Nick Lear gives a real world look at the Nvidia RTX 4080 vs the RTX 2080 for real world editing, and it is very interesting, and makes me happy with Apple and Apple Silicon. It may not be the fastest, but it is pretty fast.
I still prefer Mac, and the new M1 Max certainly seems to have some serious speed improvements, but a 12 Gen Intel i9 with an NVIDIA would seriously crank for Premiere.
Malcolm Own at Apple Insider has an article on M1 Pro and M1 Max GPU performance versus Nvidia and AMD.
Now it uses teraflops to compare it to what the equivalent processor is, meaning the top of the line is equivalent to a Radeon RX Vega 56 or GeForce RTX 2080.
Which also means my Radeon Pro Vega 64x, which can do a bout 13.5 teraflops (12.5 teraflows for the 64) is still better, but still slower than a RTX 3060 Ti or above processor.
So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.
And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).
Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.
This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).
And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.
I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider hacve an article on how someone at Apple Management doesn’t want NVIDIA support in MacOS.
I have been talking about this for years. Apple doesn’t care about the pros. They care about what they want. And they want the companies that kowtow to them.
And the new “modular” macpro is obviously not going to be what Pros want if you can’t use the components that you want. It seems any new MacPro will only work with AMD video cards. And many video pros want NVIDIA and CUDA, as well as for science people who need proprietary CUDA support! Honestly it means that likely there will be no accessible pci slots in the new MacPro, and not even thunderbolt support for NVIDIA.
There were all these rumors that the exclusivity with AMD ended as of 2019, but it seems Apple is done with NVIDIA. Hell there were even rumors that 2xxx series work with startup unlike all non-supported apple cards, and if that is true Apple is actively supressing NVIDIA!
Now I hear from friends that the new iMac Pro is awesome, but I hate no PCI slots or extra internal storage! Hell you can get PC’s with built in Raids that don’t even require sleds for spinning hard drives. I mean a macpro with an external raid would blow people’s minds! Even if it was a “module” you could add on!
I don’t want to move to Windows. I love my surface, because I can run real photoshop, but would rather have it be a mac, and I want my computer to ge a mac, but am more and more scared that a mac will not be great for a pro.
So Apple has released it’s latest OS, OS X 10.14 Mojave, and it dropped Open CL support, breaking many legacy programs and also unfortunately breaking NVIDIA’s CUDA.
Apple has released a list of cards that are compatible with Metal and will work with Mojave. It lists 2 old Mac Edition NVIDIA cards as working (though with really old drivers that won’t work with any modern card) and a slew of AMD cards (also with issues I will get into later).
So for many OSes NVIDIA has been releasing Web Drivers and CUDA drivers that gave support to 3rd party NVIDIA cards within a MacPro 5,1 (or flashed 4,1).
Unfortunately it seems that Mojave broke CUDA support, and NVIDIA has not been able to get it working, so they haven’t even released Web Drivers. The link says that they need to work with Apple to get it working, which may mean it will never happen. As Apple has only released machines with AMD cards since someone at NVIDIA leaked the specs on a computer before a Steve Jobs Keynote.
So anyone with an NVIDIA card can’t upgrade to Mojave (well you can but without any video card acceleration it will be a mostly useless computing experience).
This does not give confidence that the promised new Mac Pro for 2019 will be able to use NVIDIA cards either. And I for one have been greatly impressed with NVIDIA cards and CUDA acceleration.
And the issue above with AMD cards come into play here. AMD cards do support metal and do it very well, but they are continually beaten by NVIDIA cards not only in performance, but especially in power consumption and heat generation.
And the fact that AMD cards will work in a MacPro 5,1 in Mojave is great (though without any boot screens as they are not flashed for Mac), but the power consumption of those cards is not. So even the consumer Radeon RX 580, 570 or even 560 can draw too much power for a MacPro and cause power spikes and crashes. The solution is to either hack your mac’s power supply by tapping into all the power cables to draw enough power, or run an external power supply for your video card (made more difficult since all my PCI cards are full with a USB 3 card, a Blackmagic card and an ssd hard drive).
And NVIDIA cards use so much less power that you can easily run an NVIDIA GTX 1080 8GB in a MacPro and it will outperform an RX 580 (check this out at Barefeat). And sure the RX Vega 64 beats the GTX 1080, but it requires an external power supply and if you were going to go that the GTX 1080Ti beats the AMD. And it gets even worse if you check the Metal scores, as even the GTX 1070 beats the RX VEGA 64 significantly in Metal scores, and the Vega 64 has huge issues with Fans and drivers support.
So will NVIDIA fix CUDA, or are they giving up on Mac? And if they are giving up on Mac what is the solution for us NVIDIA card users in our old MacPros? The new MacPro is still vaporware. So it looks like sticking to High Sierra is the only solution and hope Adobe keeps supporting High Sierra till the new MacPro comes out.
And then it will be time to see if it is time to move to Windows or get a new MacPro.
EDIT: Mojave was released September 24th and it is October 27th. Am really starting to think this is not happening at all.
Digital Photography Review has a cool article on the new tech NVIDIA is showing off, using AI to slow normal footage down, and even slow down already slow motion footage.
This is pretty amazing. I wonder how long this takes to crank out. I mean Twixtor is pretty good, but these results are pretty amazing.
You can go to Apple and and see the new features announced for iOS, MacOS, AppleTV OS and Apple Watch OS. And things do look good, but there was no new hardware announcements at all. And especially no mention of the new MacPro. This is Apple flipping the bird at Pro users. As was all the talk of egpu support (which doesn’t support NVIDIA which most pros want).
