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Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Plug and Play in 10.13.1+

T

theitsage

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Aug 28, 2005
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iMac Pro launch is within weeks. The top-end configuration most likely contains an under-clocked iteration of the Vega FE 16GB. I got the air cool version today and it was plug and play in the Mac Pro tower.

This is a beautiful and great build-quality graphics card. It's fully enclosed in brushed aluminum housing, anodized in blue. I'm currently using the two mini-PCIe power booster to run the Radeon Vega FE. This is not recommended due to its high TDP. I'm only testing this briefly as the card will primarily be used for eGPU.

mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition.jpg


mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-about.png mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-pcie.png
mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-metal.png mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-opencl.png mac-pro-tower-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-luxmark.png
 
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That's good, and if a Vega 64 can run Luxmark with just the mini 6pin power supply. Then most likely it's good enough for something like video editing.

However, I still doubt if that will draw too much when doing 3D work. Not necessary ridiculous like Furmark, but I suspect even Unigine benchmarks can shut down the Mac. Of course, for eGPU setup, it doesn’t really matter.
[doublepost=1511860750][/doublepost]Anyway, I expect it can do better in Metal compute. May be the driver still not there yet.
 
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William Payne said:
Thats cool, what are you going to be using it for?
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I'll use it primarily in an eGPU enclosure for testing and reviewing. I wanted to provide Mac Pro tower users an update the card works (needs more juice). Just in case we have the urge to buy an iMac Pro, a Vega Frontier Edition may not be that bad of an option.
 
theitsage said:
I'll use it primarily in an eGPU enclosure for testing and reviewing. I wanted to provide Mac Pro tower users an update the card works (needs more juice). Just in case we have the urge to buy an iMac Pro, a Vega Frontier Edition may not be that bad of an option.
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HI,

There is another thread about a vega 56 running in a cMP under 10.13.2 and the poster claims there are problems with sleep and fan constantly spinning.

Did you experience any such problems with the FE version of this card?

And have you tried any vega 56 cards in a cMP?

Thanks
 
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krakman said:
HI,

There is another thread about a vega 56 running in a cMP under 10.13.2 and the poster claims there are problems with sleep and fan constantly spinning.

Did you experience any such problems with the FE version of this card?

And have you tried any vega 56 cards in a cMP?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Same behavior. I have an RX Vega 56 that I tried with my Mac Pro tower a couple months back. The drivers are getting better but still a work in progress.
 
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theitsage said:
Same behavior. I have an RX Vega 56 that I tried with my Mac Pro tower a couple months back. The drivers are getting better but still a work in progress.
Click to expand...

Curious if the update today fixes that. I have a Vega 56 waiting in box for the drivers to be cleaned up.

It seems to me like they disabled all the power management in the drivers for some reason. In since the iMac Pro has custom fans, doesn't seem necessary for the iMac Pro to me, and they'll want to support this for eGPU.

So hoping that they just had some issues with the power management and they turned it off for now.

Nvidia under High Sierra is so bad I'd love to be able to swap back to AMD and get some stability again.
 
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theitsage said:
I'll use it primarily in an eGPU enclosure for testing and reviewing.
Click to expand...

Cool. What eGPU enclosure are you using? and what Mac is the enclosure rigged up to? Mostly I see eGPU running via Thunderbolt from iMacs, Laptops, and nMP, but there are eGPU boxes built for cMP as well.
 
goMac said:
Curious if the update today fixes that. I have a Vega 56 waiting in box for the drivers to be cleaned up.

It seems to me like they disabled all the power management in the drivers for some reason. In since the iMac Pro has custom fans, doesn't seem necessary for the iMac Pro to me, and they'll want to support this for eGPU.

So hoping that they just had some issues with the power management and they turned it off for now.

Nvidia under High Sierra is so bad I'd love to be able to swap back to AMD and get some stability again.
Click to expand...

What nividia card are you running? with what problems?
 
William Payne said:
What nividia card are you running? with what problems?
Click to expand...

I have a flashed 680. It's a mess with Metal. OpenGL is fine, but as Metal becomes more common it's an issue.

Running the Apple drivers because I'm on betas, but the downloaded drivers don't make much of a difference.
 
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goMac said:
I have a flashed 680. It's a mess with Metal. OpenGL is fine, but as Metal becomes more common it's an issue.

Running the Apple drivers because I'm on betas, but the downloaded drivers don't make much of a difference.
Click to expand...

Ah ok. I can understand. I'm not a metal user so I am a bit naive to that. I can understand.
 
William Payne said:
Ah ok. I can understand. I'm not a metal user so I am a bit naive to that. I can understand.
Click to expand...

I've heard that there is a plan to fix all the bugs. But I'm kind of over it and Vega seems like a nice upgrade with more support.
 
William Payne said:
What is your use case with metal?
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Just running Metal stuff.

But in High Sierra it's worse because now the whole window server is Metal.

10.13.2 is making progress on Nvidia fixes but it's still not there. But at least the window server is a lot better in 10.13.2.

(And I know my hardware is fine because it worked fine in Sierra and it works fine in Windows.)
 
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goMac said:
Just running Metal stuff.

But in High Sierra it's worse because now the whole window server is Metal.

10.13.2 is making progress on Nvidia fixes but it's still not there. But at least the window server is a lot better in 10.13.2.

(And I know my hardware is fine because it worked fine in Sierra and it works fine in Windows.)
Click to expand...

I apologise I am really uneducated when it comes to metal. What takes advantage of it? I apologise, all the stuff I use is open GL or CL so excuse my questions.
 
goMac said:
Just running Metal stuff.

But in High Sierra it's worse because now the whole window server is Metal.

10.13.2 is making progress on Nvidia fixes but it's still not there. But at least the window server is a lot better in 10.13.2.

(And I know my hardware is fine because it worked fine in Sierra and it works fine in Windows.)
Click to expand...

That’s strange. I’ve seen a few post about their Pascal card doesn’t work well in High Sierra, but switch back to 680 fixed everything.

But you said your 680 mess up everything. And my 1080Ti actually work flawlessly in High Sierra so far.

It seems the experience is very inconsistent, there must be more than just the driver quality, or METAL.
 
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h9826790 said:
That’s strange. I’ve seen a few post about their Pascal card doesn’t work well in High Sierra, but switch back to 680 fixed everything.

But you said your 680 mess up everything. And my 1080Ti actually work flawlessly in High Sierra so far.

It seems the experience is very inconsistent, there must be more than just the driver quality, or METAL.
Click to expand...

The 1080 Ti might be worse for all I know. But I’m finding bugs in projects I’m working on. Heard the same elsewhere. Heard multiple places they are working on it. Intel has it’s own set of Metal 2 issues, but I’ve heard the AMD drivers are the much more dependable ones for Metal 2.

Again, YMMV, and it should improve in later macOS versions. But at least on 10.13.2 it seems like every time something is fixed for Nvidia something else gets broken.
 
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mattspace said:
I recall hearing a while back that Apple's Nvidia driver was problematic under High Sierra. Could the difference be that the 1080ti is using Nvidia's driver? Or, are you using the webdriver?
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All pascal card must use the web driver, they are not supported by the Apple driver at all (nothing to display).
 
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