Gadgetory

When we reviewed the iMac Pro We didn't really touch on it's 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 found out who sponsored today's video! Ha, yes, Thermaltake the Thermaltake Core P90 tempered glass case is an angled Open frame design featuring 5 milimeters thick glass Three layer placement layout options vertical GPU mounting with a riser cable included and more Check it out in the link below so there were a few questions that we need to answer before we could make any value comparison One, how much does a custom setup with a same base expect as our base model iMac pro costs? Two, does that setup perform better or worse? And perhaps most importantly, three. Could we optimise that 5,000 dollar budget to get better performance? Without sacrificing all the features that will make the iMac pro special? So this is what we ended up with based on pricing from PC partpicker Our first build adheres as rigidly as possible to the 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 as an afterthought Using a less expensive core i9 7900x and a much faster Nvidia Titan Xp So we gave up ECC memory, Thunderbolt 3, a nice case, and wireless peripherals But, we still have the high resolution of the 4k DCIP display Workstation level CPU performance with many cores Support for an up to 128GB of RAM And access to more professional code paths in the GPU driver compared to a consumer grade 1080ti Running directly off the hardware right away, our choices are far superior at this price point With the iMac pro pulling worst numbers than the equivalent hardware in Deus EX: Mankind Divided In both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 Middle of Earth: Shadow of War seems to be better use for Apple, and then CSGO actually has an above our equivalent, but then below our custom build So it should be noted that even for developers like Valve who made OpenGL a priority, Windows is still way ahead of 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 got significantly worst numbers again for CPU rendering in Blender But we actually saw far better results for most Specviewperf Giving us a look at the pro aspect of the 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 would like to see separate, deeper dive into the iMac pro's cooling. For today though the focus is for gaming so let's have a look at some of the other solutions that we came up with. Starting with an external graphics card. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3, we can use our Razer core or something similar so slot in a variety of aftermarket GPU 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 gonna 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 it is quite a bit better than a stock GPU And CSGO didn't seem to care that much anyway. As you might expect, our external Vega 56 results were generally dissappointing, providing us with a bottom tier performance in almost every tests. We even lost the pro driver codepath in the Specviewperf giving us much worse productivity performance. So you wouldn't upgrade your iMac pro with a standard Vega 56 and other words, but As new GPUs are arriving in the market, it's good to know that a system performance upgrade Should be possible by this means. But bringing it back to gaming again, considering the cost of an enclosure It's possible that you maybe 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 for you who don't want a deal with upfront costs of building separate tower There's actually