Does this mean the MacPro won’t even be shown off until 2019? And if so WTF! And no mention if the next os will still support the MacPro 5,1! This is so insulting. Will pros be kicked off their machines with no sign of what the new pro machine will be?
I mean I like some of what was announced. The new OS sounds good, but can I run it?
Or should I have moved to Windows ages ago?
So Matthew Panzarino from TechCrunch has had another meeting with Apple about Pro Machines, a year after their last roundtable when they announced the iMac Pro. It seems this is meant to assuage fears of the pro community and show that Apple is now focusing it’s attention on Pros and building a modular Mac Pro to work for them, that won’t appear until 2019 (Likely end of December just like the iMac Pro which means almost another 3 years wait from the initial announcement and almost 2 years from now).
OK it is good that Apple has hired pros to come in and work with them on projects and help shape the future of all Mac Pro products, and they claim to be working with 3rd party developers and not just apple products, though it sounds like Panzarino only saw Apple Logic and Apple Final Cut Pro X edit bays. And what really scares me is the modularity seems to be things like the external eGPU’s for Laptops, and using multiple iPad Pros with an iMac Pro as control surfaces. None of these are bad things, but they are not PCI slot rich MacPro’s that can use off the shelf PC Cards to expand and enhance the mac, and Thunderbolt is not ever going to be as fast as the fastest PCI slots.
And honestly if Apple is so into working with 3rd parties to make their products work, how about working with NVIDIA to include their Web Drivers in their system updates? Many of us struggling Mac Pro users are using the most powerful modern video cards in our old Cheese Grater Mac Pro’s and that means using NVIDIA cards. And while with some system updates have not required me to swap back to my old Apple flashed video card, most of them do. So I now dread system updates. Not because they are undoable, but because they take me so long to have to swap out my video card and run the update and then upgrade NVIDIA’s drivers, before I swap back to my old video card. And it never goes perfectly, and always takes hours. If you want to care about Pro users, help us NVIDIA users out!
Also Final Cut Pro X was my final straw in trusting Apple Pro software. I bought it and it just didn’t work for me at all. It forced an entirely new way of editing and seemed to only work with that one workflow. While with AVID and Premiere Pro every editor has their own methodology that they use, and that is how Editors like it, not being forced to work one way and one way only with a completely uncontrollable timeline. And Apple has killed so much great pro software. Final Cut Pro 7. Shake. Color. Aperature. I just don’t trust them anymore. And I almost wish they would get out of Pro Software completely and just work with AVID and ADOBE to make their software work better. Now they claim to be working with them in this article, but it doesn’t sound like they have AVID and Premiere Pro edit bays at Apple for their pros they have hired. And who are these pros? I would love to know. And I would love to hear them talk a bit, not just some tech writers.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I want the Cheese Grater Mac Pro upgraded with modern technology! Yes it should include Thunderbolt so it can be modular and use eGPU’s if I want to, but I want to use off the shelf PCI cards to upgrade it. And I want internal storage! And not just one hard drive, multiple hard drives. And hell an attachable RAID that takes drives directly without a sled would not be horrible, but I can always get an external. All this modular talk scares me.
The more I hear the more scared I get that I will end up replacing my aging MacPro with a Windows Box. And I know Windows has gotten better (I have a Surface Pro 3), but I still don’t like using it like I use a Mac. I am just worried that all this modularity talk sounds more and more like something like the Trashcan macpro that just isn’t what people want, as making a new cheesegrater should not take 2 years! It sounds like they are trying too hard. And when Apple tries too hard we get things like the Trashcan or the Mac Book Pro with weird ass touch strip instead of the touch screen that everyone actually wants.
Who is Apple talking too? Who have they hired? The high end people working big movies like those mentioned, are not working on their own gear. They have rental gear, or working at a company. What about us Editors who work on our own gear? Or small companies with a few Mac Pros? Are they in the mix and talking to Apple?
Or even worse maybe the Apple making it’s own Chips rumors is true, and they are waiting for that. Which would be a disaster. Making it harder to maintain Mac and Windows versions.
And what happens if my Mac Pro finally kicks the bucket before then? I have already replaced a -power supply. I am not moving to an iMac, so that will likely mean I move off the Mac completely.
Apple as a Pro users I am well and truly scared, and if you cared you would be working faster, and not taking 3 years to show a machine that might not work at all for me and might finally drive me well and completely to windows.
So after some posts online at various forums, it seemed to be that my crashing issues were what I feared. My EVGA NVIDIA GTX 680 4GB was causing the crashes.
Unfortunately MacVidCards seems to not have had any stock since September 2016, so I wasn’t going to get a flashed replacement card.
So I started looking for a PC NVIDIA GTX 980 4 GB with 2 6 pin power supply. This was much easier said than done. There are still quite a few new 980’s out there, but most of them either have 2 8 pin, or 1 8 pin and 1 6 pin for their power supplies. Looks like with the 10 series out (even though those won’t work in a Mac since NVIDIA hasn’t bothered writing drivers for them) that the 6 pin 980 have become rather sparse.
Finally I was able to find a ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX 980 4GB AMP! Edition which had the requisite 2 6 pin adapters, and a bit of a speed increase over stock along with 3 fans instead of 2. I had never even heard of ZOTAC before, but most reviews seem like it is a pretty good company.
I got the card and installed it, no startup screen of course, but it runs great. And speed tests show it is about 100% faster than the 670 I had installed, and it works great, the crashes are gone. And Premiere Pro runs great!