So - how's it going? Any more insights on performance / feedback on the card?
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MP 7,1 W5700X Release
- Thread starter darkmatter343
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Sigh. I wish I could share something more meaningful, but at the moment I’m not using the system for anything strenuous. What I wanted to do is get people some kind of feedback as quickly as I could.
Sadly the same in Australia - no expedited options. and we're stuck with TNT who are woeful.
According to Apple, they shipped three days ago from Shanghai and based on TNT tracking it hasn't moved at all.
As I mentioned, I don’t have any real world tests at the moment. But here are the Unigine Heaven comparison benchmarks. I’m not sure how useful they are since Apple has deprecated OpenGL, but at least it’s something.
1920x1200 2xAA Full Screen
Quality: High
Tesselation: Moderate
580X temp 39-40c
FPS: 49.4 min 12.2 max 99.9
Score: 1245
W5700X temp 97-102c
FPS: 120.4 min 14.1 max 235.0
Score: 3034
So the W5700X performance is roughly 2.5x the 580X. It’s also quite a bit more toasty at a max temp of around 102c. Note that with some extended execution the temp got up to around 105c. The fans eventually kicked in, although the temp didn’t seem to go down much.
Unigine Valley comparison
1900x1200 2xAA Full Screen
Quality: High
580X temp 50-51c
FPS: 57.3 min 29.8 max 105.4
Score: 2396
W5700X temp 91 - 105c
FPS: 112.8 min 37.2 max 168.8
Score: 4719
So in this case the W5700X performance is roughly 2x the 580X. The 580X temperature is likely higher in this case because I ran the W5700X benchmark first, which no doubt heated things up internally. The fans spun loud enough to be heard while running the W5700X benchmark. The threshold appears to be around 105c.
[edit] More testing has the fans sometimes ramping up at around 99-100c for the GPU. Not sure what algorithm Apple is using to ramp up the fans. No doubt other components like CPU come into play.
1900x1200 2xAA Full Screen
Quality: High
580X temp 50-51c
FPS: 57.3 min 29.8 max 105.4
Score: 2396
W5700X temp 91 - 105c
FPS: 112.8 min 37.2 max 168.8
Score: 4719
So in this case the W5700X performance is roughly 2x the 580X. The 580X temperature is likely higher in this case because I ran the W5700X benchmark first, which no doubt heated things up internally. The fans spun loud enough to be heard while running the W5700X benchmark. The threshold appears to be around 105c.
[edit] More testing has the fans sometimes ramping up at around 99-100c for the GPU. Not sure what algorithm Apple is using to ramp up the fans. No doubt other components like CPU come into play.
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Great - thanks for the updates Thomast0001. Looking like it's a worthwhile investment then 
Your welcome!Great - thanks for the updates Thomast0001. Looking like it's a worthwhile investment then
Yeah, the W5700X is the obvious choice for a mixed moderate workload, but that’s hardly a surprise I guess. I can say the card/system seems stable with the benchmarks I’ve thrown at it. No system crashes or wildly varying real world UI experience. The poor (collapsing) GB5 Metal performance is concerning, but we need another Metal test to see if it is a GB5 issue for example. If anyone has any suggestions for one that is respected, please let me know.I ordered 2x so it will be interesting to see how that goes performance wise. I'm constantly maxing out my current 580 and am hoping a pair of W5700X's will keep me going into the future (16c / 192GB / 1TB + 8 TB NVME).
Fingers crossed that they can address the apparent metal issues in a firmware / or driver fix.
Fingers crossed that they can address the apparent metal issues in a firmware / or driver fix.
Hmmmm. Will the two actually be utilized together? The W5700X doesn’t support Infinity Fabric Link. Whatever workloads you are using would need to understand how to use both cards...
No - no infinity fabric, but given that Apple are selling the dual W5700X combo as an option, I am hoping that there are some decent benefits to be realised from using the two together.
Regarding the low benchmark scores: I suspect Apple disabled SMU firmware for the W5700X MPX module at the moment because there is some issue with Kernel Panics on boot when SMU firmware is loaded for Navi cards on 10.15.5 beta. Check here and here for reference.
If you are on 10.15.4 you can use OpenCore to inject those device properties on the W5700X until Apple fixes up their mess:
If you are on 10.15.4 you can use OpenCore to inject those device properties on the W5700X until Apple fixes up their mess:
- ForceLoadFalconSmuFirmware with value 1
- PP_WorkLoadPolicyMask with value 32
Infinity Fabric does not obviate in any way the need for the application to explicitly handle dealing with more than one card being present. Infinity Fabric provides a faster medium for two GPUs to 'talk" to each other, but it doesn't do anything to make the two GPU "disappear" into a virtual GPU construct that completely hides the GPU hardware.
Metal only provides some structure on how to share the data over Infinity Fabric, not hiding/virtualizing the GPU themselves. So if have an "multi GPU dumb" app, then Infinity Fabric isn't going to help.
Pragmatically, Infinity Fabric means that a wider set of applications can scale close to linear in performance as add a another GPU chip to the computation solution mix. It won't work for literally all workloads, but it is a better "toolkit" to work with for applications that can chop more than a reasonable amount of the the work into some smaller pieces.
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I'll bet that if you had two Vega II Duo cards installed without the IF, any multi-GPU app will still see four individually-addressable GPUs. Apps like Davinci Resolve, et al.
(Note: I'm ignoring the on-card IF that the two GPUs share).
I can appreciate everyone's enthusiasm about showing off their new cards, but let's go folks. Get them installed and start doing some work with them. Not the benchmark tests, but instead, let's see some h.264 and h.265 exports with apps like Davinci Resolve and/or Final Cut Pro X.
I would sure hope that for gaming the FPS would be at least 2X or more the 580X, especially since it's a completely different architecture. I'm currently running a 5600 XT in my eGPU and the compute and FPS performance compared to the 580/580X is amazing.