Resolve + Mac Pro setup

Hi Everyone, Happy (nearly) post-pandemic.

My trash can Mac Pro has a thunderbolt bus dying-- rather than go through that mess (again), I bought a used 2019 Mac Pro. It saved thousands off list, for which I am grateful, but it still ran about $9500 after shipping and tax.

16-core processor (32 threads) 96Gb RAM, 4Tb, Radeon 580x.

I will likely expand the RAM and add the Afterburner card since I cut exclusively in ProRes. But I know nothing about video cards, at least modern ones.

What is a great video card setup for this Mac for Resolve and After Effects? I use particles A LOT, mostly in AE with Particular. I do some stuff in the Fusion page, but nodes are a slow learn for an old AE layer hacker like me.

Higher resolutions aren't a concern, I deal mostly in 1080p, occasionally 4k, but I try to stick 1080 to save drive space. I never deal with anything over 4k.

Thanks for your thoughts.

You may not really need an Afterburner, that machine will fly with ProRes in HD, even 4K should be no problem. The Radeon 580 may not be the latest and greatest, but it's a very stable workhorse. I never had any driver issue or the like. Compared to your old 'Trashcan' you'll be positively surprised as it is anyway.

IIRC, Particular is based on OpenCL. It should work nicely with your 580. Fusion standalone should work very well too with those CPU cores and the large RAM. It's a shame you can get Trapcode Particular only for AE, but Particle Illusion is slowly catching up.

...bought a used 2019 Mac Pro...16-core processor (32 threads) 96Gb RAM, 4Tb, Radeon 580x...I will likely expand the RAM and add the Afterburner card since I cut exclusively in ProRes...What is a great video card setup for this Mac for Resolve and After Effects?...

Afterburner only accelerates *decode* of ProRes and ProRes RAW. It does nothing for encode, render or anything else. Resolve does not support ProRes RAW, so AB would be only for ProRes decoding in your case, which does not need hardware acceleration -- it is already optimized media.

Re an improved GPU, yes that would help, especially for Resolve. The 580x is OK but not really fast. I recollect some tests showing varying efficiency of GPUs being utilized on the 2019 Mac Pro, but I don't remember the specifics.

I wouldn't just buy an expensive GPU based on synthetic benchmarks. You want reviewers who used application benchmarks with various GPUs in the 2019 Mac Pro, focusing on the software and workloads you use.

If you do work in Fusion, you want to see various Mac Pro benchmarks or user feedback using that. If you use largely After Effects, you could probably get better advice on a forum for that.