MP 1,1-5,1 Cheesegrater gaming & VR

[imrazor]

I have a cMP5,1 with a Vega 56 that I mostly use for light video editing, web surfing, email, media consumption, iPhone management, etc. While I do work in IT, the vast majority of my work is in either Windows, UNIX or Linux. I've decided to test its gaming capabilities to see if it might make a good alternative to my more expensive gaming rig. And the results are mixed, probably due to the single X5680 that the cheese grater sports.

The Vega 56 has been flashed with a standard PC Vega 64 BIOS to get a higher power limit (220w) and memory speed (945MHz), and the extra power is provided by two SATA power connectors (sorry, I'm not brave enough for Pixla's mod.) Gaming has been a mixed bag with Horizon Zero Dawn @ Ultimate settings, 1600p netting 50 - 55 fps. That's pretty impressive. But Fallout 4 VR is not nearly as nice with a hardwired Oculus Quest 2 I, getting frame rates ~ 30 fps in most outdoor areas.

On the Mac OS side I've maintained Mojave due a desire to stick with a fully supported OS, and also to preserve backward compatibility with 32-bit Mac games. On the Windows side, I'm running Windows 10 with the latest AMD Vega drivers.

Is anyone else trying to do this, even just as an experiment? What kind of frame rates and/or benchmark scores are you seeing out of your machine? Is this setup likely to incompatible when Apple finally gets around to entering the VR/AR market?

 

[MarkC426]

I havn't played with VR for many years.
Last time was with my Rift DK2 in snow leopard (when drivers still existed for OSX).
It stopped working (non OSX support) at about Yosemite or el cap, so boxed it up.
I was only viewing 360 still renders though so nothing heavy.

In the current mac VR climate I would just go for a PS4/5 with psvr.

From what I have heard, I have a feeling the Apple headset is going to be standalone.

 

[natjonesart]

I have been experimenting with the Quest 2 on my cMP in Adobe Medium, but not for gaming.

 

[eksu]

You will be CPU bound in trying to achieve high refresh rates for a comfortable experience.

And you will have poor async warp / reprojection on AMD vs Nvidia since VCE is so much slower than NVENC (video encoders).

If VR is your interest, it would be good to have two separate computers. Fun to toy with though.

 

[mattspace]

The only HMD that was supported on macOS was the original Vive, however Valve has mothballed SteamVR for macOS, and there were never more than a few mac-compatible apps. IIRC at least one of the launch apps for Mac VR that Apple used to demo the iMac Pro never made release on macOS.

Definitely a better idea to build a dedicated VR station around the biggest Nvidia GPU you can afford. Even if Apple’s VR headset:

1. Exists
2. Isn’t standalone
3. Is actually good (which I wouldn’t credit, since everyone writing about it seems to not know enough about HMDs to know what they’re saying)

It’s almost certain it will only talk to new, probably M1 only, machines, for reasons of driving the sales cycle.

 

[h9826790]

It’s almost certain it will only talk to new, probably M1 only, machines, for reasons of driving the sales cycle.

Hopefully not. My wife has a M1 Macbook Air, I tried it, the GPU is really weak (compare to the dGPU that we can have on the cMP).

If the HMD is M series only, then its function / performance will be very limiting.

And you will have poor async warp / reprojection on AMD vs Nvidia since VCE is so much slower than NVENC (video encoders).

I agree. And I tested the M1, it's even slower than AMD VCE indeed. My Radeon VII can do HEVC to H264 transcoding (full hardware decoding / encoding by FFMpeg) in Big Sur 50% faster than my wife's M1 Macbook Air. Of course, if we consider power consumption as well. Then the M1 is impressive. But in terms of pure performance, it's quite low indeed.

Is anyone else trying to do this, even just as an experiment? What kind of frame rates and/or benchmark scores are you seeing out of your machine? Is this setup likely to incompatible when Apple finally gets around to entering the VR/AR market?

The cMP can do it well

But of course, depends on the game / software. If it's too CPU single thread limiting (e.g. too rely on a single CPU core to perform a series of Physics computation), then the performance will be very limiting.

However, if Apple release VR / AR, then it will be in macOS. And TBH, even Metal makes a big step forward from OpenGL, but still not quite at DirectX level yet (both quality and performance). And unable to use Nvidia GPU will be another downside.

At this moment, IMO, if we want to use VR, better do that in Windows. Even I hope Apple can release a nice VR / AR glass, but TBH, I won't expect anything amazing in short future.

 

[imrazor]

@h9826790 Benchmarks I see; I like benchmarks.On the VT test mine gets a Very High, but the number of frames is about 25% off your result. Here's the VR result along with Fire Strike & Time Spy, a couple of popular PC benchmarks.

These results are not remarkable, but mean that even modern AAA titles, unless heavily CPU bound, are playable on High or Ultra settings. Anyone else?

