compression Codecs being DSC. The VESA site goes on to say:

"To assure visually lossless performance, VESA’s display interface compression standards are rigorously tested for subjective image quality using a diverse group of test subjects."

So, according to VESA, whether a person can tell a difference or not is subjective.

When one considers the cost a 7,1 Mac Pro paired to an XDR display -- and common use cases for such systems -- adding DSC into the pipeline is dubious, IMHO. Of course, W5700X is a consumer graphics card, not a professional workstation card like the Vega II, so this is not a bad choice for the W5700X itself given its target market, but it was one more (small) reason for me to throw in the towel on W5700X.

 

[choreo]

I have not noticed ANY "display" issues with my (3) NEC 27" Monitors (and the w5700x), but they are all QHD resolution (so 2560x1440). With the NEC Spectarview II Calibration software, they are all calibrating really tight and they look great. Since I do mostly commercial "print" work and photo retouching for print - color accuracy is more important than 4K+ resolution. I have been using NEC & Spectraview for years and have always had extremely accurate results and a bit cheaper than EIZO's.

Now, if I could just keep the machine from restarting!

 

[daveedjackson]

Just got finished escalating and dealing with a business machine (Mac Pro) I purchased myself, with the W5700X.

It is my opinion that the 580X or Vega II at this point are the only viable options for solid performance. I would have to think that the 580X is probably more than enough for a user running a single display (up to and including the XDR) for graphic, design, audio and programming etc. type duties. If you have more demanding usage such as dual XDR displays, do video editing or have any compute usages then you'll do well with the Vega II.

If Apple fixes the issues somehow with the W5700X through some combination of firmware and driver updates, then I would say go for it as the W5700X is definitely from experience a bit snappier card for general usage and has hardware video encode/decode features the Vega cards do not. Waking from sleep is quite literally 2x faster with the W5700X in my experience vs. the Vega II. My Vega II does a couple extra screen flashes and takes a good 5-10 seconds longer to wake from a deep sleep. In my case, I was not experiencing sleep crash issues with two of my machines. 1 of the machines (an 8 core Mac Pro) did crash a couple of times with the W5700X sleeping, but seemed to be fixed with a completely fresh install of Catalina and a couple firmware updates that were installed for I believe the XDR as well as the thunderbolt bus on the video card.

**I would caution for users with graphics/design critical usage cases where per-pixel rendering and/or color accuracy is paramount, to steer clear of the 5x00 line especially if you're using the XDR display as from the DSC there are visually noticeable losses in visual fidelity. You would probably only notice as I have, after using the W5700X for a while like I did, then using a Vega II card side by side and comparing to see what I mean.

I can tell you that as a graphics person, the 580 Is absolutely rubbish. It's slow and I often run into performance issues. for example working on an 8gb artwork in photoshop - performance is appalling.

 

[yurc]

Just want to chime in, the Navi GPUs in general are absolutely unstable until now, even from the early days from Catalina introduction, many machines were affected from 16" MBP to any discrete GPU on 2019 Mac Pro (even hackintosh lol)

Navi just fine on Windows, so clearly this is must be MacOS related bug.

For any production machine relying GPU for stable operation, look no further than Polaris (RX580/WX 7100) or Vega based (Vega II, WX9100, Radeon VII or older Vega 56/64). Those GPU support in MacOS are more matured.

Personally I don't want put any Navi card in my production Mac Pro, and I for Adobe I prefer to hold off updates, current newer CC updates sometimes tend to break stability.

 

[ondioline]

The important words here are "visually lossless", which, of course, translates to "DSC is lossy".

Great info thanks. This is quite shocking to me, considering every Navi card in MBP/iMac/MP is apparently using DSC.

 

[bsbeamer]

NEC Spectarview II Calibration software

Assume this is installed on MacPro itself?
Did the kext issues you were running into have anything to do with this?

 

[Hotshoe]

Great info thanks. This is quite shocking to me, considering every Navi card in MBP/iMac/MP is apparently using DSC.

@ondioline, using DSC may very well be something most users cannot notice -- although, @eflx claims to be able to see a difference, which is the reason I opted to chime in. It may very well depend on the person and how critical his or her eyes. I surmise there is some loss of quality given VESA needed to do subjective image testing with groups of people, and that they probably optimized balancing how much compression with what most people can start to detect.

