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Gaming benchmarks and cores

ok, that's the Unigine only, which AFAIK favors the AMD cards. we'll find who's right only when more thorough benchmarking will see this world.

as of tdp, it might have been wrong nMP GPUs TDP numbers that circulate the web, and D700s might just have the tdp of around 130w :)
 
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iBug2 said:
About TDP, the GPU's in Mac Pro seem to go well above the 108W since they measured 435W during the Luxmark Open CL test which pushes both GPU's to the extreme. The question is for how long can they keep that up.
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Boost clock TDP:
D300 - 139W
D500 and D700 - 129W
 
kaellar said:
ok, that's the Unigine only, which AFAIK favors the AMD cards. we'll find who's right only when more thorough benchmarking will see this world.
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I don't really know if it somehow favors AMD but I haven't read anything regarding that anywhere.


http://www.barefeats.com/gpu680v.html

Here you can see that GTX 680 is almost 30% faster than GTX 680MX, which is only a bit slower than GTX 780M on heaven. So it seems that D700 performs more or less the same as GTX 680 Mac edition, which is the fastest GPU you can get right now. (Titan and 780 don't improve on it yet due to driver & flashing issues)

So even if this is only one benchmark, it shows clearly that D700 is perfectly fine for gaming, because GTX 680 most certainly is a killer card, still.
 
I would wait for actual gaming benchmarks, in Windows. OS X gaming is so sad you'll have a hard time playing with all the tears in your eyes.

As for the single D700 Vs the 680, the 7970 is about on par with the 680. It's considered a mid-range card nowadays. However, the 7970 with it's significantly faster clock and same stream processors as the D700.

If by some miracle Xfire actually exists for the nMP, that'll be an interesting development. I'm really skeptical about a sustained boost clock with Xfire though.
 
slughead said:
I would wait for actual gaming benchmarks, in Windows. OS X gaming is so sad you'll have a hard time playing with all the tears in your eyes.

As for the single D700 Vs the 680, the 7970 is about on par with the 680. It's considered a mid-range card nowadays. However, the 7970 with it's significantly faster clock and same stream processors as the D700.

If by some miracle Xfire actually exists for the nMP, that'll be an interesting development. I'm really skeptical about a sustained boost clock with Xfire though.
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OS X gaming is sad due to the lack of titles. Otherwise, unless you really want the fastest framerates a computer can offer, you can game quite well on OS X. I play WoW constantly and it runs perfectly well, even on my MBP.

I never run bootcamp to game. When I game I like to use my computer for other purposes as well, which I can't do while bootcamping.

Yes GTX 680 is a midrange card, but that's what all Mac Pro's have shipped with so far. At least this time, it's really the second best offering one can get. When I bought my Mac Pro in 2008, it shipped with GT 8800, which really wasn't the second fastest GPU Nvidia was offering at the time. It really was an average card.
 
iBug2 said:
So it seems that D700 performs more or less the same as GTX 680 Mac edition.
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If it's true (let's wait for more tests), kudos to Apple. Such performance at half of TDP of regular 7970 is really good. Drivers seem to be fine tuned.
 
666sheep said:
If it's true (let's wait for more tests), kudos to Apple. Such performance at half of TDP of regular 7970 is really good. Drivers seem to be fine tuned.
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Yeah we need more tests. I'm basing this on Heaven benchmark only.
 
iBug2 said:
OS X gaming is sad due to the lack of titles. Otherwise, unless you really want the fastest framerates a computer can offer, you can game quite well on OS X. I play WoW constantly and it runs perfectly well, even on my MBP.
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Are you kidding me? OS X is awful for gaming. Ignoring the I/O problems, the card drivers are G*d awful.

http://www.barefeats.com/imac11e.html
im11e_l4d.gif

im11e_sc2.gif

im11e_wow.gif


iBug2 said:
Yes GTX 680 is a midrange card, but that's what all Mac Pro's have shipped with so far. At least this time, it's really the second best offering one can get. When I bought my Mac Pro in 2008, it shipped with GT 8800, which really wasn't the second fastest GPU Nvidia was offering at the time. It really was an average card.
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You can run a Titan in a Mac Pro. There is also a flashed GTX780 if you really need boot screens.

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antonis said:
I'd hardly call 680 as a mid-range card for the time being. Here's the rankings:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

This is the list of high-end cards (there are other lists for mid-range and low-range GPUs), and 680 stands in 7th place, under 780, 770, and Titan (obviously).
Click to expand...

The 770 is the new "Mid-range" and it is significantly better than the 680.

Nothing wrong with mid-range cards.
 
Lets be realistic here. Mac gaming sucks. It just sucks less than it used to. I dearly love OS X, and I love Apple's hardware design equally as much. My Retina MacBook Pro 15" is a wonderful thing, I use it every day, and I will continue to use it every day for almost everything.

Except games.

There is also a GTX 680MX equipped iMac in my house. I don't personally use it much, but I have put it through its paces. I will continue to not use it much. It is not at all compelling to play games on. Even EFI booted into Windows.

I was hoping (without any shred of sanity) that Apple would throw a bone to the gaming community with the new Mac Pro. Unsurprisingly, they did not. Which means now I must look elsewhere. I've already specced out a Micro-ATX PC and ordered the parts for it. This can be had for dramatically less than a Mac Pro, and it performs hugely better in this particular use case.

It is okay that Apple does not cater to gamers. We are not a large or lucrative market relative to the other markets that exist. It is a shame, but what can you do? Part of what makes Apple so good at what they do is what they do not do.
 
How do you know whether or not the new Mac Pro is good at gaming when there have been no benchmarks under Bootcamp yet?

