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D300 vs m290x?

bladerunner2000 said:
The D300 is basically a repackaged AMD 7850. The 7xxx series cards are 3 years old. Though to be fair, AMD hasn't done much since, LOL; see AMD Fury X


Benchmarks on the 7850 can be found here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/...-hd-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands
Click to expand...

3 years ago sounds about right, especially since the Late 2013 Mac Pro you are referring to was released almost two years ago. I don't think assuming a D300 is the same as another card, and using those benchmarks from a windows machine, with completely different drivers, will accurately show performance.

Link to useful Mac Pro benchmarks.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/14/04...s.power.the.mac.pro.to.new.performance.highs/
 
gman36 said:
3 years ago sounds about right, especially since the Late 2013 Mac Pro you are referring to was released almost two years ago. I don't think assuming a D300 is the same as another card, and using those benchmarks from a windows machine, with completely different drivers, will accurately show performance.

Link to useful Mac Pro benchmarks.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/14/04...s.power.the.mac.pro.to.new.performance.highs/
Click to expand...

It is essentially the same card. AMD has done nothing but rebadge, rebadge, rebadge over the last three years. Gaming performance on the D300 is the same as the AMD W5000, which is the 7850.

Sorry, but the GPUs in the new Mac Pros aren't all that great.
 
MartinAppleGuy said:
Thanks! What kind of games are you running? And is this OS X or Windows? And how does crossfire work when gaming, are you seeing a nice increase in performance?

Sorry for all the questions haha
Click to expand...

Crossfire will work for Windows games. If you are gaming in OSX, most if not all games will not recognize the second card.
Played mostly the same games listed in that first link, in Windows. Played F1 2013 in OSX, ran perfect at all very high settings.
 
gman36 said:
Crossfire will work for Windows games. If you are gaming in OSX, most if not all games will not recognize the second card.
Played mostly the same games listed in that first link, in Windows. Played F1 2013 in OSX, ran perfect at all very high settings.
Click to expand...

Not most, absolutely all. Apple refuses to add crossfire or SLI into OS X.
 
bladerunner2000 said:
It is essentially the same card. AMD has done nothing but rebadge, rebadge, rebadge over the last three years. Gaming performance on the D300 is the same as the AMD W5000, which is the 7850.

Sorry, but the GPUs in the new Mac Pros aren't all that great.
Click to expand...

Im not claiming the GPUs are great. They are workstation cards, not gaming cards like the 7850 you are mentioning. But claiming the D300 is the same as the 7850 is far stretched. Unless you work at AMD, and know hands down that EVERY single core is identical to a gaming card, I wouldn't recommend making that claim.
 
Bladerunner is not competent to talk about AMD GPUs, as much as that guy from KitGuru. To add to that history, AMD did not send KitGuru free sample of Fury X after that particular film. There is few Biased sites, like Techpowerup is favoring Nvidia. KitGuru is simply negative for AMD, and that is the difference.

I watched this film again, and the assumptions made by the guys are complete rubbish and ********, I have no idea, how that guy can be in a reviewers site...

One more thing. Despite the similar core count, amount of RAM, bus Wide, Grenada silicon is completely new, but has old software. And that should tell a lot about the GPUs, why they are right now 7-10% faster cock to clock than R9 290(s) GPUs.
 
koyoot said:
Bladerunner is not competent to talk about AMD GPUs, as much as that guy from KitGuru. To add to that history, AMD did not send KitGuru free sample of Fury X after that particular film. There is few Biased sites, like Techpowerup is favoring Nvidia. KitGuru is simply negative for AMD, and that is the difference.

I watched this film again, and the assumptions made by the guys are complete rubbish and ********, I have no idea, how that guy can be in a reviewers site...

One more thing. Despite the similar core count, amount of RAM, bus Wide, Grenada silicon is completely new, but has old software. And that should tell a lot about the GPUs, why they are right now 7-10% faster cock to clock than R9 290(s) GPUs.
Click to expand...

Oh no? Then what about the review from Linus Sebastion? Is his review that show lackluster performance 'biased' or untrue, and thus, as you say, rendering me not competent to talk about AMD GPUs?

Pretty much all the reviews of new AMD GPUs are nothing to write home about. AMD's been lagging badly behind both Nvidia and Intel.