I don't want to be the source of much to do about nothing (I was simply quoting VESA standards body site), but, for me, the possibility that I could be giving up display quality wasn't worth the potential tradeoff (to be able to use my XDR as a hub to connect high-speed devices). I have no doubt it's something a person needs to A/B test in order to see a difference, and again, probably depends on several factors such as the person, the display, and what's being displayed.

As mentioned earlier, I also cannot help but wonder if DSC is contributing to some of the problems reported with W5700X and Mac Pro. This is pure speculation in the absence of Apple being forthcoming with information, but it stands to reason as possible -- it's one more thing the developers need to deal with for an area that is relatively new and almost certainly non-trivial.

 

[choreo]

Assume this is installed on MacPro itself?
Did the kext issues you were running into have anything to do with this?

The NEC SpectraView II Software is installed on the Mac Pro as an application (and it only works with NEC monitors). As far as hardware calibrators, they bundle their own version of X-Rite i1 (that also only works with NEC monitors), but you can use several other 3rd party hardware calibrators that are approved (such as the X-Rite i1Display Pro).

There is nothing running in the background. You launch the app whenever you want to recalibrate (usually every 2 weeks to 90-days). The software saves the results to the monitors themselves (in hardware) and loads an ICC profile to the Displays panel through the ColorSync folder in the OS. [You just need to make sure NightShift is turned OFF!]

There is no kext file that NEC creates. As far as removing all the kext files that Apple had me do, that turned out to be a waste of time as the machine still was freezing/restarting, so I reinstalled all the kext files they had me remove.

 

[eflx]

I have not noticed ANY "display" issues with my (3) NEC 27" Monitors (and the w5700x), but they are all QHD resolution (so 2560x1440). With the NEC Spectarview II Calibration software, they are all calibrating really tight and they look great. Since I do mostly commercial "print" work and photo retouching for print - color accuracy is more important than 4K+ resolution. I have been using NEC & Spectraview for years and have always had extremely accurate results and a bit cheaper than EIZO's.

Now, if I could just keep the machine from restarting!

Color accuracy in the center of a solid color won't be any different between DSC on and off. It's the sub pixel rendering, and complex photos etc. that of course compression affects. In your case, your monitor might not support DSC so there may not be any compression happening at all which would be good.

@Hotshoe - you nailed it there. Exactly as you've said. It's intended to be "subjectively lossless" but if you have good eyes (I guess?) and a very high resolution display like the XDR you're more likely to spot compression artifacts due to the amount of compression used to support the higher displays. Stands to reason, the higher the color bit depth, display resolution and refresh rate the more DSC compresses the signal.

The signal sent via DSC is also a constant bit rate; meaning if by chance the image displayed on the screen dynamically increases the base data-rate needed before DSC, I could see the compression artifacts increase as the DSC remains at the same bitrate but would have to drop or further estimate the adjacent pixels etc.

In either rate, compressing a display output signal is just plain boneheaded in the computer monitor world where accuracy is usually needed. The only time I could see getting away with this is for TV screens, or setups like simple web browsing and document editing and games etc. where the average user wouldn't care at all nor probably notice.

DSC has absolutely no place in a pro workstation. Boneheaded move on Apple's part

 

[flowrider]

Just want to chime in, the Navi GPUs in general are absolutely unstable until now, even from the early days from Catalina introduction, many machines were affected from 16" MBP to any discrete GPU on 2019 Mac Pro (even hackintosh lol)

Navi just fine on Windows, so clearly this is must be MacOS related bug.

For any production machine relying GPU for stable operation, look no further than Polaris (RX580/WX 7100) or Vega based (Vega II, WX9100, Radeon VII or older Vega 56/64). Those GPU support in MacOS are more matured.

Personally I don't want put any Navi card in my production Mac Pro, and I for Adobe I prefer to hold off updates, current newer CC updates sometimes tend to break stability.

I've posted before, but I'll post again. I'm not running the W5700X, though I'm in the market for one. I am running an Aorus RX5700XT however. I am also running Big Sur. When I was running Catalina I did have a few forced shutdowns, mostly activity associated with the net. Since I have been running Big Sur, Beta 6 I have had no shutdowns. I use Adobe PS and Acrobat. PS has shown no issues for me. Acrobat is not running properly in Big Sur, was fine in Catalina. In Big Sur, it quits unexpectedly. That problem has been confirmed by another forum member. I also own PDF Expert which works in Big Sur. The Biggest issue I have with OS11 is that it will not read optical media, however, for me, it has been much more trouble free than Catalina.

