AMD RADEON VII, any one tried this card on mac pro?

[Demetri79]

I'm considering getting an AMD RADEON VII instead of my Nvidia GTX 1080Ti, that turned out to be useless. curious if anyone has tested the VII with isadora, I did a search and saw no posts even mention the card. It is billed as one of the most powerfull cards made by AMD .. which is what I need.. looking for the most powerful card I can put in a mac pro 2012.. any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. 

[Fred]

@demetri79 your 1080ti is a really great card, not sure what problems you had in the mac pro, but the throughput on that machine is much lower than a modern motherboard so getting actual good performance from modern GPUs will be hard. The power supply cannot deliver enough power for a 1080ti - maybe you have another PSU running the GPU? The VII uses even more power - 300w so for sure you need something else to give it the power. There are some mods for the exsiting PSU - maybe you have done this already - https://thehouseofmoth.com/mac-pro-pixlas-mod/ this is pretty hacky as the PSU is still limited. At any rate you will get less performance from that card (and any modern card) in the old mac pro so the benchmarks and reviews you see my well not apply.

[Woland]

@Demetri79 said:

my Nvidia GTX 1080Ti, that turned out to be useless

I highly suggest that you hang onto your GTX 1080Ti and build a Windows 10 machine around that. As @Fred said, it's a great card, the problem is just that you're trying to combine it with a machine from 2012. If you're trying to custom-build a powerful, affordable computer for video it's much more viable to build a Windows 10 machine. You can get more bang for your buck if your entire machine is modern rather than trying to splice a few cutting-edge components into a machine that's nearly a decade old. 

[Fred]

@demetri79 or if you insist on a mac you can always hackintosh in which case the VII is a good call, but it seems to point that the rest of the hardware in that machine is not up to scratch. Im pretty sure the 2012 models had the same motherboard as 2008/9 models, that is some antique gear. If you can step away from mac (likely a good time to start as everything moves to arm) then the 1080ti is a keeper.

[Demetri79]

@Fred  @Woland ..I did the pixelas mod and the power should be more than adequate according to MACVIDCARDS , I had the card flashed with their proprietary EFI boot rom which didn't not affect performanc.. i tested before and after. so I am feeding the card  6 pin power from the pixelas mod and then dual mini 6 pin to single 8 pin from the 2 pcie power busses.. these 2 feeds combined should be more than enough. I have seen lots of other post great results and impressive benchmarks with this same machine and card.. I know its old but I got all aftermarket best parts available and the performance should be close to the new mac pro in some ways (not all).. i just cant afford being another machine at this point..and i've never used windows in my life so thats a steep learning curve in matters this complex.. my mac expertise very high and my knowledge demands are huge.. but i would like to to try installing windows 10 on this and see how that performs as a test.. if i can figure out how to get everything running.

i want to find out for sure if this is an nvidia problem not playing well with my machine.. so ill test a couple AMD cards.. I went ahead and bought an AMD Sapphire Nitro RX 590 and an AMD Sapphire radeon vega 64 and will test both and see how they compare to the nvidia.. got them on amazon and you can return anything .. but I'm leaning towards staying away from the Radeon VII since it means i cant use high sierra anymore which would open new problems for me:

1. no more isadora 2.6 with amazing 32 bit free frames (a ton of amazing stuff thats not available on 64 bit), 

2. and it would cause incompatibilities with my other audio software.. 

so that means the vega 64 is probably the most powerful option i can get from AMD but want to see how good the rx 590 .. the if i kept the 1080 i can never upgrade mac OS later in the future (i plan to build a mojave installation so i can dual boot when i need) so I'm gonna send it back... luckily got an extension since I've had it 2 months. but ill do a few more test as some of you have suggested first..

i really appreciate everyones times. my patch is super huge and complex and it has performance problems, and bugs already so i really need an amazingly powerful system to even make it barely work.. hopefully in a year or 2 i can get a modern top end machine.

[Fred]

@demetri79 glad that you see a way out, definitely though if costs are a big limitation (as always) I would really look at upgrading to V3 and then replacing the CI and other actors that are not available and in general fixing your patch. Isadora 3 is a big leap in features and performance, and with a bit of work I would be surprised if there are things you cannot replace with GLSL actors. Keeping everything on a high end GPU like the VII and using GLSL will give you a lot of performance, especially if things only go from the CPU to GPU once. Also going to V3 bit by bit now will get your ready for the future when you wont have an option for modern OS's to use V2.

[Demetri79]

@fred I am using isadora 3 I just also use 2.6 when I need to use some of the old 32 free frames.. and the old version of data moshing.. but most my work is on V3 now.

So i got rid of the 1080 and ended up buying the Sapphire Radeon Vega 64 and the Sapphire Nitro RX 590.. the 590 had poor performance even worse than the 1080 and 5770.. so that one is going back.. The vega 64 however is the best that I have tested so far.. not a huge performance increase but a noticeable one so Ill stick with that one.. I also went ahead with a mojave partition and tested on isadora 3 and 2.6 and had the same results as on high sierra.. so no sliceable reason to move to mojave.. thus I won't end up getting the Radeon VII since its it would lock me into mojave. So overall things are working mostly well its just the intermittent glitches and crashes due to CI and QTZ actors that I can't remove since there are no equivalent replacements.

[Fred]

@demetri79 can you let us know what the things are you can't replace, you never know what's possible.