Mon Jan 13, 2020 3:07 am
I'm a bit late to the party; it looks like this conversation is well underway. For what it's worth, my current rig:
Mac Pro (2019)
- 16-core Xeon
- Vega II GPU (single)
- 96GB RAM
Of the three NLEs I've run on it so far (FCPX, Pr, and Resolve) Resolve is, by far, the snappiest. My source and output files are all long-GOP formats; h.264 and h.265. 4K/60FPS. Each of the NLEs handles the files as best it can, but Resolve's handling of them is quite a bit faster.
Now, the GPU. For rendering, it's faster than the upcoming W5700X, as far as I can tell (based on the specs). However, from a hardware encoding/decoding perspective, the Vega GPUs are a couple of generations old and are, unfortunately, a bit slow. When I say "slow", I mean the card can encode a 4K/60 h.265 in real time. If the video is 10 minutes long, the encoding will be ~10 minutes long. There's little that can be done about that because, again, the hardware encoder on the Vega II is too old. The newer 5700-series cards from AMD have a much newer and faster encoder on them. It's assumed the W5700X will be identical. That means it should be able to encode in 75% of the time at the same output type. If not faster.
So, you have to figure out what's most important: rendering or encoding? What do you want to be "faster"? I do wish the W5700X was available when I purchased my rig as I'd have saved some money, and would have a faster encoder/decoder. That's not to say the Vega II is a bad card; it's not. But I'm not spending a bunch of time rendering; I'm waiting for the encodes.
System: Mac Pro (2019)
CPU: 3.2GHz 16-core Xeon
GPU: AMD Radeon Pro Vega II
RAM: 96GB
Storage: 1TB sys drive, 8TB NVMe RAID01, 4TB SSD RAID0