Lou

 

[bsbeamer]

There is no kext file that NEC creates.

There may not be a true kext, but there still is a display profile or pref that is created by all of this. Does switching to a "default" for hours/days help to resolve anything? Would not be the first time I've seen something act up like your reports from something as "simple" as this. Has happened with Win/Mac/Linux, even corrupted an old Octane2 on Unix.

 

[choreo]

DSC has absolutely no place in a pro workstation. Boneheaded move on Apple's part

Agreed.

 

[choreo]

There may not be a true kext, but there still is a display profile or pref that is created by all of this. Does switching to a "default" for hours/days help to resolve anything? Would not be the first time I've seen something act up like your reports from something as "simple" as this. Has happened with Win/Mac/Linux, even corrupted an old Octane2 on Unix.

As far as the System is concerned, all the NEC app does is install a standard ColorSync Profile following calibration into the ColorSync folder. That profile shows up in the System Preferences>Displays>Color list of profiles along with all the other Apple installed ColorSync profiles. The app does not run in the background or alert me when it is time to recalibrate - only when I manually launch the app does it tell me when the last calibration was performed. NEC Monitors have onboard hardware that maintains the calibration until recalibrated.

 

[daveedjackson]

I've posted before, but I'll post again. I'm not running the W5700X, though I'm in the market for one. I am running an Aorus RX5700XT however. I am also running Big Sur. When I was running Catalina I did have a few forced shutdowns, mostly activity associated with the net. Since I have been running Big Sur, Beta 6 I have had no shutdowns. I use Adobe PS and Acrobat. PS has shown no issues for me. Acrobat is not running properly in Big Sur, was fine in Catalina. In Big Sur, it quits unexpectedly. That problem has been confirmed by another forum member. I also own PDF Expert which works in Big Sur. The Biggest issue I have with OS11 is that it will not read optical media, however, for me, it has been much more trouble free than Catalina.

Lou

The big issue with this is in pro setup we seldom jump ship to the latest and greatest, because so many plugins don’t work. Have issues. Jumping at release can really decrease productivity and impact on workflows. So not always doable.

I have the same acrobat issue on bigsur, it’s a known bug from adobe.

the 5700 currently has stopped crashing my system, so notsure if this was due to the sneaky update my system did in the background.

 

[choreo]

The 5700 currently has stopped crashing my system, so notsure if this was due to the sneaky update my system did in the background.

Wait for it!

 

[choreo]

I use Adobe PS and Acrobat. PS has shown no issues for me. Acrobat is not running properly in Big Sur, was fine in Catalina. In Big Sur, it quits unexpectedly. That problem has been confirmed by another forum member. I also own PDF Expert which works in Big Sur. The Biggest issue I have with OS11 is that it will not read optical media, however, for me, it has been much more trouble free than Catalina.

Lou

I have on had one crash in Photoshop, but the "font-intensive" apps like AI, Acrobat, InDesign - I have seen repeated crashes. I have also seen problems lately in Photoshop with older layered files with fonts not being able to auto-activate fonts. I also have seen older PSD files with font layers not being able to save or "save as" but with no "!" layer warnings? If I delete the text layers and recreate them, I can then save the files? I see several indicators that point to font problems with Adobe apps on Mac Pro I have - no problems with the same version of Catalina on my MacBook Pro with same apps.

Also, most of my Adobe crashes usually occur soon after launch if they occur.

 

[flowrider]

The big issue with this is in pro setup we seldom jump ship to the latest and greatest, because so many plugins don’t work. Have issues. Jumping at release can really decrease productivity and impact on workflows. So not always doable.

Agree wholeheartedly, which is why the MP series (except for the 6,1👎) is such a GREAT platform for the MacOS. I have ten SSDs inside my NcMP. Five of them are reserved as start-up devices for the Mac OS. Currently one is the untouched OEM SSD. Two have the latest Catalina OS, one is running Big Sur and one is MT because, as of now, there is no way to clone a drive in Big Sur. My point is, if I run into a roadblock in a new or beta OS, I can easily restart in the prior OS and complete my task.

