I'm an audio person so immediately think 'lowest video card possible' but I am thinking about potentially 2 of the displays and am curious if the base video card is good enough to do that and do it just as well as the vega.
For mainstream displays that 580X is better than the D700 of the previous Mac Pro.
Ball park these two are suitable stand in for those two. ( D700 -- W9000 and 590 --- 580X )
https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-FirePro-W9000-vs-AMD-RX-590/2841vs4033
[ I think the 580X may be a 12nm bump to the baseline 580 design. But maybe not with the clocks bump up quite as high as the 590 to get to better thermals.
even basic 580 would still have a substantive gap.
]
The 580X isn't a bargain basement, low power card. It is probably pulling around 180-225W. Driving two mainstream, normal displays isn't going to be a major problem.
Additionally I'm considering getting into 3d modeling using the same machine and don't really want to do upgrading of the mac myself later.
3d on a non 4K screen would be different than trying to do 3D on a 6-8K screen.
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Ideally defer the decision until more is known about the AB card. See my post here:
#45
By comparison, a top-spec iMac Pro is already pretty fast, except for the GPU. There are extremely GPU-intensive plugins such as Neat Video, Imagenomic Portraiture and Digital Anarchy Flicker Free. I just finished a documentary that had lots of low-light, grainy contributed footage, so I had to use Neat Video a lot. It took my 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro forever to process that. Each new encoded version for final review was several hours elapsed time to generate.
Each workflow is different and there is huge variation in the computational load paths of various plugins and codecs. Those also vary based on NLE, so it's difficult to evaluate. But if you're using a NLE like Resolve that can effectively harness lots of GPU horsepower, it seems like Vega Duo would be a better fit than Afterburner.
Probably within 1-2 weeks it will be more clear.
Afterburner is only accessed through Apple AV Foundation libraries APIs. If there is custom computations that 3rd party plug-ins are going to do directly themselves then there is little need to wait 1-2 weeks to see if there will be any Afterburner impact. There won't be. Apps can't get to Afterburner to do something just they particularly want it to do.
If have custom computations ... Afterburner isn't the answer. Afterburner is primarily going to make calls to Apple API functions go faster over as subset of Apple's API. That is useful. But not particularly in the context of 3rd parties doing manipulations of the video data after it has be decoded and loaded. [ if the hold up was in the loading and writing back out to disk in ProRes format then Afterburner might help. But transforms in the middle once decoded ; not really. ]
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I’m watching and waiting until someone does a tear down. So I can see what type of SSD port is being used before I make any decisions.
It is extremely likely the same system that Apple uses for the iMac Pro.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Pro+Teardown/101807
It is a single logical SSD composed of
three parts. The T2 ( SSD controllers) and two (sometimes one in Mac Pro case entry config) NAND daugther cards. Those cards are
not SSDs. Those card are pragmatically internal components to the T2 driven SSD. As internal SSD components there are no "3rd parties" likely coming for this SSD any more there are 3rd party coming for the internal of other folk's SSD implementations.
It isn't like Apple invented something brand new for the Mac Pro storage. They have had this system set-up infrastructure for two years.
