Adobe doesn't seem to support iMac's anymore

Report · Sep 16, 2020

I just bought a bunch of 2020 27" iMac's with the Radeon Pro 5700XT GPU. I'm having all sorts of issues. Windows in AE are bouncing around, GPU error messages in Illustrator.

So I sat down to figure out, what iMac is supported by Adobe. Turns out you have to go all the way back to 2017 to find a 27" iMac that has a GPU option that is supported.

The latest GPU's are Radeon Pro 5300, Radeon Pro 5700 and Radeon Pro 5700XT. None are supported

The 2019 iMacs had the option of Radeon Pro 570X, Radeon Pro 575X and Radeon Pro 580X. Also not supported

After much persistence I was able to speak with a senior engineer at Adobe and was told not to export support for the new iMac's anytime soon. If ever? So I got the idea of putting in an eGPU so that I can get a card, like the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64. Now I have told that Adobe deosn't support eGPU's.

Is there any Adobe support for modern Mac's? I'd hate to go back to Windows.

Report · Sep 17, 2020

Here is the big problem:

Adobe spent so much time testing the newer Turing GPUs (which, unfortunately, are not supported at all in any Mac) that it just had no time whatsoever to test any of the recent Macs (or any other AMD or Intel graphics or GPU). As a result, Adobe's support of both OpenCL and Metal have (relatively speaking) languished, while continuing to require newer Nvidia GPUs and drivers to run Premiere Pro properly.

In fact, Adobe didn't even bother to update the GPU recommended list for Mac or for non-Nvidia GPUs in Windows since late 2017, when Premiere Pro CC 2018 was released.

If this lackadaisical and indifferent support for either OpenCL or Metal continues, then I am speculating that Adobe might depreciate or cut off support for anything Mac or anything with a non-Nvidia GPU. And that would seriously restrict hardware choices.

Which is what we do not want.