Problem with poor Vega 64 Performance on Mojave 10.14.5

[movolans]

What were your BruceX times before and after 10.14.5?

I only had RX580 OC pre .4.5 and I was getting around 15 seconds. I now get 21-25 seconds on either card.

 

[movolans]

@movolans,

After updating to 10.14.5 I noticed this too on my White Knight hack (see sig for specs) which i use for video editing with FCPX. Prior to 10.14.5 BruceX export test was around 12 seconds but is now ~21 seconds, Geekbench also went down from around 21,000 to 15,500 which has been reported by many other users.

Other synthetic benchmark's such as Valley, Haven & LuxMark have remained around the same score.

I think the issue is that while Apple improved the support for OEM Vega cards in 10.14.5, the overall performance in certain apps/tasks has taken a hit although in my case (Sapphire Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Card) it is still hitting the 1750Mhz max die clock speed and 950Mhz Memory Clock when under heavy load.

I believe this is down to two reasons.

1. The current 10.14.5 Vega drivers are not so well optimised as previous versions.
2. FCPX is not currently optimised for the new Vega drivers in 10.14.5.

Its strange for sure ....

One other thing i've noticed is that in previous versions of Mojave, MacOS would use both the IGPU (configured as headless) and the dGPU for certain tasks, but it seems that in 10.14.5 it appears to only use the dGPU .. since installing 10.14.5 I no longer see the IGPU in Intel Power Gadget and in Activity Monitor -> GPU History (which only shows the Vega) so clearly something has changed.

And yet IQS is still working well with finder and X264 video format converters so the system configuration is still ok.

I must admit I haven't done any major video work since updating to 10.14.5 except to run the BruceX tests so its possible an update for FCPX has already been released ... I'll try and remember to check next time i fire the machine up.

Edit: I'm currently on FCPX 10.4.4 ... the latest version is 10.4.6 so will update when i get chance ...

Hopefully Apple will optimise the Vega drivers in the next Mojave update (10.14.6)

If i where you i'd sit tight on 10.14.5 rather than mess about down grading and see what happens with the next update.

In Summary I think your configuration is correct and that your not alone in what your seeing with Vega performance in Mojave 10.14.5.

Cheers
Jay

Hi Jay - thanks for this. Really concise and more or less completely mimics my experience. Like many of us - I'm a total sucker for chasing the ideal performance for my system. I'll literally lose sleep over it So this has at least stopped me hunting endlessly for a solution - for now at least!

If anyone finds a solution to this maybe we can create a new thread when it arises. I'll certainly keep my eyes peeled. I just hope that 10.14.6 or Catalina sorts this out.

This video is sort of interesting and would suggest that Radeon 7 optimisation is actually better (using Mac Pro 1,1 SMBIOS) than Vega 64.

 

[pastrychef]

Hi Jay - thanks for this. Really concise and more or less completely mimics my experience. Like many of us - I'm a total sucker for chasing the ideal performance for my system. I'll literally lose sleep over it So this has at least stopped me hunting endlessly for a solution - for now at least!

If anyone finds a solution to this maybe we can create a new thread when it arises. I'll certainly keep my eyes peeled. I just hope that 10.14.6 or Catalina sorts this out.

This video is sort of interesting and would suggest that Radeon 7 optimisation is actually better (using Mac Pro 1,1 SMBIOS) than Vega 64.

I convinced my friend to come over later this evening with her external backup drive to try out BruceX on my rig. I'm extremely curious. The last time she did this for me was back in High Sierra and I got 12 seconds. I just switched to iMacPro1,1 system definition 2-3 days ago...

 

[4string]

I just swapped my 8400 for a 9600k and now my hack wont boot. Seeing as I’m too tipsy to fix it ill run some tests later this week and update with any findings then

 

[movolans]

I just swapped my 8400 for a 9600k and now my hack wont boot. Seeing as I’m too tipsy to fix it ill run some tests later this week and update with any findings then

Never drink and hack!

 

[4string]

Boot arg=no!=your mother!

?



Edit: to be clear. The computer boots windows fine. I just need to adjust my efi for the hack side of things

 

[pastrychef]

macOS Mojave 10.14.5
iMacPro1,1 system definition
i9-9900K @ four cores 5.1GHz/four cores 5.0GHz, IGPU disabled
Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi)
64GB TridentZ 3400MHz RAM
Final Cut Pro 10.4.6
MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 Air Boost
BruceX Test 5K - ~14 seconds (same across 5 runs)



Here are my results from High Sierra. (I upgraded CPU since then.)

Here are my results from High Sierra with an Nvidia GTX 1080.

 

[justinhe]

Have you tried post #7 and post #8. As i said, you did not enable PluginType, so no CPU PM and GPU PM, so performance can be effected.

 

[4string]

Just to update. I swapped for the 9600k successfully. BruceX scores in 10.14.3 with fcpx 10.14.6 are still around ~12s which I’m fine with.

I think I’m just going to hang on this set up for a while and change my focus to getting my thunderbolt to work.

I have a few previous versions of final cut pro archived, let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to test

 

[Seeminglylost]

macOS Mojave 10.14.5
iMacPro1,1 system definition
i9-9900K @ four cores 5.1GHz/four cores 5.0GHz, IGPU disabled
Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi)
64GB TridentZ 3400MHz RAM
Final Cut Pro 10.4.6
MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 Air Boost
BruceX Test 5K - ~14 seconds (same across 5 runs)

View attachment 411654

How do you get temp and core clock for Vega 56 to appear in iStat?

edit: using the command pasted below, I can see my memory is stuck at 500Mhz.

while sleep 1; do clear;ioreg -l |grep \"PerformanceStatistics\" | cut -d '{' -f 2 | tr '|' ',' | tr -d '}' | tr ',' '\n'|grep 'Temp\|Fan\|Clock'; done