Hardware video acceleration on the classic Mac Pro - part 1
Forced obsolescence is with us. No matter how capable or fast, old hardware are retired everyday - an ecological disaster for the sake of progress.
One of the best examples of a machine defying its age is the classic Mac Pro. There's nothing that justifies officially stopping to support this machine, besides profitability. It took many years for Apple to ship a machine that surpasses its multithreaded performance. Single threaded performance is very important for gamers but not very important for many professional use cases.
The supported CPUs don't handle some modern instruction sets. However, for many media and scientific workflows, a modern GPU can make all the difference.
Apple officially supports hardware H.264 encoding and decoding only with a very limited subset of AMD GPUs. HEVC (H.265) is a no-go. Why? Otherwise many would have no reason to upgrade their machines. A faster computer may not help you produce more - there's only so much one can do at the same time.
However, if you stay under Final Cut Pro 10.4.6 and install CoreBoot, you can enjoy hardware encode and decode of H.264 and HEVC, you will get unbelievable performance increases. Compressor will do only H.264 but, together with the multithreaded GPU, render times drop to a fraction of what they are using only the CPU. I got incredible results with an ageing Radeon RX580 but the community supports even newer cards. I also tested a multi-GPU setup.
Episode index:
00:00 - Introduction and my setup
01:39 - Source material
02:34 - VideoProc hardware acceleration
03:09 - QuickTime hardware-accelerated screen capture
03:39 - Hardware-accelerated H.264 Compressor export
04:27 - GPU and CPU usage during export
04:31 - HEVC H.265 software export
04:40 - HEVC hardware-accelerated export from Final Cut Pro
05:23 - GPU usage during hardware-accelerated HEVC export
05:42 - Dual GPU setup - Installation
06:52 - Fan speed issues with 2 GPUs - Macs Fan Control to the rescue
08:40 - Dual GPU configuration
09:32 - H.264 hardware-accelerated dual GPU export from Compressor
11:24 - CPU and GPU usage during export
11:47 - Dual GPUs and classic Mac Pro - Commentary
12:27 - Compressor settings - Commentary
13:32 - Performance results - Commentary
15:25 - HEVC export from Final Cut Pro using a Compressor template
16:06 - Performance with different video cards - Commentary
19:12 - Closing thoughts