Looking for a bit of advice. I’ve been buying Macs for 20 years but in 2018 I decided to build a Hack to get more performance for my money. I wasn’t wrong, the machine is still a great workhorse. But I’m stuck on High Sierra and the new versions of apps I use daily are almost all incompatible (Davinci, AE, PP, Blender). I’m starting to feel the pinch.
When I built the hack using a Nvidia GPU (GTX 1080 Ti FTW3) I knew this day would come and was excited when these new AMD GPU’s became a potential replacement to the 1080 I use. As many others on here, I firmly believe these 6000 cards will be supported in MacOS, eventually.
The other day I managed to (impulse) snag a Sapphire 6900 XT, but at a huge cost £1200. I am now trying to decide if I should cancel the order and go for a standard 6800 instead. Reasons being; these are currently around £700; additional performance for editing, etc. seems marginal compared to the 6900 XT from tests on editing apps I’ve come across. These cards are after all geared towards gaming. Essentially, I just need more VRAM than a 5000 series would offer. I have considered a second hand Radeon VII.
With Apple’s new in-house silicon roadmap, I’m certainly going to shift back to buying native Macs. I’ll wait for their new Mac Pro, which is expect will be a late 2022 launch, so I need a stop gap to get my current machine running Big Sur with similar performance I get from the 1080.
While I appreciate it’s impossible to predict how a 6800 –with the first round of drivers and software support– may perform on MacOS and also how it would compare to the 6900 XT, considering there will be more VRAM to play with vs. a 1080 I would imagine I could expect at least equivalent performance to the 1080 for my use? So should I just grab a 6800 instead?