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Dual RX 480s in Mac Pro 5,1 running MacOS (w/ How-to)

AndreeOnline said:
Well, I'm not quite happy as it stands now. I'm trying to buy the best 'current generation' AMD card and it comes in slower than my old card. I like it better when performance doubles each year and the price stays the same, if you know what I mean... Anyway…

View attachment 662472

My 280X is also a MSI Gaming card and I do like the way they look and feel. Also very quiet. It feels good that the power strain on the system goes down with these new cards, but like I've said before: it's not my main focus. While I would have liked the card to slightly outperform my 280X, the 8GB RAM is the great redeemer for me. I've had memory issues in both Cinema 4D (complex scenes and/or huge arcvis textures) and DaVinci Resolve (4k+ resolutions).

I hope—and do believe—that we'll see increased performance from these cards in future MacOS updates. Let's hope they get closer in performance to what they show under Windows 10.

I'm buying a new MacBook Pro regardless, and I'll wait to see what happens on the Mac Pro + iMac and external display front. But I won't wait another year for a new workstation. If Apple fails to deliver this fall, it's back to Windows on that front.
Click to expand...

Do you suggest this type of design of open cooler blower for the cMP's? Or, the reference type blower exhaust to the rear type?

Also, does this card have a backplate? And, if so, does it fit in the cMP with it?

Thanks!

Looking for the RX series as my upgrade path from HD5770 since I just got a cMP for use with FCPX and Motion5.
 
AndreeOnline said:
Here are some cleaned up numbers for quick relative performance:
Click to expand...

AndreeOnline said:
Well, I'm not quite happy as it stands now
Click to expand...

As i said when you dismissed me,
Performance is bad in Resolve.

A single GTX 980 on macOS is out performing 2x RX 480's.
In windows one RX 480 is doing better than 2 in macOS, This could be Resolves fault as well though as they may not have focused on Polaris optimisation in macOS which might be coming.
 
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p.l said:
As i said when you dismissed me,
Performance is bad in Resolve.
Click to expand...

Phillip, I didn't dismiss what you said—or the tests you've made. I highly appreciate them. But anything 'Windows' is totally irrelevant to me at this point, apart from the fact that it is a clear indicator of where potential performance is being left behind. It's still early days with these new cards—Nvidia's 1070/1080 as well. I would have preferred a new generation Nvidia card but there's less pointing to them working soon.

I will not go backwards and buy old tech at this point. There are already too many concessions or work arounds made. When forwards and upwards no longer works I'll personally have to switch platform.

The additional card already doubled my performance in Resolve (up to a point—getting me up to 25 fps with a set of normal correction nodes and qualifications) which was the main goal. But I'm hoping it will 'bloom' further of course.
 
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RX 470, 10.12.1 beta.

Tomb Raider 1200p default High setting - 82FPS.

Not bad. The RX 480 should be about 10% less than the best Geforce card that currently "works" on macOS.
 
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We're expecting too much from what is a workaround with beta software. I don't recall the last time we had a modern GPU working in a Mac this early.

This is all part of being an early adopter. It's exciting to figure things out. :)
 
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Will run all tests again after latest beta. However, I don't expect changes and to be realistic I think we will be adding Device ID for 470/480 for all of Sierra updates in the future (unless some magical unicorn decides to release a new desktop class Mac that doesn't use mobile chips)
 
Updated Sierra to 10.12.1 beta 3

Easy, just add the ID, fix permissions, reboot. No card swapping because the Radeon can load macOS without a driver.

New scores

Geekbench Compute 86000. Increase by 3000.

Luxball 10173. No change.
Neumann 5852. No change.
Hotel 1652. No change.

Tomb Raider, 1200p, default High. 82fps. No change.

Valley Extreme HD with Ultra quality 1548. No change.

If you have X5690s then add 10-15% to the GL scores.
 
The problem remains you are running Polaris 10 cards ( 470/480 ) on Beta Polaris 11 ( 460 ) drivers. I wouldn't expect better performance until apple provides Polaris 10 drivers. My thinking is we are seeing Polaris 11 drivers due to a possible RX460 iMac in the future, or Apple could drop the support at any time.....
 
