1- Would the RX 580 be a justifiable upgrade for a (primarily) photographic workflow? PS, Lightroom, etc. I use Handbrake a lot but that is all CPU from what I can tell. (HB is slightly faster processing video files on my iMac and both the Mac Pro (RX 7950) and iMac (RX 850) use only about 20-25% of the GPU memory).
I don't really think so, no. There are some tools in PS/LR that are accellerated by GPU, but not all. For those tools that are, yes the RX580 would speed up your workflow, but I don't think it's a significant enough upgrade just yet if you're only thinking of the photography workflow. Mostly because Adobe's GPU utilisation still isn't entirely where I'd say it should be. It might be a more significant difference with Affinity or Pixelmator. Maybe in future Photoshop/Lightroom as well, but for now they don't utilise the GPU as much as they could.
2- Which RX 580? I realize they all have the boot up issue. OWC sells the RX 580 for about $390. They don't say which flavor. B&H, Newegg, etc have the Pulse version for about $220. Does OWC do something with card that justifies almost double the price? Perhaps its been flashed to a "Mac Edition" and is ready to use as is. They have not gotten back to me on that. I realize the boot up issue would still be there regardless.
There's no Mac Edition ROM to flash to it in any case, so they definitely don't do that. No way of getting a boot screen on there right now. That is; Unless you're capable of hacking in UGA support for the card yourself. - If you do, please let others know how...
So basically all I have to do is install the card and that’s it. No drivers , no nothing. It simply works . That’s amazing !
Yep. I mean that is typicaly for GPUs supported by macOS
Do you lose the boot screen with this card ? Is there a special way you have to get into Windows ?
You lose the boot screen, yes. In System Preferences, you can select Startup Disk. Inside of Windows, with the BootCamp tools installed, you can likewise change startup disk.
Ah very cool. Is the nitro larger than the pulse ? How are able to boot Mojave’s and high Sierra ? And have a boot camp for Windows 10?
By partitioning the drive in three chunks. If you're using an MBR for Windows you'll need to make sure the partition map for Windows (the MBR section) has no more than 5 entries (maybe it's 3? Think it's 5) otherwise Windows won't boot, but you can manipulate the partition map with GDisk from within macOS or Linux. If you're using GPT for Windows you don't need to worry about that.
