What’s the currently best GPU in 2021 for Mac, or for macOS in general?
Big Navi is finally here and I had the chance to buy Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6800
XT Special Edition and because I’m simply amazing I did for you some tests and benchmarks
with this card in my 2019 Mac Pro so you can judge yourself if the RX 6800 XT is the best
GPU for Mac.
So here you have it…
Hi, I’m Teresa from morgonaut.cloud and I provide personal individual support with
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In my 2019 Mac Pro I have Radeon Pro W5500 just to drive my displays, so the performance
of the 6800 XT is the best possible.
RX 6800 XT is recognised out of the box, you don’t need to install any drivers, it just
works.
For the purpose of this video I removed my two Radeon Pro Vega II cards from my 2019
Mac Pro and into the first slot I installed this 6800 XT.
Let’s start with Geekbench 5 compute test.
Mac Pro (Late 2019), 16-core Xeon, so let’s run the Metal benchmark.
183308 score, that’s insane.
So is the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT better than my Apple branded Radeon Pro Vega II cards
which costs $5,600?
Of course I did the test for you too, have a look.
103577.
So this single AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Big Navi monster in my 2019 Mac Pro is in Geekbench
5 almost as fast as TWO Vega Pro II cards together.
That’s incredible.
Next is Luxmark - openCL benchmark.
Luxball scene score is 56278, Neumann scene score is 43087 and Lobby scene score is 10912.
I shoot on Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K so for me is important Blackmagic RAW performance.
Blackmagic RAW speed Test, 8K resolution with 12:1 compression, 84 FPS on CPU, but 164 FPS
on GPU.
Now let’s jump to the Candle benchmark in latest DaVinci Resolve 17.2.2.
Again the RX 6800 XT is recognised out of the box, so let’s enable it just for compute
tasks and let the Radeon Pro W5500 just drive my displays.
Let’s load 66 blur nodes.
29 fps.
That’s insane.
Let’s load 6 noise reduction nodes to put it finally on it’s knees :)
34 fps.
So again, how is the 6800 XT compared to my Radeon Pro Vega II card for $2800?
I ran the test for you too.
Only 18.5 fps.
Hmm.
And the 6 blur nodes?
26, 26.5 fps.
So again huge win for the RX 6800 XT in 2019 Mac Pro.
So the 6800 XT is 56.7% faster than the Vega Pro II in 66 blur nodes and 30%
faster in 6 TRN nodes.
So let’s test it now on real project, on one of my past videos.
In my 2019 Mac Pro I have the Apple Afterburner card, FPGA which accelerates Apple ProRes
decoding, so for fair results I disabled it, because my 4K timeline project contains some
4K ProRes footage.
As well as some 6K Blackmagic RAW, H.265 footage and sequence of EXR files.
And the whole project is in 4K HDR ! I will disable all optimisations, no render cache,
deleted render cache.
That’s no surprise the scrubbing is absolutely lightning fast :) So let’s export the video
to 4K HDR ProRes 422 HQ.
I kept for you the Update during render enabled, if disabled the render time would be even faster.
Color graded 6K Blackmagic RAW it renders at 73.5 fps = that’s more than 3 times faster
than realtime.
In 4K HDR! Help......
So here we have results.
This video is 3 minutes 32 seconds long and the AMD RX 6800 XT GPU in 16-core 2019 Mac
Pro rendered it in just 1 minute and 21 seconds.
Are you courious how fast will this project be rendered on my TWO Radeon Pro Vega II cards?
So two Vega Pro II cards against single RX 6800 XT :) Unfair?
I have the result for you.
In just 1 minute and 3 seconds.
So yes, sure it’s faster with 2 GPUs which are even connected via infinity Fabric Link.
So the RX 6800 XT is only!
22% slower than two Vega Pro II cards, but obviously much faster than a single Vega Pro
II card.
And much cheaper :) Huge win for Big Navi in Mac Pro.
At the time of shooting this video in latest macOS Big Sur 11.4 and latest iStatMenus and
TG Pro the temperature readout is not present.
So you can just only guess if it’s hot or not buy the noise it comes from the Mac Pro.
During several minutes long maximum load the RX 6800 XT fans were audible, but absolutely
not as loud as the Mac Pro fans can be.
So what do you think?
Leave me a comment down below if you think the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is the best GPU
for macOS or in my case for 2019 Mac Pro or not.
My opinion is clear.
Yes, it is.
Because if you compare the 6800 XT to the 6900 XT, the 6900 XT is much more expensive,
but delivers only few % advantage over the 6800 XT.
BTW if you’re thinking about getting just the AMD RX 6800 without the XT, then I have
good news for you again.
I prepared for you same tests with RX 6800 too.
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Bye bye my Macintosh friends.