Actually Polaris 10 is mentioned in the drivers. The drivers should be identical across all Polaris, the only difference being the specification of each variant.

Btw, Sierra font rendering is broken on many systems. If you see it happen you are not alone and is not GPU specific.
 
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Taking the Romper Room spin... I see Baffin, Bonaire, CapeVerde, Carrizo, Ellesmere, Fiji, Godavari, Hawaii, Iceland, Kalindi, Lexa, Oland, Raven, Spectre, Stoney, Tahiti and Tonga.. and all my video card friends.

... Taking a closer look at the Chipsets mentioned within Amdx4100... Stoney... Raven. Has anyone mentioned this yet? Very interesting!! This backs rumors of a shift away from intel for x86.

http://www.eteknix.com/amd-raven-ridge-apus-will-combine-zen-polaris-hbm/
http://wccftech.com/amd-stoney-ridge-platform-2016-5-compute-cores/
 
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handheldgames said:
Taking the Romper Room spin... I see Baffin, Bonaire, CapeVerde, Carrizo, Ellesmere, Fiji, Godavari, Hawaii, Iceland, Kalindi, Lexa, Oland, Raven, Spectre, Stoney, Tahiti and Tonga.. and all my video card friends.

... Taking a closer look at the Chipsets mentioned within Amdx4100... Stoney... Raven. Has anyone mentioned this yet? Very interesting!! This backs rumors of a shift away from intel for x86.

http://www.eteknix.com/amd-raven-ridge-apus-will-combine-zen-polaris-hbm/
http://wccftech.com/amd-stoney-ridge-platform-2016-5-compute-cores/
Click to expand...
That is very interesting. BitsAndChips.it have reported that AMD has given Engineering Samples of Zen APU to Apple in december of last year.

One thing to note. Everybody believes that Zen APU will feature Polaris arch. It will not. Zen+Vega is the APU in Microsoft Project Scorpio(Xbox Next), and this: http://videocardz.com/62250/amd-vega10-and-vega11-gpus-spotted-in-opencl-driver shows that Raven Ridge APU graphics is the same family as Greenland and Vega.

Zen then has to be really competitve against Intel...
 
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Isn't Thunderbolt Intel tech? How would AMD APU work if new Macs come with Thunderbolt 3 through USB-C?
 
theitsage said:
That's good to know. At least, it's in the pipeline.
Click to expand...

The pieces are in place.

Apple will move their slimmest computers to ARM.

Their mid range computers will stay Intel for a while.

For power they will move to high cores and multi GPU AMD and also allow anyone to install macOS on a system with AMD CPU and GPU.

I don't care what the naysayers say because we told them this for over a year and now it's clear.
 
SoyCaptain:
1) Unlikely. Only using Macbook with ARM CPU would be viable.
2) I can very much see a Mac Mini with quad core AMD APU with 16 CU GPU and 2 GB of HBM2 as EDRAM being option for smallest desktop computer, Apple makes.
3) Nothing will most likely change for highest end, unless AMD will be extremely competitive with Intel.

One thing that would be good for idea "AMD in Apple computers" IF AMD is competitive, is HSA 2.0 initiative.
 
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So, what would you guys do?

If I have the money to get an RX470 or RX480, which one would you get? But, keeping in mind, everything. Like, how the RX470 consumes less power and is only marginally slower, which might not even be a big deal in video production or that kind of stuff than it would be in like, say, games.

Or, should I get an RX480 because it's only about $50 more on average and has slightly more streaming processors and has 8GB of VRAM, instead of the 4GB $200-ish RX470's?

With all that said, is there a difference of what brand, type of cooler, etc. to look out for when purchasing either an RX470 or RX480?


Thanks!

PS--Also, RX480's have BATTLEFIELD 1 DELUXE EDITION UPGRADE COUPON which I don't really understand. Is that coupon an upgrade? Or is it the whole game?
 
I'd get an RX 480. It runs with one 6-pin PCIe cable just like the RX 470.

The coupon is for in-game upgrade.
 
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