ATI GPU the right choice?

[Herb Sevush]

AMD is comparing the firepro to the K2000, hardly a top of the line card. I’d wait for the usual benchmark tests before popping the bubbly.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Lance Bachelder]

Another benchmark showing higher end cards:

https://www.fireprographics.com/resources/AMD_W8000_benchmark_V2.pdf

Note that the GPU specs in the new Mac Pro far exceed the W8000 and you get two of them… not bad.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Rick Lang]

The specs for the custom GPU in the Mac Pro Tube appear to meet or exceed their top card, the S10000.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Erik Lindahl]

The S-series isn’t even on their sites:

https://www.fireprographics.com/index.asp
https://www.amd.com/uk/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/Pages/ati-firepro-3d.aspx

Is that something “coming soon”?

There is no doubt though that the GPU’s have power. It’s however been an issue with OpenCL vs CUDA in the past. Hope this changes!

[Steve Connor]

[Erik Lindahl] “Hope this changes!”

It is for Video Editing and grading, BMD and Adobe have been vocal about this since the launch, maybe not so much for 3D in AfterFX though

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s not just 3D in After Effects, H264 encoding in Sorenson Squeeze and I know people where iffy about anything but CUDA for 3D-rendering in other apps (Maya perhaps).

But yes, open technologies like OpenCL / OpenGL is highly preferred!

[Walter Soyka]

[Lance Bachelder] “Looks like ATI may be roaring back – no wonder Apple went this direction…”

The new Mac Pro mini-site claims 7 teraflops of compute performance (presumably obtained by summing the performance of each of the dual GPUs), suggesting each GPU does about 3.5 teraflops. NVIDIA’s GTX Titan does about 4.5 teraflops, so two of them would deliver 9 teraflops.

So in terms of raw power, AMD still trails NVIDIA — but it’s not as simple in the real world as the spec sheets suggest.

Apple is pushing OpenCL, and I think that’s the key to the decision here. Even if CUDA is better, I am guessing that Apple doesn’t want to be stuck on someone else’s proprietary technology. (They prefer to be the proprietary ones.)

AMD’s OpenCL performance exceeds NVIDIA’s in most synthetic benchmarks (though there are a few tests where NVIDIA stomps AMD in OpenCL). NVIDIA’s drivers don’t yet support OpenCL 1.2 as AMD’s do. Real-world testing of AMD vs NVIDIA on OpenCL, or AMD on OpenCL vs NVIDIA on CUDA is really limited.

Bottom line: whether these AMD cards are “the best” or not, they are certainly the best that have ever been offered in a Mac, and Apple’s move here makes CUDA a second-class citizen on Mac OS.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Rick Lang] “The specs for the custom GPU in the Mac Pro Tube appear to meet or exceed their top card, the S10000.”

The S10000 is a dual-GPU card (like how the GTX 690 is two GTX 680s on a single board, or the Radeon HD 7990 is two 7970s).

What’s interesting to me is that the S10000 costs $3500.

A Mac Pro with dual GPUs is not going to be cheap.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Daniel Frome]

[Walter Soyka] “What’s interesting to me is that the S10000 costs $3500.”

Crap…I wasn’t aware the prices were THIS high.

I had guessed that a 12 core 64GB RAM config was going to cost about $6000 … that’s looking more like $9000 now.

[Walter Soyka]

[Erik Lindahl] “The S-series isn’t even on their sites… Is that something “coming soon”?”

It is, but it’s classified under Server Graphics:
https://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/firepro-remote-graphics/S10000/Pages/S10000.aspx#3

[Erik Lindahl] “There is no doubt though that the GPU’s have power. It’s however been an issue with OpenCL vs CUDA in the past. Hope this changes!”

Apple clearly wants OpenCL. That makes sense. Apple originally developed it.

From what I’ve read, CUDA offers a much more mature and refined development environment, but of course it’s proprietary and OpenCL is not. But now it may not matter if CUDA makes development easier; if a developer wants their GPU-accelerated code to run on high-end Macs, they’ve got to go OpenCL or maintain two separate processing paths.

This is a blow to NVIDIA for CUDA on the desktop. It won’t dent their financial or scientific computing prospects at all.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events