RX 5700 XT on macOS Catalina 10.15.2  

Why performance so low in Mac OS?

Rx 580 have same score in geekbench

Thanks for the numbers

Is this drop just a geekbench issue?

I can confirm the low GB5 scores with RX 5700 XT in macOS Catalina 10.15.1 and 10.15.2.  Been testing with MBP16,1 and Sonnet eGFX 650 OC.  MBP16 is 2.4/8GB/64GB/1TB.

10.15.1 METAL for 5500M 8GB: 27580
10.15.1 METAL for RX 5700 XT 8GB in Sonnet 650 eGPU: 33723

10.15.2 METAL for 5500M 8GB: 26963
10.15.2 METAL for RX 5700 XT 8GB in Sonnet 650 eGPU: 33742

For reference an MP5,1 with RX580 8GB in 10.14.6 has a GB5 METAL score of 39004.

@quietpower

This was the Metal score I got in 10.15.1...

Now I get 32-33000.

I have been doing my job on my PC for the last two months and today I'm working on the Mac with the 5700 XT. I'm really not happy with macOS performance at all. I've been spoilt by Windows and RTX graphics. It is very hard to work on macOS with having CPU throttling, sluggish graphics drivers, Wacom drivers causing CPU spiking. The new Mac Pro offers me nothing either. A $6K PC can destroy that $50K Mac Pro configuration at everything and for that massive price I could get several workstations for freelancers and take more client work. So this is probably my last year as a Mac user.

Need to test a modern metal game like Rise of the Tomb Raider.

anyway for now Navi drivers performance on macOS are quite bad, especially compared to Vega and RX 5xx

Posted by: @craftsman

@quietpower

This was the Metal score I got in 10.15.0...

 

Now I get 32-33000.

I have been doing my job on my PC for the last two months and today I'm working on the Mac with the 5700 XT. I'm really not happy with macOS performance at all. I've been spoilt by Windows and RTX graphics. It is very hard to work on macOS with having CPU throttling, sluggish graphics drivers, Wacom drivers causing CPU spiking. The new Mac Pro offers nothing either. A $6K PC can destroy that $50K Mac Pro configuration at everything. So this is probably my last year as a Mac user.

Usually it is the opposite, as yes I also work on IT in a big Windows based company. macOS is quite fast compared to Windows. CPU throttling happens in most computers, only workstation or big desktop can keep 100% cpu performance for long time. Saying that Mac Pro is nothing special makes me believe you don’t have a clue about advantages of thunderbolt, solid hardware, T2 encryption... there is a lot o good PCs but most are trash, buy what you want, but stop exaggerating . And yes for now Navi macOS drivers are quite terrible, I’m quite confident they will get better

@ikir

I've had almost every PowerBook, Power Mac, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro that has existed. Please be polite to people online.

I produce a mother load of creative content. I mean inhuman amount of work. At my busiest, my working week is about 130 hours. If anything slows me down, it really hurts. I've been tweaking and perfecting my workflows and machines for over 25 years. My PC is hand built (has 2 x Thunderbolt 3), I have never bought a pre-built PC. It's liquid cooled using push-pull to 5.2Ghz on all 8 cores and beats some 12+ core systems (proof attached). Idle temperatures as low as 22C (proof attached!). I'm really fanatical about all this fine tuning because any stress or slowdown is bad for my health, bad for my clients, bad for my earnings. Today I was again in physical pain and swearing at the computer (the Mac with eGPU). I didn't do that for the last 2 months while using the PCs.

macOS as an operating system provides less friction, it allows the user to quickly get to things like system settings and files. But the last decade has been rough. The APIs have fallen behind Windows. OpenGL slower, OpenCL slower, Metal slower than Direct X or Vulkan. That just kills the user experience for someone who is in physical pain sometimes from sitting at the desk for so many hours. If you think the Navi drivers will 'get better', please don't have too many hopes. Once the graphics driver performance has been locked down in macOS we have never seen GPU performance get noticeably better with subsequent OS updates. Barefeats website shows graphics drivers in fact getting slower with updates.

On the hardware side, every Mac is being engineered more and more for style and locking down repairability and upgradability. When you design a system like that you start to fight the laws of thermodynamics and you get hit by bad thermals on top of the slow graphics acceleration. Even this new Mac Pro, the cooling design looks bad (hope I am wrong). If your studio or ambient temperatures are high then this machine pulls hot air directly on to the storage, memory and CPU before it has a chance to circulate in the system. It makes me remember the time I was working in Asia, 42C degrees in the summer. Our Power Mac G5 and first generation Mac Pro 1,1 couldn't handle the heat in the studio. 

A funny thing happened while writing this reply. I had the Mac Pro product page open and all the animations on the page made the 5700 XT eGPU start to get loud and then Catalina was slowing down. Because of a webpage, so imagine. Goodnight.

Geekbench 5 reports lower scores then prior Geekbench versions, perhaps that is why results are lower?

@mark_marin

In the same version of Geekbench on the same setup I’ve seen scores between 30-60K for 5700 XT - hardly consistent. While macOS drivers are evidently bad, it seems this benchmark is too (it should be consistent). Or maybe the benchmark behaves oddly due to the driver - we can only guess. Hopefully we see driver improvements; actually more generally, just a better macOS.