Apple Launches Latest iMac Pro With AMD’s Radeon Pro RX Vega For Premium 8K Video Editing

When Apple took the veil off of its latest iMac Pros earlier this year, it made no secrets about AMD taking on the graphics duties, with its RX Vega series. Apple has touted the use of these GPUs in its latest desktop workstation the same way AMD has: it’s all about high-end content editing and design.

At a time when 4K content is still way too scarce, the industry is looking ahead to 8K. I can attest that 4K films can look extremely good, so I’m personally excited at seeing resolutions improve going forward, and especially see more 8K displays hit the market. Currently, those cost a seriously pretty penny.

While the iMac Pro only supports 5K natively, 8K displays could be added after-the-fact, perhaps at a time when it won’t cost so much to have one or more of them kicking around (though when the iMac Pro costs $5K out-of-the-gate, cost might not be this target audience’s greatest concern).

The default iMac Pro configuration includes AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 with 8GB of HBM2 memory, which is standard fare given what we’ve seen from retail Vega cards. Exclusive to Apple (at least right now), though, are 16GB versions of the RX Vega 64 – a change that could further aid with smooth 8K video editing, and other memory-starved workloads.

For fun, I played back an 8K video sample a couple of months ago on a machine equipped with the 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X, as well as NVIDIA’s Quadro P6000. Playback was almost smooth, but not ideal – and that’s despite the CPU being hugely utilized. Thus, the promise of smooth 8K workflow is important here. AMD quotes Post Perspective‘s Thomas Carter, who wrote, “8K. Color correction. Blur. No Rendering. No ‘1/4 quality’ BS. No frames dropped.”

② Speed. We tried compiling one of our meatier Xcode projects on the iMac Pro (10-core Xeon W, 3 GHz) vs. our standard Mac Pro (3.5 GHz Xeon E5, 6-core). Sure, the Mac Pro is old, but the iMac Pro compiled the project 41% faster. A pretty sincere boost.

— Cabel Sasser (@cabel) December 12, 2017

Sounds good to me. As more iMac Pros get into the hands of professionals who can take advantage of such grand hardware, we’re sure to hear more input on the system’s 8K capabilities. As for gaming, you could likely expect a similar performance level as the desktop card, though I’d reckon the form-factor of an AIO won’t bode that well for peak performance. That said, the inside of the iMac Pro is extremely efficient with how it moves air out of the system, and pulls cool air in, so maybe there are some surprises.

It’s nice to see another win for the red team – or perhaps “blue team”, given the deep blue that permeates throughout the Radeon Pro line.