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blazerunner

Suspended
Nov 16, 2020
1,081
3,998
Doesn't look like the new iMacs got any AMD GPUs inside them. That said, I'm having doubts that RX 6000 series drivers will be available anytime soon, if at all. What would be the point if they don't sell any Mac with those GPUs?
 
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bsbeamer

macrumors 601
Sep 19, 2012
4,313
2,713
Doesn't look like the new iMacs got any AMD GPUs inside them. That said, I'm having doubts that RX 6000 series drivers will be available anytime soon, if at all. What would be the point if they don't sell any Mac with those GPUs?

I cannot find any indication there is eGPU support coming to those M1 iMac machines or any reason they will behave differently than the current crop of M1 devices. Would assume they'll ship with Big Sur 11.3 since it's been in beta so long. No drivers available in 11.3 even if code remnants exist in some fashion.

Will be at least a few days before major developers and hardware manufacturers could offer any indication, but assume they'll need to have hands on with M1 iMac hardware to say 100% either way (or have embargo lifted). If they somehow offered eGPU support then 6XXX series drivers would be more likely and would open the door.

At this point, I'd guess an MPX upgrade unit for Mac Pro is more of a pipe dream than reality. Apple is clearly phasing everything towards their own hardware solutions.
 

sirio76

macrumors 6502a
Mar 28, 2013
578
416
You do realize that even this iMac is part of the very bottom line of the Mac hardware? Every M1 machine is equipped with an integrated GPU more powerful than their Intel based predecessor GPU (integrated or not) so why bother to offer something else from AMD since all those machine are not conceived for heavy computing?
This announcement doesn't give any indication about what they will offer on beefier machine.
 

vslab

macrumors newbie
Jul 11, 2014
12
4
Of course it’s just some iMacs in fruity colors which got released today. That’s not the point. This thread is 7 month old today and it started with a simple question. A simple question that apple ignores like they ignored the whole nvidia story. It’s history repeating itself. I have been using macs since the 9600 in the late 90’s and I have been going through many thirsty times with apple, waiting and waiting again. And I never bought a candy colored G3 iMac, although I believe they will sell a lot of them now to some kids with big eyes. Just to let them find out in 20 years from now, that apple has forgotten about them. It’s just a company. A technology company without a soul. It was great at some point but since the last ten years it feels more and more like a waste of time.
 

blazerunner

Suspended
Nov 16, 2020
1,081
3,998
God damn, took them long enough... 5 months.

They don't specify anything about the 6700 XT though... (which I have)....
 

The-Bloke

macrumors newbie
Feb 11, 2018
26
21
Brighton, UK
It's oh so beautiful...

Screenshot_2021-04-21 20.53.52_xJoFtB.png

(That's a Hack of course, my secondary test system, hope that's OK.)

That GB 5 score is three times what my Vega 64 8GB gets!

Time to finally update my main system from 10.15.7 to Big Sur!
 

The-Bloke

macrumors newbie
Feb 11, 2018
26
21
Brighton, UK
@hifimac my reply to you is stuck in moderation because I included a link. You'll see it soon I guess, but the summary is: Octane Bench 2020.2.3 unfortuntately says "No supported GPU found". Octane X does detect the 6900XT as OTOY promised it would.

@DFP1989 I use Resolve for video editing but I do have FCP X. Tell me what to do (and how) and I'd be glad to. I remember reading on this forum a while ago (in the cMP 5.1 H264/HEVC acceleration thread) that there's some benchmark suite or something for FCP X? Should I run that?
 
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vslab

macrumors newbie
Jul 11, 2014
12
4
It's oh so beautiful...

View attachment 1761696
(That's a Hack of course, my secondary test system, hope that's OK.)

That GB 5 score is three times what my Vega 64 8GB gets!

Time to finally update my main system from 10.15.7 to Big Sur!
If that’s correct, then it’s 2.6 times as fast as the VII and almost twice as fast as the Pro VII and 1.8 times faster then the Pro Vega II, which means, if that scales accordingly to octane bench it should have around 556 OB which would make it the fastest card for rendering with octane x to date and it compares to an RTX 3080 (around 549 OB).
 

The-Bloke

macrumors newbie
Feb 11, 2018
26
21
Brighton, UK
Literally playing a 4K 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC file on the timeline without stuttering or rendering is frankly the goal haha.

I can try and upload a sample file shortly that you could pop in a timeline.
OK sure. Currently the 6900XT is still in my old H77 4-core 16GB system, so if that will use any CPU at all the results might be compromised. But I'll try it on both my main system (with Vega 64 8GB, on 10.15.7) and the H77 with 6900XT and see if I can spot a difference.

@blazerunner Yeah there's no framebuffer definitions for Navi22 unfortunately. Early attempts by people to spoof the device ID of a 6800XT (using OpenCore + Lilu + WhateverGreen) apparently result in reboots on boot. Fingers crossed for 6700XT users that Apple plans to support that too (or that the community find a way to make it work.)

