AMD versus NVIDIA GPUs running OpenCL under High Sierra
October 12th, 2017, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist
Now that High Sierra (macOS 10.13) NVIDIA web drivers are available for NVIDIA Pascal GPUs, it is time to see how they compare to two of the latest AMD GPUs running OpenCL intensive apps under macOS High Sierra.
GRAPH LEGEND
GTX 1080Ti - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (11GB)
RX Vega 64 - AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (8GB)
GTX 1080 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (8GB)
GTX 1070 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB)
RX 580 - AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU (8GB)
RX 480 - AMD Radeon RX 480 GPU (8GB)
R9 290X - AMD Radeon R9 290X (4GB)
HD 7950 - AMD Radeon HD 7950 'Mac Edition' (3GB)
GTX 680 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 'Mac Edition' (2GB)
Test 'Mule' was a 2010 Mac Pro tower (3.33GHz 12-core Xeon, 96G of RAM).
DaVinci Resolve - Using popular Candle 1080p project, we measured the speed of playback while rendering Noise Reduction Node (1NR) on-the-fly. GPU Processing mode was set to OpenCL for all GPUs.
(HIGHER frames per second = FASTER)
LuxMark 3 OpenCL Benchmark- Using the LuxBall default scene, it averages the samples per second over a two minute period. (HIGHER KSamples per second = FASTER)
Geekbench 4 OpenCL GPU Compute Test - From image processing to computer vision to number crunching, it stresses your GPU using relevant and complex challenges using OpenCL. (HIGHEST Score = FASTEST)
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
AMD has raised its game with the release of the Vega series of GPUs. As you can see from the graph, the RX Vega 64's performance falls between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. That makes it serious contender for apps rendering with OpenCL API.
Notice we included the 'last of the true Mac Edition' GPUs (Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 and EVGA GeForce GTX 680) for perspective on how good the newer GPUs are by comparison.
As we indicated in our earlier article, the RX Vega 64 is not ready for prime time under macOS. Though OpenCL apps and Metal benchmarks ran okay, there were serious issues with OpenGL apps. Speaking of Metal, here's a bonus graph:
Geekbench 4 Metal GPU Compute Test - (HIGHEST Score = FASTEST)
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WHERE TO BUY THE AMD RADEON RX VEGA 64 GPU
B&H Photo Video sells various brand of Radeon RX Vega 64. Check also with NewEgg. Both stores also have NVIDIA Pascal GPUs for sale.
MacVidCards specializes in making NVIDIA GPUs into 'Mac Editions' including startup screens and maximizing bandwidth.
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