Paul Draper wrote:Personally, would take any Apple hype with a grain of salt, & especially re. their AMD GPUs.
There's not been any "hype" around the new W5700X release. In fact, Apple has said nothing about it at all, other than when they introduced the Mac Pro. Then went silent on it other than having a "coming soon" note on said GPU. Like previous releases, this "coming soon" GPU just appeared. Folks only knew about it because they were religiously checking Apple's site waiting for the moment to buy.
The only interest I have in the card is its hardware encoding speed. It theoretically should be a good bit faster than the Vega GPUs at the same task. But getting someone to try and test that has been challenging.
In my case, an 11GB RTX 2080Ti running on a Dell workstation waaaay outperforms this overpriced /over-hyped 32GB Vega II on a Mac Pro.
I'm sure most of us would prefer an NVidia GPU in a Mac, but it's literally never going to happen again. I rarely say "never", but this is one of those times I feel comfortable doing so. Given that, it's really pointless to compare the two or kvetch about it. We know Apple and NVidia hate each other with a blinding passion. Which means Apple and NVidia are never going to work together again after the laptop fiasco of several years ago. It's over, done, finished, kaput. Neither company has the modesty or humility to apologize to the other.
That means if you want to stay in the Apple environment, you learn to bend the AMD GPUs to your needs. Can they perform like NVidia's can? Nope. Team Green will always have the advantage; they just make better GPUs across the board and always have. If you want Team Green, it means Windows or Linux; the Mac environment is out of the question.
Like many, am also watching this space carefully but I suspect we won't see anything comparable to Nvidia performance until
And like so many AMD releases of the past, they'll release something that's just as good as the previous generation of NVidia cards, while Jensen and crew are well into the next generation. Again: set expectations accordingly.
Ditto the 5700WX release: should have been released as the 'bog standard' card at the MP 7,1 release
Sure, but there wasn't a product ready for the Mac Pro. So either Apple delays releasing the Pro by almost five months(!) or they release it with a serviceable GPU until the W5700X is ready. They chose correctly, I believe.