when we reviewed the imac pro we didn't really touch on its gaming potential in
spite of apple's inclusion of their fastest GPU ever in an imac
and the reason for that is let's be real here that's a 5k display
paired with what is still a vega 56 a
card that's optimized for half of that resolution
but could there be a way around it
could there be a way to game on the imac pro
let's find out right after we find out who sponsored
today's video ah yes thermaltake the thermaltake core
p90 tempered glass case is an angled open frame design featuring five
millimeter thick glass three-way placement layout options vertical GPU
mounting with a riser cable included and more check it out at the link below
so there were a few questions that we needed to answer before we could make
any value comparisons one how much does a custom setup with
the same basic spec as our base model imac pro cost
two does that setup perform better or worse
and perhaps most importantly three could we optimize that five thousand
dollar budget to get better performance without sacrificing all of the features
that make the imac pro special so this is what we ended up with based
on pricing from pc part picker our first build adheres as rigidly as
possible to apple's spec sheet like we couldn't find a vega 56 variant of the
frontier edition for a true apples to apples comparison while our second build
treats gaming as an equal priority rather than as an afterthought using a
less expensive core i9 7900x and a much
faster NVIDIA titan xp so we give up ecc memory Thunderbolt 3 a
nice case and wireless peripherals but
we still have a high resolution albeit 4k dci p3 display workstation level CPU
performance with many cores support for up to 128 gigs of RAM and access to more
professional code paths in the GPU driver compared to a consumer grade 1080
ti running directly off the hardware right
away our choices are far superior at this price point with the imac pro
pulling worse numbers than equivalent hardware in deus ex mankind divided in
both directx 11 and directx 12. middle
earth shadow of war seems to be better news for apple and then cs go actually
has it above our equivalent but then below our custom build so it should be
noted that even for developers like valve who have made opengl a priority
Windows is still way ahead for gaming so gaming directly on your imac pro not
the worst experience but not a great choice especially since in our review we
saw that the cooling isn't capable of handling full load for long as for
productivity we've got significantly worse numbers again for CPU rendering in
blender but we actually saw far better results with most of
specuperf giving us a look at the pro aspect of apple's vega 56 solution
drivers and in some cases frame buffer size can make a big difference because
remember that these results are in spite of the throttling under sustained
workloads that we've come to expect from the imac pro
let us know by the way in the comments if you'd like to see a separate deeper
dive into the imac pro's cooling for today though the focus is gaming so
let's have a look at some of the other solutions we came up with starting with
an external graphics card thanks to Thunderbolt 3 we can use a
razer core or something similar to slot in a variety of aftermarket gpus from a
very similar vega 56 all the way up to that titan xp from our build and the
question here is how much are you going to give up by
using an external solution with a titan xp our results are
obviously worse than a normal internal pci express slot especially in directx
12 but they're still quite a bit better than the stock GPU and cs go didn't seem
to care that much anyway as you might expect our external vega 56
results were generally disappointing providing us with bottom tier
performance in almost every test we even lost the pro driver code path in spec
view perf giving us much worse productivity performance so you wouldn't
want to upgrade your imac pro with a standard vega 56 in other words but
as new gpus arrive on the market it's good to know that a system performance
upgrade should be possible via these means
but bringing it back to gaming again considering the cost of an enclosure
it's possible that you may be better off just having a second utility pc in the
house bringing us to our next solution streaming
steam in-home streaming lets you be like me and have a gaming pc in your closet
or somewhere out of the way while you use your super clean setup for both work
and for play and thankfully it actually works a treat on macOS
and for those of you who don't want to deal with the upfront cost of building a
separate tower there's actually a mac beta now of NVIDIA's g-force now cloud
gaming service so when we tested g-force now over a year ago the experience was
already pretty impressive and i would only expect it to have improved since
then however your mileage
quite literally may vary because the
performance of GeForce now is highly dependent on your physical distance from
NVIDIA's servers so let's summarize what
we learned today first and foremost while apple's pricing is actually good
for its choice of hardware a different
configuration like if they were willing to use NVIDIA graphics for example
would have the potential to achieve much better performance with our station's
obvious trade-offs being the lack of ecc memory support and Thunderbolt
and we also learned that thanks to third-party devices and services gaming
on the imac pro doesn't have to be limited by its own hardware though
like with anything on a mac that comes with an additional cost your choice
whether it's upfront or monthly what we didn't learn
we already knew this is that if you do plan to game on your mac you will need
to buy better peripherals even ignoring the accidental weapon switches while
moving the mouse due to the scroll gesture the mouse is an ergonomic
nightmare has like has anyone but me ever noticed all those web 2.0 companies
out there with their 800 chairs and apple mice
sorry anyway i digress if you take anything away from this
follow-up video on the imac pro it should be that your expectations need to
be tempered when dealing with a form factor like this one you're getting
beautiful and actually surprisingly powerful hardware
but the configuration is a touch mismatched and it ends up getting choked
by its insufficient cooling
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