Xeon 8-core with AMD 7870 Slower than Macbook Pro 2013

[moosefuel]

Hi all,

I have been really satisfied with my build, a 8-core XEON 2665 2.4ghz with 16GB ram and SSD, including a Sapphire Radeon 7870 2GB graphics card, except for one thing. My 2013 Macbook Pro (15," quad-core 2.3ghz i7, 750ti 2GB) handily outperforms it in Final Cut Pro X and other tasks. So much so, in fact, that it is really my main machine. I would say that exports, renders, even playback, is about twice as good/fast on the Macbook. I just want to check if there is something I am not doing, some drivers not installed, that could be causing this. I thought AMD cards were more or less native, or so everyone seems to say. I would love to get some more performance out of this build.

Another possibility is that the Macbook relies heavily on Intel's QuickSync technology to decode and encode h.264 video. I had thought that most graphics cards would do the same, but maybe Apple doesn't support it?

I would try the card in Windows except that I don't have Windows, at all.

 

[moosefuel]

A little more info:

My graphics card Luxmark (openCL) score is quite a bit lower in my Macbook Pro, so there is no shortage of OpenCL power. Something funny is going on here.