Mark Aceto Posted July 16, 2018 Share Posted July 16, 2018 Thanks, @zoomer. What are the 2 GPU's? I'm only aware of the 580. Considering that the WX9100 costs $1600 before an enclosure, and VW can't take full advantage of GPU acceleration yet, the 580 might actually be a great solution for the next yearly cycle of Vectorworks/Apple hardware. BTW the baseline for me is the 1080 Ti... so whatever AMD chip will get me as close to that performance on a Mac. Quote Link to comment
zoomer Posted July 16, 2018 Share Posted July 16, 2018 (edited) I think there won't be any NVidia GPU on Mac in the foreseeable future. So whatever new GPU AMD will bring is welcome and we can only hope that Apple supports it. I forgot where I read about the list of GPUs, maybe on german heise.de or on Mac Rumors. But I remember that I wondered as Apple not only mentioned RX 560 and 580 GPU in general but also a special Vendor for each of them. EDIT Maybe this helps ? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/29/state-of-egpu-apple-introduces-official-egpu-support-in-macos-10-13-4-internal-display-acceleration-opt-in/ Edited July 16, 2018 by zoomer Quote Link to comment
Mark Aceto Posted July 16, 2018 Share Posted July 16, 2018 Oh, wow, looks like the WX 9100 is already compatible: Quote AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, Vega Frontier Edition Air, and Radeon Pro WX 9100 These graphics cards are based on the AMD Vega 64 architecture. Recommended graphics cards include the Sapphire Vega 64, XFX Vega 64, AMD Frontier Edition air-cooled, and AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100. Recommended Thunderbolt 3 chassis for these graphics cards: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 650W3 So that's probably as close to the 1080 ti as I could get! Quote Link to comment
DomC Posted July 19, 2018 Share Posted July 19, 2018 (edited) Hi We tested NVIDIA and AMD in comparison in a small frame on Windows. So far there were some little surprises by the result: 1. Zoom/pan differences are as expectably the same as the etablished open GL benchmarks. So NVIDIA 1080ti is fastest by zooming paning big models than 580 and would be a little faster than vega I guess. So far no surprice. AMD consumer cards have better price value than NVIDIA. NVIDIA wins the High End scope by he consumer cards with 1080ti 2. Quadro Based Graphic Cards have similar hardware and so I expected nearly same performance. But as far as I could test, the Quadro drivers performs better with Wireframe and Planar Objects. This is hard to measure but M2000 wins agains a GTX 1060 which have a much higher Hardware performance. As I told this is hard to measure ... 3. If I have a specific drawing with much of png pictures on it and I switch to this layer the first time in the session I can wait with an invidia card about 20 seconds till all ojects are visible on the screen. With an amd it takes about 5 seconds. Seems that processing the drawing to the graphic driver could be faster in some specific cases with AMD cards. A normal 2D 3D Plan have no measurable difference between amd nvidia or between High End Graphic or cheap graphic for navigation between layers/layout/classes/saved views. It seems mainly be related to the cpu single thread performance. Edited July 19, 2018 by DomC 2 Quote Link to comment
Mark Aceto Posted July 19, 2018 Share Posted July 19, 2018 3 minutes ago, DomC said: It seems mainly be related to the cpu single thread performance. Yup. Quote Link to comment
zoomer Posted July 19, 2018 Share Posted July 19, 2018 1 hour ago, DomC said: We tested NVIDIA and AMD Great, thank you. I am especially interested in all details between the gaming and pro GPUs. Interesting that there are still small differences, although VW, like many others, claims not using any specific pro driver features. I think that in CAD and 3D Apps there may still be some features used (like Cross Hair Cursors and such) that are artificially disabled on hardware by drivers, not included or not optimized in gamings drivers and so emulated in software done by CPU. While still existing in overall pro drivers and allowing faster GPU hardware acceleration. For Apps like SolidWorks which really makes use of App-optimized Pro drivers, it is offen that a cheap power saving P1000 works still much better that latest GeForce monsters in 3D/CAD specific tasks. That may not have any relevance on Mac but Windows only (maybe also a little on Linux with proprietary GPU drivers) but it would make these Pro GPUs still very interesting for me. Differences between AMD vs NVidia are interesting too of course. Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted July 19, 2018 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted July 19, 2018 2 hours ago, DomC said: It seems mainly be related to the cpu single thread performance. This is the core of almost the entirety of the remaining performance issues. Even more being pulled off of it in 2019 but still more to be multithreaded planned after that. 2 1 Quote Link to comment
DomC Posted July 19, 2018 Share Posted July 19, 2018 Quote but still more to be multithreaded Beside that. We took a look at other CAD applications in the same market segment. They do not really take more advantage from multi-core CPUs than Vectorworks. They all need seperate threads for more or less the same actions. Also the gaming industry are trying to use advantage of more cores. People thinking it would be easy to just split every action on 32 cores and make it 32times faster. I think this is something where VW Inc. team makes a great job, thanks. 1 Quote Link to comment
Jack D Posted July 27, 2018 Share Posted July 27, 2018 So in terms of working with what apple recommends, has anyone done a Vega64 vs Pro 7100 test on an MBP 15" touchbar yet? They're roughly the same price and the vega64 seems a lot stronger on paper but I don't know much about this stuff. Quote Link to comment
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