There are times when I need to question my sanity (like why am I buying this GPU for a now 6 year old system?) To be fair (to myself), I bought this 2019 Mac Pro as a certified refurb in June 2023 after seeing the Apple Silicon based Mac Pro (announced at WWDC 2023). Back in 2021 when this graphics card was released, the single module went for $2,400 (the Duo version with Infinity Fabric Link went for a cool $5K). The last highest end GPU for this Intel based Mac Pro was the Radeon Pro W6900X; that one went for $6,000. Thus the only “saving grace” was paying a fraction of the original price (but still…)
UPDATE: see note at the bottom
These MPX modules are still a piece of art though (the industrial design of the Mac Pro and its components remind of those Sun Micro enterprise workstations and servers I used to work with). It’s too bad the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (if it continues even being a product) will likely never see these type of dedicated discrete GPU’s. Yes, these types of graphics cards are brute force (especially the Duo version and having two of them linked together for 4 GPUs worth of processing capability is the definition of that).
I debated of going with a W6800X Duo but slapped myself (it would make more sense to sink that money into an RTX 5090 for my PC and just do all of the ML upscaling and re-encoding on it). Thankfully I didn’t since the expected video encoding gains weren’t as large as I thought it would be. These cards biggest gains are with Final Cut Pro and Resolve types of workflows and not with these non-fully optimized (for encoding) software like VideoProc Converter. It’s still an extra 15-20% frame rate increase on encodes but far below the 30% average I was hoping to see (oh well). Since I am still on Monterey (12.7.6), I’m not sure if I might get some gains with moving to Ventura and higher (since those support Metal 3). I do plan to move to Tahoe in the fall when that is released so we will see.
On the playback side, the hardware decoder unsurprisingly still struggled with H.264 and HEVC 8K video (higher motion frames would cause frame drops/stutters; don’t know how much of it is Apple and their drivers). Thus the need to transcode to ProRes (4K playback of H.264/HEVC at least worked well); thus I’ll still get some better benefits with this card compared to the W5500X it replaces.
As for the future of this machine (once it becomes really outdated), I will probably end up turning it into my VMWare virtual machine system and network file server. It has 320GB of memory, the drive carrier at the top currently has three 8TB SSD’s while the Sonnet M.2 4×4 Silent PCIe card has 4x4TB NVMe’s (Sonnet has a newer 8×4 Silent card which I’ll probably pickup later this year). While my workstation needs is still going to be met with this system for the next few years, I’m also again looking to that future where that HP Z workstation may end up being the route I go (as I had previously contemplated before) if Apple decides something like the Mac Studio is good enough for that demographic.
UPDATE: ok, I guess I can be classified as officially insane… I got a good deal on a W6800X Duo (cheaper than the original price of the non-Duo version) and an unopened Xeon W-3245 (16-core) processor. Yeah, the Geekbench 6 benchmarks for these Xeon’s look anemic compared to Apple Silicon but I’ve seen the real world differences when it is processor plus decent GPU (those tasks have been faster on this Mac Pro) with what I am doing with non-ProRes video. This is just extra brute force I can throw at it (what these towers are useful for). I cannot take this money to the grave and it isn’t much in the grand scheme of things.
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