Installing a Radeon Vega Frontier Edition in a 2010 Mac Pro

So I did some more real world tests, but first I should mention something I forgot in my original post, which is that the retail Vega Frontier does not give you boot screen or verbose mode, but recovery and safe mode both work.

On to the tests. I just did a big video wall project, and I used the Premiere timeline from that to test how the Vega compared to my old R9 290x in Premiere rendering and AME encoding. Now for some AE tests from that same project. These tests will not be comparing against my old card, but rather the two top end 2013 Mac Pros I rented for render nodes (12-core, 2x D700, 64 GB).

Also, I'm an idiot and have lots of background apps running, which I kept running for the sake of real-world testing. The 2013 Mac Pros only had a clean install of High Sierra, AE, AME and the plugins I needed

1st test: 3D scene in Video Copilot Element 3D in AE. Big slowdown here was all the lighting. Rendered at 1080p60 with MB and DOF blur.

2013 Mac Pro: 197 min

2010 Mac Pro Vega: 150 min

2nd test: 3D motion track on 11 short shots, with lots of layers composited on top. Lots of basic effects (drop shadow, glow, etc) on the layers. MB and DOF blur on. 1080p30

2013 Mac Pro: 32 min

2010 Mac Pro Vega: 30 min

3rd test: 3D scene in Element 3D again, except the big slowdown here was the 63 video textures bombing the VRAM. MB and DOF blur on, 1080p30. Here I had to estimate the time of the 2010's time from an overnight 7 hr render.

2013 Mac Pro: 106 hrs

2010 Mac Pro Vega: 98 hrs (est)

So the performance of my rig is at least as good as a top-end 2013 Mac Pro now

Final note here is that I discovered my first driver glitch. Not a show stopper, but I still don't like it. I have my Mac set to not sleep, but dim the monitors (BenQ SW2700s) after 10 min of inactivity. When I wake up the monitors, my secondary monitor looks like this:

Forcing any redraw on the screen, like moving a window over to that desktop, brings the picture back. This makes me wonder if there's a wake-from-sleep issue hiding in here that I'm not seeing because I don't use sleep. To be clear, this seems to only be with the AE renders.

Anyway, pretty happy about the upgrade

They run side by side. The regular one in the case powers everything but the card and the Thermaltake powers the card via some extension cables out the back.

Lance Mcvickar wrote:

How are the fans in the Vega 64 noise level wise when your rendering stuff?

Sorry, I just realized I clicked on your links, got sucked into Beth Hart YouTube, and never answered your question.

Much quieter than my previous Sapphire R9 290X, which worked great but was a noisy beast with it's double fan design. I much prefer the sealed design of the Vega with hot air sucked out the back of the case

I have 29 Ultrastars in 2 RAID cases, so it's a pretty noisy studio to begin with, even with the quietest fans I could find. Yes, it's annoying.

I had a 980 Ti and I found the driver thing to be too much of a pain in the ***, so I switched back to the R9 290x and now the Vega. I have a Mac so I don't have to mess around with these things, but the 980 was undoubtedly fast, probably in the same range as the new Vega. I would imagine the 1080 is even faster. Having to hold back on important security updates was the final straw for me, YMMV

FYI, the Vega 64s and 56s seem to be back in stock

Hi Apple, when you edited this post without telling me why, you messed up the formatting and I can no longer edit to make it right. My bullet list is all screwed up, but most notably the landscape orientation photos are now squished into a square aspect. Please fix. Thank you

The took down the About this Mac screen, I guess because I left the startup drive name in there, tho not the SN. But anyway, too many spaces in the bullets, and the landscape photos are squished horizontally on my browser. It makes me look like an idiot video editor who doesn't know how to properly format text and images.

Yeah, I started as an Avid editor in the 90s and I still keep a license and use it a couple of times a year, but what you describe was one of my many problems with Avid that chased me from their iron grip when FCP 2.0 and the first BlackMagic Decklink SDI card came out around 2001 (uncompressed SD to my graphite G4 for $1k -- a miracle!). Switched to Premiere after the X debacle, and I've been largely happy with it. It remains buggy, and Adobe makes certain software design choices that confuse me, but since the CC subscriptions started, they are very aggressive with updates, and support for new macOS updates (for example, early Metal support). Also, I love me some After Effects, and after using Automatic Duck for 10 years, I love the tight integration with Premiere.

FWIW, multicam stuff works well in Premiere, at least in my recent experience with a music video where I had 14 sync performance takes. Here 'tis:

Andra Day - Stand Up For Something feat. Common [Official Music Video] - YouTube

Looks like the Vega 64 smokes the Frontier (tho mostly in games). Interested in Adobe tests

My sympathies to anyone who deals with Avid/Digidesign as their vendors. They're much better than they used to be, but they retain some of their arrogance from when they were monopolies.