In other, somewhat annoying news, the beta appears to have been pulled. Maybe it went out early? I did think it was surprising it came out before 11.3 GM. Unfortunately this means I won't be able to upgrade my main system yet. But tomorrow I will move the 6900XT and Big Sur 11.4 beta 1 SSD into my main system so I can get an idea of performance with real hardware.
 

The-Bloke

macrumors newbie
Feb 11, 2018
26
21
Brighton, UK
If that’s correct, then it’s 2.6 times as fast as the VII and almost twice as fast as the Pro VII and 1.8 times faster then the Pro Vega II, which means, if that scales accordingly to octane bench it should have around 556 OB which would make it the fastest card for rendering with octane x to date and it compares to an RTX 3080 (around 549 OB).
Nice! GeekBench is not the best benchmark tool, at least from my past experience - it doesn't test hard or long enough. But that ~180k result is pretty consistent across multiple tests. But yes I'd love to test it on something more demanding.

One thing I did notice is that while the Metal score is 180+k, the OpenCL score is only 122k. That's the widest gap I've seen in OpenCL vs Metal in GeekBench. OpenCL is deprecated of course so wouldn't be surprising if Apple put little effort into optimising it. But it does mean that scores might not be so impressive with software that doesn't (yet) use Metal - like Blender.
 

vslab

macrumors newbie
Jul 11, 2014
12
4
Nice! GeekBench is not the best benchmark tool, at least from my past experience - it doesn't test hard or long enough. But that ~180k result is pretty consistent across multiple tests. But yes I'd love to test it on something more demanding.

One thing I did notice is that while the Metal score is 180+k, the OpenCL score is only 122k. That's the widest gap I've seen in OpenCL vs Metal in GeekBench. OpenCL is deprecated of course so wouldn't be surprising if Apple put little effort into optimising it. But it does mean that scores might not be so impressive with software that doesn't (yet) use Metal - like Blender.
I did the math based on your benchmark and these numbers from geekbench and octane. The last Octane X benchmarks we’re done in december so these number might even have improved since then. I wouldn’t wonder if we get even a higher OB with the 6900 then. >>>

December 5th 2020: PR7 on macOS 11.1 Big Sur is about 8-10% faster than PR1 on Catalina:

(with more tuning to be done in the months ahead for 2021 version releases)

Radeon Pro Vega II Duo - 446 OB (dual ASIC GPU)

Radeon Pro Vega II - 223 OB

Radeon VII - 214 OB

5700 XT - 184 OB

Vega FE - ~174 OB

Vega 64 -~160 OB

Vega 56 - ~126 OB

Vega 48 - 117 OB

5600M - 117 OB

5500M - 83 OB

Vega 20 - ~55 OB



Apple M1 (MacBook Air) (TBD - still being tuned, but our Transformers scene is 7.4x slower on M1 than on a 600 OB RTX 3080 | OctaneRender 2020.2 w/ RTX on)

Apple A14 (iPhone 12/iPad Air 4) - ~20 OB



Intel iris 640 - ~17 OB

Intel iris 630 - ~15 OB

Apple A13 - ~15 OB



Bildschirmfoto 2021-04-21 um 23.38.47.png
 
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goMac

macrumors 604
Apr 15, 2004
7,663
1,694
One thing I did notice is that while the Metal score is 180+k, the OpenCL score is only 122k. That's the widest gap I've seen in OpenCL vs Metal in GeekBench. OpenCL is deprecated of course so wouldn't be surprising if Apple put little effort into optimising it. But it does mean that scores might not be so impressive with software that doesn't (yet) use Metal - like Blender.

Recently Apple has actually stopped doing OpenCL and OpenGL drivers. Instead they have a new layer that translates OpenCL and OpenGL to Metal, so they only have to ship Metal drivers.

So far the only systems to use the translation layer have been M1 systems. But it's always possible that Apple and AMD have decided it's not worth it to write OpenGL/OpenCL drivers for Big Navi and just use the translator.

The translator really is just there to keep things working. I've seen some reports that in some cases it can be faster than a native OpenGL driver. But generally performance doesn't seem to be it's goal.
 
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s4ru

macrumors newbie
Feb 10, 2020
17
27
FINALLY!

I’m so glad seeing 11.4 supports 6900XT !
Thanks Apple!
And yes, OTOY was right.

I’ve been checking news about it literally everyday since last December.

Can’t wait to try on my MacPro.
 
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carrawayjb

macrumors newbie
Apr 21, 2021
2
0
I'm sure there is probably a response somewhere in this thread but does anyone know which 6900XT is compatible (as in actually fits in the 7,1?)
 

T3hUnkn0wn

macrumors newbie
Nov 29, 2012
9
24
Can I just say.... **** YES! I've been stalking this thread and several others just madly desperate for this to happen. See you all in a few years when these cards start to show their age!
 
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