 

[AlexMaximus]

I have a cMP5,1 with a Vega 56 that I mostly use for light video editing, web surfing, email, media consumption, iPhone management, etc. While I do work in IT, the vast majority of my work is in either Windows, UNIX or Linux. I've decided to test its gaming capabilities to see if it might make a good alternative to my more expensive gaming rig. And the results are mixed, probably due to the single X5680 that the cheese grater sports.

The Vega 56 has been flashed with a standard PC Vega 64 BIOS to get a higher power limit (220w) and memory speed (945MHz), and the extra power is provided by two SATA power connectors (sorry, I'm not brave enough for Pixla's mod.) Gaming has been a mixed bag with Horizon Zero Dawn @ Ultimate settings, 1600p netting 50 - 55 fps. That's pretty impressive. But Fallout 4 VR is not nearly as nice with a hardwired Oculus Quest 2 I, getting frame rates ~ 30 fps in most outdoor areas.

On the Mac OS side I've maintained Mojave due a desire to stick with a fully supported OS, and also to preserve backward compatibility with 32-bit Mac games. On the Windows side, I'm running Windows 10 with the latest AMD Vega drivers.

Is anyone else trying to do this, even just as an experiment? What kind of frame rates and/or benchmark scores are you seeing out of your machine? Is this setup likely to incompatible when Apple finally gets around to entering the VR/AR market?

Hi imrazor,

I sit in the same boat here. I did go to the extreme in the past and I used to have a Vega VII from Saphire in my rig, just for games.
This trusted 5.1 was always my all-in-one solution and I did have this Windows / OSX Hybrid system for a long time, going back to Nvidia web driver days. However, since the Vega VII got extremely rare in Germany, I sold it for 20 bucks beneath the original purchasing price after hours of begging from my friends. I am an electrical engineer when it comes to hardware, Pixlas & PowerLink was never an issue for me, so I was hot and keen to try out a water-cooling mod on a bootable, flashed RX580 which I do have now. This may qualify me to give a comparison between a Vega VII and a RX 580 Pulse with 8GB of VRAM.
The verdict:
I loved the Vega VII. It is just great on the cooling side, on the design, fit & finish as well as on the performance. Of course its a bit faster on any Steam title, however not as much as I have anticipated. This was actually a shocker to me. Even with all known bottlenecks eliminated (dual switch card with NVME drives in slot #1 or #2 and many other upgrades such as the slightly stronger Xeon X5690 chip, - the downgrade to the water-cooled 580 Puls was not felt as a painful disaster. It may took away 5 -7% in performance in games, and even that is a high estimate. The 580 is actually surprisingly strong in games. I can play any title just as I have with the Vega VII with only minor loss of performance. The key element here is my new gained ability to have Windows 10, which I did not have on the system with the Vega VII. Since then I play more on the Win10 side of it, so the comparison is not fair on that end.
For you, this means you can not go higher and squeeze more juice out of this machine any more. With the Vega56 on top of it, you have a driver advantage because of Apple selling the iMac Pro at that time and having the Vega56 as default. Chances are you have excellent drivers because of this, meaning there is not much headroom left for any more tune-ups.
On the VR side, I also used to have the HTC goggles two years ago on a Nvidia 980Ti. I could run many titles at that time, it was ok with only minor discrepancies. Fast forward to today I am sure you could somewhat run the new stuff as well. However I see more problems on the software support side of it and on the lacking single core score of that CPU. The small difference in performance between those two GPU cards mentioned above paint a clear picture, meaning you can only compensate the slow CPU with new fast GPUs to some extent. Yes it works, the 5.1 is still a great machine, I still can not bring myself to sell it, however there is a price to pay which is this CPU single core bottleneck the can not be eliminated fully. With the new Apple Silicone world dawning fast this year, the switch to ARM is in full power mode. It would be best to sell it now and leave the 5.1 game very soon. I hate this realisation and I will not leave, but this is reality.

 

[imrazor]

@AlexMaximus I also have an RX 580, but it is unfortunately an OEM/reference model with a 6-pin power connector. These reference models have major issues with occasionally exceeding the PCIe power spec, and if I put it in cMP it will eventually flatline under stress and need to be rebooted.

For the Vega 56, I've flashed it with a Vega 64 BIOS, which allows it to draw more power through an EVGA Powerlink connected to the normal 6-pin connectors, as well as two SATA power connectors. I also have a 'low power' ROM image that only sips 150w and is usable with just the 6-pin adapters.

As for the single core speed of the machine, I do have a couple of X5687 Xeons (3.8Ghz turbo) floating around, but I wonder if they'd even work in a cMP.

And another thing I've been wondering is if an unlocked chip like @h9826790 's W3690 can be soft-overclocked on the cMP to address the single core issue.

 

[h9826790]

And another thing I've been wondering is if an unlocked chip like @h9826790 's W3690 can be soft-overclocked on the cMP to address the single core issue.

We can OC to CPU to something like 4GHz without any difficulty.

It's possible to go higher, but that will need quite a bit more voltage, and in general, not worth to do so.