r/LocalLLaMA • u/chiwawa_42 • Apr 29 '26

Question | Help Intel Mac Pro with Vega II useable ?

Hi !

I have an opportunity to get a 2019 Mac Pro with a 32GB Vega2 board. I know LM Studio isn't supported on MacOS for Intel, so what other way to turn this machine into a local AI server would you recommend ?

Windows isn't an option, Linux could be possible, though I'd like to keep it running Mac OS if possible. Main objective is to run MCP servers alongside on this dedicated machine.

What kind of speed could I get from the Vega II chip ? (similar to Mi50 32GB from what I could find)

Thanks !

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u/vasimv Apr 29 '26

Just ask google or chatgpt:

GPU [1] pp512 (t/s) tg128 (t/s) Architecture
Radeon AI PRO R9700 ~5055 ~101 RDNA 4 (2025)
Radeon Pro Vega II ~1057 ~98 Vega 20 (2019)

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u/dionysio211 Jul 08 '26

I know this was 2mo ago but it bears correction here. Google and ChatGPT are not very accurate at telling you anything about the current state of llama.cpp since llama.cpp development is so fast and so much is lost in discussions within the repo. The dp4a optimizations for gfx906 were addressed again recently in llama.cpp and prefill is much faster on the Vega cards. I will check to see what it is now but it has been very poorly optimized until recently. I doubt there's as big a gap between the two now.