Here's Linus' review of the AMD Fury X:


Or Jayz2cents:

 
gman36 said:
This is about how im feeling right now... W5000 is basically the W7000 as well if we use that logic...
Click to expand...
To quote an article on the MacPro's video cards:

  • Each D300 achieves its performance courtesy of 1280 stream processors utilizing AMD's GCN architecture, a 256-bit wide memory bus with a 160GB/s memory bandwidth coupled with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM.
  • AMD markets the rough equivalent to the D500 (codenamed 'Tahiti') in the same 'High End' workstation GPU category as the D300, although it is further up the range. The $400 upgrade will get you an additional 246 stream processors per card, taking the count to 1526 each. Although performance increases incrementally from 2 teraflops to 2.2 teraflops per card, importantly the memory bus increases to 384-bits, while memory bandwidth is upgraded to 240GB/s. VRAM also gets boosted by 1GB per card to 3GB, all helping to give a solid boost to overall performance. Its processor architecture is also based on AMD's GNC design.
  • The closest equivalent to FirePro D500 in AMDs range is marketed as an 'Ultra High End' workstation GPU, which should appeal to those with either the extra cash, or need, for the optimal GPU graphics and GPU compute performance. The $1000 upgrade ups the ante by adding 522 stream processors per card over the D500 and a whopping 768 stream processors per card over the D300 (for a total of 2048 stream processors per card).

which isn't to say that these are killer cards. Far from it. At the same time, though, a 7850 has but 1024 stream processors, and a 7870 has 1280. The 7870 is the more appropriate comparison.
 
bladerunner2000 said:
Oh no? Then what about the review from Linus Sebastion? Is his review that show lackluster performance 'biased' or untrue, and thus, as you say, rendering me not competent to talk about AMD GPUs?

Pretty much all the reviews of new AMD GPUs are nothing to write home about. AMD's been lagging badly behind both Nvidia and Intel.

Here's Linus' review of the AMD Fury X:


Or Jayz2cents:

Click to expand...
You understand the difference between review and speculation film? KitGuru made speculation film. Those are reviews. Im not arguing that Fury X is lagging slightly behind GTX 980 Ti in under 4K resolutions, but in 4K there is a tie. Is that falling behind? I would doubt very much about it.

R9 390 and 390X are right now as fast or faster than GTX980 in 1440p, and faster than it in 4K resolutions. Also they are much faster for any real world work than GTX 980 offerings. If you don't believe me, check the reviews on computerbase.de and golem.de which are as of right now, the one of the last unbiased sites in the internet. And if someone will argue about the efficiency. Geforce GPUs are efficient in games. When they have to do something that is more robust, like compute the example is GTX 980. It draws only 20W less than R9 290X, yet still is slower than it. GTX 980 with BIOS lock will really draw at max 190W of power, but will have locked Turbo mode and will be much slower than R9 290 even.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,3941-12.html Here is the review that shown that.
And here is Fury X Review from golem.de http://www.golem.de/news/radeon-r9-...erg-schlaegt-nvidias-titan-1506-114780-4.html
19-luxmark-v3-(complex-scene,-gpu-only)-chart.png

Shows quite different story, than you tell.
Also we have to remember there are games that are Nvidia GameWorks titles that will favor Nvidia GPUs and in those games Nvidia will always look better. However, there is few unbiased titles like Ryse, Crysis 3 both from CryTek if i recall correctly. And they show quite different picture.
 
MartinAppleGuy said:
Thanks! Now a question regarding the fusion drive, how will bootcamp work with it? Will it just install windows via the hard drive portion?
Click to expand...
Normally, Apple will install BootCamp Windows to a partition on the hard disk portion of a Fusion drive.

However, I run my iMac 5K with BootCamp Windows on an external Thunderbolt bus-powered SSD hidden on the back of the stand using a LaCie "Rugged" enclosure with SSD installed.
 
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MartinAppleGuy said:
Primary uses will be within OS X with photo work and art based projects. I'm looking for something killer that fits in too, so the amazing look of the 5k iMac and the Mac Pro really fit into that as well.

Secondary use would be gaming in bootcamp of course, I know from ip my current iMax with a 750m GPU that macs can run game just fine, and that the D300s and the m290x are faster.

One difference is that gaming on the D300s would be done at 1080p, but I would be playing at 1440p in the retina iMac. So what would you recommend? What would be the better setup? I've came to the conclusion that both will meet the requirements for my uses in OS X, but what do you think it better for the secondary windows uses; Dual D300s or a single m290x?
Click to expand...

I would get the iMac. I doubt you have any need for the Mac Pro. The iMac is more consumer machine and the m290x will be a big upgrade to your 750m. It also sounds like your main concern is gaming. Buying a Mac Pro for gaming purposes is ridiculous.
 
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