pastrychef
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Here are some tests and hope this helps and gives you some extra information. As mentioned, my system is X299 and does not have an iGPU so I don't have anything else to test. I guess I can cross reference on my MacBook Pro (2018, 6core)?
I believe the lack of HEVC hardware encoding has something to do with the T2 chip (which has its own H264/HEVC encoder/decoder and it's own basic OS), especially on the iMac Pro 1,1 SMBIOS when iGPU is disabled. macOS does different things to different SMBIOses behind the scenes. If it doesn't see a T2 chip, it just fallbacks to CPU perhaps? In the compressor preferences there is a setting to use multiple instances of the processor cores, and you can max out all the CPU during exporting, which will increase speeds.
It's more surprising to me that the Radeon VII isn't taken advantage of even by Adobe Media Encoder, because it's such a good computational card. If Apple supports eGPU's natively (and officially), then I am not sure why performance isn't pushed to the limit on these cards.
I think what happened was Apple had tapped into the Intel QuickSync tech for a while adn got tired of it so when they developed their own T2 chip, they threw hardware encoder/decoders in there so in the future when all Macs have a T2 chip, they don't have to rely on AMD/NVIDIA/Intel for H264/HEVC decoding/compression. This means more control to them and less reliance on external companies...and also an easier transition to the ARM architecture? But I am just guessing here, because the AMD Radeon VII and the other recent cards like NAVI ones have great onboard HEVC/H264 encoder/decoders...Applications such as Davinci Resolve do take advantage of these other GPUs.
Hope this helps.
Latest FCPX shows Radeon VII:
View attachment 435602
FCPX H264 export uses GPU (but not at 100%, and it is not loading the CPU):
View attachment 435603
FCPX HEVC 8Bit export doesn't seem to use GPU, but uses CPU instead:
View attachment 435605
FCPX HEVC 10Bit export (through compressor, with GPU enabled) doesn't seem to use GPU, but uses CPU instead:
View attachment 435606
Adobe Media Encoder CC2019 for H264 (with hardware enabled in settings, and OpenCL, since Metal is slower) uses GPU (but not at 100%):
View attachment 435607
Adobe Media Encoder CC2019 for HEVC (with hardware enabled in settings, and OpenCL, since Metal is slower) uses GPU (but not at 100%):
View attachment 435608
QuickTime Player H264 exporter uses GPU but at a very low amount:
View attachment 435609
QuickTime Player HEVC exporter uses GPU but at a very low amount:
View attachment 435610
VideoProc sees both H264 and HEVC:
View attachment 435611
Ah yes!! I completely forgot about how the T2 factors in... That makes perfect sense! Thank you!