hey guys it's lance at mac sound solutions and today i am probably doing my very final
upgrade to my mac pro 5.1 which is installing
this a black box actually it's an rx 6800 xt which is sold by sonnet technologies they make like usb
c cards and egpus but i think this is their first foray into selling gpus and rx 6800 xt was
never going to work in a mac pro 5.1 but thanks to syncretic i think i'm finally saying his name
correctly he created a patch to be able to patch the rom on these cards so that it will boot in a
mac pro five one so there's basically three things you have to do if you want to run an rx 6800 xt
or an rx 6900 xt number one you have to be running open core with big sur or monterey number two
you have to flash the card with syncretix patcher tool number three you gotta do the pixless mod
because there is not enough power being supplied by the two mini 6 pin connectors that are normally
used for your gpu and your mac pro you have to tap into that 950 watt power supply directly
and do the pixels mod i have the instructions in the links below on how to do the pixless mod i
followed the house of moths instructions he has a blog and he has a video on how to do it so there's
no reason for me to repeat what he has done again you got to patch the card in a windows computer
or a mac pro 71 running windows you cannot do it with a mac pro 5 one running windows
so when you take your graphics card to your buddy's house with the windows computer
you got to make sure it's got the correct power connections also which is dual 8 pin
so i was able to do it at my friend's place pull out his titan and put this in run the patcher tool
bingo and then voila it now shows up in my mac pro 5.1 now the other thing to know is the xt models
eat into your second slot so you lose your second 16 times slot you could just get the rx 6800 and
supposedly not have to do the pixes mod it runs off the internal power supply and it doesn't eat
into the second pcie slot so it'll be interesting to see somebody who just went for that card and
see what kind of scores they get compared to the scores i'm getting it'll be interesting how this
card performs because you know it's a 10 year old computer you're using the 10 year old cpu and
you're using pcie 2.0 these cards are pcie 4.0 and obviously a modern day cpu combined with this card
is going to perform better than it will in the mac pro 5 one so is it worth spending the money to get
one of these cards that's the question um i think my mac pro 5 one will be running faster than it
ever has it won't be as fast as a pc or a mac pro 7 one running with this card but it will be faster
than my mac pro using the 5700 xt that card i was able to power off the internal power supply i did
not have to do the pixis mod for the 5700 xt and the pixas mod always kind of scared me you know
just tapping into your mac pros power supply and actually when i first ran a game on this
card now when i first boot it up but when i first really taxed the card i think it was doom eternal
i smelt like burning plastic i'm like oh no what do i have a fire in my macro is something melting
but it really was just an initial burn in on the graphics card because it doesn't smell that way
anymore and i didn't see anything melted or any char marks anywhere thank god so let's get to the
benchmarks so in geekbench in the metal score we are getting almost twice the speed with the
rx 6800 xt than the rx 5700 xt so that is a big leap and in opencl not quite as big of a leap but
the rx 6800 xt is still way on top and here in luxmark the rx 6800 xt is getting a whopping 55
890. and this is not an overclock gpu this is the reference clock speeds and in windows we
get an even higher score of 58 346. so here are a couple of results from the lexmark website and
the top result is from an rx 6800 xt it's got a slightly higher clock speed than my stock card and
it's getting 60 000 and i'm getting 58 000 so you know old mac pro is keeping up with those results
then below that is the 6900 xt it's got 40 compute units instead of 36 and it's got the same clock
speed as mine but it's getting a higher score but it is a 6900 xt and here are the other two
benchmarks you can run in luxmark the microphone the neumann and the hotel lobby so again
pretty good scores and when you run this benchmark you can see the processor really gets maxed out
on the gpu whereas when you're editing in final cut pro x no matter what i did i could not get
my processor to go over 15 maybe 20 usage but i don't even think it hit 20 percent
i was rendering out an ak file it uses the gpus vram a lot but it's really not accessing the
processor as much as you would like apple sells these really expensive gpus for the mac pro 7.1
and in final cut it's just not really utilizing it as much as you would like maybe in davinci
resolve you'll get better results for all that money come on apple let's let's pump up that gpu
final cut seems to really be more cpu based than gpu based so all the marketing of using metal and
all of that seems to be a little bit of a mumbo jumbo and thanks to open core we have hardware
acceleration with this video card in our mac pro 5.1 so that speeds up the rendering process
so check this out here is a rx 6800xt metal score running in a mac pro 7.1 this is like
your average score 150 000 i'm getting 147 000 and you know basically it's smoking the apple m1 ultra
and it's in a 12 year old computer you know it's just a shame that apple won't let you use an egpu
with the m1s because even though you got 32 cores or 64 core gpu and these m1 ultras they are not
good for gaming okay let's move on to gaming in shadow of the tomb raider oddly enough i'm getting
slightly higher frame rates under mac os running metal than i am in directx 12 under windows but
only really in the benchmark pretty much the same settings although windows does have more settings
and you can turn ray tracing on which definitely drops you down about 10 frames a second but i did
not have that on during my test and if you look at gpu bound it's super low it's zero percent seven
percent under mac os and i believe what this means is the gpu is not the bottleneck here but the cpu
is the bottleneck even though the benchmark in mac os seems a little higher than windows the gameplay
is still better in windows and actually during the game i'm getting higher fps than i am in mac os
i don't know what's going on with the benchmark it's just a little weird to me
i can set it to 1080 1440. it doesn't seem to make a difference it's i'm always getting the same
results or very close to it so there's something funny going on with the benchmark but in game play
at 1440p in windows as you can see i'm getting like 120 frames per second sometimes it goes
down to 60 usually when you're in the outdoor environment you're getting lower frame rates
but overall gameplay is perfectly fine with shadow of the tomb raider running under windows ouch
sorry laura and in doom eternal i'm averaging about 150 frames per second
at 2k so yeah you can game with a mac pro 5 1 and an rx 6800 xt you know if you're just
into 1080p gaming the 6600xt is probably a good choice and you don't have to do any power mods
and you'll save like three to four hundred dollars okay and here is the old iconic
heaven benchmark i'm running a 2k and everything's on ultra except for tensilation is on normal
and i'm getting 85.6 frames per second a 6800 xt is only a little slower than the 6900 xt but
it also depends on what computer you put these cards in and here we can look at the apple m1 max
32 cores the 6800 xt absolutely blows that out of the water but this benchmark here is based
on the mac pro 7 one not the five one so is the rx 6800 xt a good investment at seven hundred dollars
plus you have to flash the gpu do the pixels mod have open core running you know
if you have a mac pro five one already and you wanna keep going and get the most
performance you possibly can you can install one of these gpus financially is it a good decision
it's up in the air really depends on what you do with your computer and obviously if
it's in a modern day computer the gpu is going to perform better so we really got to thank syncretic
martin lowe and all the open core developers these guys have kept our mac pros alive in the year 2022
still running the modern os ventura might be the very end of the road though i mean
we might be stuck in monterey for the rest of the use of these computers because ventura's got some
serious roadblock issues for the old mac pro five ones and we may never get to run that os but you
know if i can squeak another year or two out of this computer and not have to buy something new
that would be great please subscribe to my channel give me the thumbs up i appreciate you watching
and making it to the end of the video and i will see you on the next mac sound solutions video