I recently installed a Sapphire Pulse RX580 8GB card into my 4/5,1, with 32GB RAM and X5680. Boots from Apple SSD SM256E/PCIe; SATA SanDisk Ultra II 480 as working drive. Based on a few comments here and there, this should be the final piece to enable 4K FCPX.
I wanted to compare this to my late-2013 15-MBP (16GB, 2.6GHz i7, GT750M, 1TB SSD). So I ran a few tests. Both systems running the latest FCPX and 10.13.6. These compare some standard benchmarks, plus compare times on a 21-minute documentary I edited earlier this year. We’re starting another documentary, which includes some 4K from an A7RII.
BruceX-Share-Master File to ProRes422
- MBP: 2:38 <- ran this 3 times. I’ve seen others post much faster times.
- MP: 0:35
BruceX-Share Export File, Computer Faster Encode H.264
- MBP: 3:10 (no external monitor)
- MP: 0:43
Geekbench 4: Compute OpenCL Score
- MBP: 28,552
- MP: 124,708
Import: Analyze Color and Proxy; Leave Files in Place
- MBP: 7:25
- MP: 13:30
Export: 720p .mp4 - faster encode
- MBP: 28:45
- MP: 33:26
Overall Observations
- It seems that BruceX and Geekbench are poor indicators of import and export performance in FCPX when comparing these 2 systems
- I believe the MBP has QuickSync, and it seems tightly integrated with the GPU; that is, the GPU is working nearly always.
- The MP does not have QuickSync, and seems to have some sort of contention. The RX 580 has lots of “downtime” in the encode/decode process
- It’s worth noting that I copied the Library to the SSDs before each test.
- The MBP fans are louder than the MP when importing/exporting
- The documentary used for export is posted on YouTube: Los Altos, An Affordable Place to Live in Silicon Valley? It’s 21 minutes long, and talks about how the high cost of housing is affecting teachers, business owners, and local workers.
Still, happy I got the RX580.
I wanted to compare this to my late-2013 15-MBP (16GB, 2.6GHz i7, GT750M, 1TB SSD). So I ran a few tests. Both systems running the latest FCPX and 10.13.6. These compare some standard benchmarks, plus compare times on a 21-minute documentary I edited earlier this year. We’re starting another documentary, which includes some 4K from an A7RII.
BruceX-Share-Master File to ProRes422
- MBP: 2:38 <- ran this 3 times. I’ve seen others post much faster times.
- MP: 0:35
BruceX-Share Export File, Computer Faster Encode H.264
- MBP: 3:10 (no external monitor)
- MP: 0:43
Geekbench 4: Compute OpenCL Score
- MBP: 28,552
- MP: 124,708
Import: Analyze Color and Proxy; Leave Files in Place
- MBP: 7:25
- MP: 13:30
Export: 720p .mp4 - faster encode
- MBP: 28:45
- MP: 33:26
Overall Observations
- It seems that BruceX and Geekbench are poor indicators of import and export performance in FCPX when comparing these 2 systems
- I believe the MBP has QuickSync, and it seems tightly integrated with the GPU; that is, the GPU is working nearly always.
- The MP does not have QuickSync, and seems to have some sort of contention. The RX 580 has lots of “downtime” in the encode/decode process
- It’s worth noting that I copied the Library to the SSDs before each test.
- The MBP fans are louder than the MP when importing/exporting
- The documentary used for export is posted on YouTube: Los Altos, An Affordable Place to Live in Silicon Valley? It’s 21 minutes long, and talks about how the high cost of housing is affecting teachers, business owners, and local workers.
Still, happy I got the RX580.
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