new iMac Pro supported? (pre-order Thursday!)

The new iMac Pro is available for pre-order this Thursday. 8-core and 10-core models readily available, 14-core (yep!) and 18-core available beginning of the year.

Since reviews started coming out today, I assume NDA's are no longer in place and I would love to hear from BlackMagic whether or not it will work with Resolve Studio 14.1.1 ... Peter? Rohit? I'm about to order one and I just want to make sure there's no weird performance/compatibility issues with Resolve. I assume you guys have been testing one for a while? As we know, macOS 10.13.2 update breaks OpenCL and Metal in Resolve, so it would seem there is already one big problem there -- the new iMac Pro will come with 10.13.2...

I plan on buying as many cores as I can afford (might not be 18) with the 16GB Vega 64 video card (performance supposedly on par with 1080 TI ?). I'm also planning on adding a second Vega card (Frontier Edition 16GB) in the newly released TB3 550W Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box (550W version is needed for Vega). I know eGPU support is not yet official with 10.13.2 but apparently it already works (plug-and-play, no hacking involved). I understand that bit might not yet be optimized/bug-free, but over time I am hoping eGPU on iMac Pro will fully work and be supported in Resolve? If we are able to add a second or even a third Vega card with eGPU TB3 boxes, those iMac Pro's should perform really well. One could even add a Titan V, or two Titan XP's or 1080 TI's (and leave the internal Vega for GUI-only).

Once I test this setup at home, we are planning to order four iMac Pro's at work to replace our four 2013 12-core Mac Pro's. That should carry us over until the new Mac Pro comes out (realistically 2019?). We just can't wait 12-18 months, and we have to stick with Mac's because the rest of our ecosystem is Apple (20+ machines) and it's working very well for us.

with the 16GB Vega 64 video card (performance supposedly on par with 1080 TI ?

I doubt it but I'll follow here to see what's going on. Good luck.

What do you mean by "supported"?

DaVinci Resolve already runs on MacBook Pros and iMacs.

Even a normal PC version of the Vega 64 card isn't as fast in Resolve as a 1080 Ti, and the Vega 64 in the iMac Pros are running a little bit slower than a normal PC card.

But seeing how I get work done on a single RX 480 8GB card, of course you'll be able to work quite nicely with the new iMac Pros.

And then there's always the option of adding an eGPU too, in addition to using the internal card.

What do you mean by "supported"?

DaVinci Resolve already runs on MacBook Pros and iMacs.

Even a normal PC version of the Vega 64 card isn't as fast in Resolve as a 1080 Ti, and the Vega 64 in the iMac Pros are running a little bit slower than a normal PC card.

But seeing how I get work done on a single RX 480 8GB card, of course you'll be able to work quite nicely with the new iMac Pros.

And then there's always the option of adding an eGPU too, in addition to using the internal card.

Indeed. To that last statement I would add two things (not based on under-the-hood knowledge, but having read as deeply into this as one can on the Internet):

1. The only case in which Resolve performance measurably increases with a second GPU is when it comes to temporal noise reduction. If that's your life, you'll want two (or more) GPUs. If that's something you do rarely, resolve will happily juggle the load from one card to another, with the slight decrease in performance that comes from constantly asking the question "which if you two GPUs wants to do the next task?"
2. A second GPU can be used to offload display responsibilities, but this is a very, very minimal gain. A 5K display at 30 bit depth, double-buffered, with alpha, is still less than 100MB of VRAM. Could you reach a point on your 8GB or 16GB GPU that you hit a wall that could have been avoided with an extra 100MB of VRAM? Maybe. But if you overrun your multi-GB card, chances are you've overrun it by more than 0.05 or 0.1 GB.

Indeed. To that last statement I would add two things (not based on under-the-hood knowledge, but having read as deeply into this as one can on the Internet):

1. The only case in which Resolve performance measurably increases with a second GPU is when it comes to temporal noise reduction. If that's your life, you'll want two (or more) GPUs. If that's something you do rarely, resolve will happily juggle the load from one card to another, with the slight decrease in performance that comes from constantly asking the question "which if you two GPUs wants to do the next task?"
2. A second GPU can be used to offload display responsibilities, but this is a very, very minimal gain. A 5K display at 30 bit depth, double-buffered, with alpha, is still less than 100MB of VRAM. Could you reach a point on your 8GB or 16GB GPU that you hit a wall that could have been avoided with an extra 100MB of VRAM? Maybe. But if you overrun your multi-GB card, chances are you've overrun it by more than 0.05 or 0.1 GB.

On my Mac Pro 5.1 Resolve performance increased pretty much linearly by adding a second, identical card.

My fps almost doubled in a normal node setup (own project) and Candle test with blur nodes, so I'm not sure where you got your info?

Adding a gfx card is probably the best price/performance upgrade you can do for Resolve. But I have a 12 core CPU. If someone uses a CPU intensive codec (or debayering raw) on a weak 4 core CPU, they might be limited there and then another gfx card won't add as much. But the whole image editing pipeline runs on the gfx card apart from decoding/debayering.