Lou

 

[eflx]

I have on had one crash in Photoshop, but the "font-intensive" apps like AI, Acrobat, InDesign - I have seen repeated crashes. I have also seen problems lately in Photoshop with older layered files with fonts not being able to auto-activate fonts. I also have seen older PSD files with font layers not being able to save or "save as" but with no "!" layer warnings? If I delete the text layers and recreate them, I can then save the files? I see several indicators that point to font problems with Adobe apps on Mac Pro I have - no problems with the same version of Catalina on my MacBook Pro with same apps.

Also, most of my Adobe crashes usually occur soon after launch if they occur.

This honestly sounds much more to do with Adobe's lackluster development as of late, than anything to do with a video card. Font-intensive Adobe apps crashing sounds like Adobe to me. My brother who's a full-time graphics & print designer spends all day every day with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign open on his 2019 iMac - he experiences sporadic crashes as well, and crashes resuming from sleep at times when he leaves Adobe open.

Display and graphics corruption, and compression artifacts ... I had those with the W5700X but what I didn't have were sleep related or in-app crashes; and I don't have a lick of Adobe anywhere installed on my systems. Perfectly stable.

Are you able to select between hardware acceleration modes in Adobe, like Metal / OpenGL or even software acceleration? I've not used Adobe in a long time now as I dropped them after CS6 with all of their subscription nonsense. Switched full-time over to Affinity myself though I'm a developer; I don't spend much time in Affinity.

 

[choreo]

This honestly sounds much more to do with Adobe's lackluster development as of late, than anything to do with a video card. Font-intensive Adobe apps crashing sounds like Adobe to me. My brother who's a full-time graphics & print designer spends all day every day with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign open on his 2019 iMac - he experiences sporadic crashes as well, and crashes resuming from sleep at times when he leaves Adobe open.

Display and graphics corruption, and compression artifacts ... I had those with the W5700X but what I didn't have were sleep related or in-app crashes; and I don't have a lick of Adobe anywhere installed on my systems. Perfectly stable.

Are you able to select between hardware acceleration modes in Adobe, like Metal / OpenGL or even software acceleration? I've not used Adobe in a long time now as I dropped them after CS6 with all of their subscription nonsense. Switched full-time over to Affinity myself though I'm a developer; I don't spend much time in Affinity.

Adobe software is no doubt having issues. This is approximately what I have seen the past 2 months after a full clean and reinstall of Creative Cloud files on a new OS:

Illustrator - crashes on launch or soon after (about 15 times)
Photoshop - crashed only once that I recall, but it has issues with Text layers when opening certain layered PSD files at times. Sometimes it shows the warning symbol on the text layer indicating the font is missing but when you double-click the layer to change it - it will not allow a change. Files that behave that way also will not allow me to save any of my work (doubt this is GPU related).
InDesign - crashed twice that I recall, both times soon after launch when it appeared it was having trouble finding the correct fonts to display (indicated by the highlighted paragraphs never resolving)
Acrobat - probably 10 crashes - usually right after launch
After Effects - No problems yet
Dreamweaver - No problems yet
Bridge - No problems yet
Dimension - No problems yet
Lightroom - No problems yet

The only non-Adobe crashes have been with Quicktime and of course the random crashes when waking from sleep.

The same Adobe CC apps on my 2015 MacBook Pro running same version of Catalina - never had a single crash or problem - so this has to be a Mac Pro/GPU/Driver/Catalina mix? I run Suitcase Fusion on all my Macs, but tried turning it off on Mac Pro and still got crashes.

Never had a single "display", "color", "artifact" issue on any of my monitors - in fact, they are performing way better than on my 2012 previous Mac Pro with a 580x Sapphire card.

With AI you can basically just turn GPU Performance off and on. With Photoshop performance has several possible setting combinations.

 

[flowrider]

I guess I should add I also use Bridge. No issues.

Lou

 

[DFP1989]

When one considers the cost a 7,1 Mac Pro paired to an XDR display -- and common use cases for such systems -- adding DSC into the pipeline is dubious, IMHO

I tend to agree. The ports on the XDR are kind of handy, but not if they compromise display quality.