2013 nMac Pro with eGPU for FCPX?

[Eric Santiago]

I didn’t know it was possible with the nMP?

Any test sites on this you can post?

[Tom Sefton]

Barefeats have some results posted showing performance changes with this setup

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Noah Kadner]

It would be kind of a wash as TB2 sort of negates the gains you get with an eGPU. The GPUs in the 2013 Mac Pro are actually way advanced for their age so I would suggest waiting for the iMac Pro or whatever comes next in the Mac Pro line for the next big leap in performance.

Noah

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[Michael Hadley]

With further digging, I found this post from the terrific egpu.io website…

https://egpu.io/forums/news/rx-580-review-amd-xconnect-freesync/#post-23631

With an AMD 580 card, Bruce x goes from 24 secs to 16 secs. That seems like a pretty robust improvement.

[Michael Hadley]

Sage advice…. except…

It looks like I would spend about $700 for eGPU box and card and the performance gains seem like they might be worth it. (Although that’s something I’m still investigating).

I will be definitely getting a new iMac Pro or Mac Pro in the future–but the eGPU might enable me to delay for another year or 18 months.

New iMac Pro will probably set me back $7K, assuming I get mid-tier. And who knows with 2018 Mac Pro. I would have to imagine at least that much?

So you see the dilemma…

[Noah Kadner]

Then go for it. One thing to keep in mind is that though eGPUs technically work in High Sierra they are considered beta for the foreseeable future. So you will likely see a wide degree of gains/setbacks. I am excited about eGPUs as well but they are not quite there yet on MacOS.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
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[Joe Marler]

[Michael Hadley] “With an AMD 580 card, Bruce x goes from 24 secs to 16 secs. That seems like a pretty robust improvement.”

My 2017 top-spec iMac 27 does BruceX in 15.8 sec, and transcodes from 4k H264 to proxy about 2x faster than a 12-core D700 Mac Pro. A 512GB SSD version with 8GB RAM is about $2700, or roughly $2300 if available on the Apple refurbished site. A 3rd party 32GB RAM upgrade would be about $350 more.

Of course the Sonnet eGPU box plus RX 580 is only about $700, but that won’t speed up H264 or H265 at all.

A 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro might be about 1.8x or 2x faster on both CPU and GPU than the top-spec iMac 27 but nobody yet knows, and how that translates to real-world performance is anyone’s guess. It would also likely be quite expensive, maybe around $7000.

[Brett Sherman]

[Joe Marler] “My 2017 top-spec iMac 27 does BruceX in 15.8 sec, and transcodes from 4k H264 to proxy about 2x faster than a 12-core D700 Mac Pro.”

The Mac Pro does a woefully poor job of decoding H.264. Since I’ve moved from an MPEG-2 to an H.264 codec for my camera (Canon C300 to C200). I’ve had to abandon the Mac Pro for an iMac and my 3 year-old Mac Book Pro. The Mac Pro is laggy playing back H.264 material, taking a half a second to even start playback. Whereas the MBP and iMac are instant. And frame refreshes when skimming are about 4X slower on the Mac Pro.

So if you use H.264 source media, I’d say avoid the Mac Pro.

————————–
Brett Sherman
One Man Band (If it\’s video related I\’ll do it!)
I work for an institution that probably does not want to be associated with my babblings here.

[Noah Kadner]

Yup- that’s because the iMac and MBP use newer Intel CPUs with an integrated H.264 hardware encoder (Intel QuickSync) that the Mac Pro’s older Xeon processor lacks.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
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[Craig Seeman]

[Noah Kadner] “Mac Pro’s older Xeon processor lacks.”

It’ll be interesting to hear how the new iMac Pro Xeons handles this (H.264) along with H.265.