Evil Spoonman said:
Lets be realistic here. Mac gaming sucks. It just sucks less than it used to. I dearly love OS X, and I love Apple's hardware design equally as much. My Retina MacBook Pro 15" is a wonderful thing, I use it every day, and I will continue to use it every day for almost everything.



Except games.



There is also a GTX 680MX equipped iMac in my house. I don't personally use it much, but I have put it through its paces. I will continue to not use it much. It is not at all compelling to play games on. Even EFI booted into Windows.



I was hoping (without any shred of sanity) that Apple would throw a bone to the gaming community with the new Mac Pro. Unsurprisingly, they did not. Which means now I must look elsewhere. I've already specced out a Micro-ATX PC and ordered the parts for it. This can be had for dramatically less than a Mac Pro, and it performs hugely better in this particular use case.



It is okay that Apple does not cater to gamers. We are not a large or lucrative market relative to the other markets that exist. It is a shame, but what can you do? Part of what makes Apple so good at what they do is what they do not do.
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Dranix said:
It does? I only have a 1680*1050 tft, but I always though such expensive displays would at least scale as good as my el cheapo Panasonic TV.
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sadly it does.. I've got an 27" imac at 2560 x 1440 and if I play anything under 1080p it does look horrible due to upscaled, sometimes not even properly anti-aliased borders and stuff...I was considering just sticking to the d500 and getting a PS4 instead for gaming..

Someone posted a benchmark list a few posts earlier, around which rank would the d500 be?
 
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chfilm said:
sadly it does.. I've got an 27" imac at 2560 x 1440 and if I play anything under 1080p it does look horrible due to upscaled, sometimes not even properly anti-aliased borders and stuff...I was considering just sticking to the d500 and getting a PS4 instead for gaming..

Someone posted a benchmark list a few posts earlier, around which rank would the d500 be?
Click to expand...

Is the D500 that much better than the D500 to make it worth the extra $400?
 
Brandon263 said:
How do you know whether or not the new Mac Pro is good at gaming when there have been no benchmarks under Bootcamp yet?
Click to expand...

Now we know what is inside the box. At the high end it is an AMD FirePro W9000, in more or less stock configuration too judging by the numbers. Chances of being able to Crossfire these GPUs under Windows is very, very low. For now I'm assuming it won't happen (even if you could it would be an EFI boot hack, almost certainly not officially supported by the BIOS emulation).

We also know what the FirePro W9000 is capable of as a gaming GPU. It roughly competes with a Radeon 7970, which is a distinctly midrange GPU today. AMD's own 290 is a lot faster, not to mention Nvidia's high end GTX 780 Ti.

What do I have to pay for this? Minimum about $4,000.00 (excluding all taxes and only upgrading GPU). So you pay twice as much money for a machine which is half as fast.

For gaming, this just isn't very compelling. Let it be known that I never said it was a bad computer. In fact I think it is a great computer for many things. Just not so good for some other things which it was not designed for.
 
As far as I can tell, people are saying it might be equivalent to the W9000 but no one has run any conclusive tests proving this. Bootcamp performance, including whether or not the GPUs can use Crossfire, has also not been tested. So everything people are saying about the Windows gaming performance of these machines is basically conjecture until someone tests it. I don't get why people just don't wait instead of making wild guesses.

Evil Spoonman said:
Now we know what is inside the box. At the high end it is an AMD FirePro W9000, in more or less stock configuration too judging by the numbers. Chances of being able to Crossfire these GPUs under Windows is very, very low. For now I'm assuming it won't happen (even if you could it would be an EFI boot hack, almost certainly not officially supported by the BIOS emulation).



We also know what the FirePro W9000 is capable of as a gaming GPU. It roughly competes with a Radeon 7970, which is a distinctly midrange GPU today. AMD's own 290 is a lot faster, not to mention Nvidia's high end GTX 780 Ti.



What do I have to pay for this? Minimum about $4,000.00 (excluding all taxes and only upgrading GPU). So you pay twice as much money for a machine which is half as fast.



For gaming, this just isn't very compelling. Let it be known that I never said it was a bad computer. In fact I think it is a great computer for many things. Just not so good for some other things which it was not designed for.
Click to expand...
 
Evil Spoonman said:
For gaming, this just isn't very compelling. Let it be known that I never said it was a bad computer. In fact I think it is a great computer for many things. Just not so good for some other things which it was not designed for.
Click to expand...

For gaming it only uses one GPU as we know. It's still a more than capable card if you want to run even with all bells and whistles in most games on at 1080p. It'd be a lot faster under Xfire but as you said that's not happening.

Then again, this is not a gaming computer. In fact, people would be acting pretty unreasonable and contrary to known fact to purchase this expensive beast for gaming when there are much cheaper alternatives for similar quality (heck even a PS4 competes on gaming and that's 10x + cheaper). If they buy it for gaming alone, it's purely an emotional not empirical purchase.

This is a creative professional's computer. The 2nd GPU is used currently purely for creative software, where it allows people like myself to render & export out much faster than was possible before on, say, an iMac. It allows me to run Resolve with 2x the GPU power and get many more nodes running in real time or close to. It allows us to edit 4K fluidly in real time. You need that 2nd GPU to get that done. And it's been proven the AMD chips run OpenGL much faster than Nvidia, though that will change as drivers improve.

Even Dual D500's are faster than a single 290x card for getting work done. The 6 core base model is super fast for getting work done too.

Anyone can build a more than capable souped-up PC gaming machine for a fraction of the cost of a Mac Pro. If people want to game, and I mean core and not casual gamers, they should get one of those, or buy a PS4/XB1. The Mac Pro is extremely fast... at getting work done.

If you're a once in a while gamer and want good 1080P gaming as a bonus when you have some down time for work, (like me) then consider it a bonus... not the reason to buy the machine.
 
I can't speak for the AMD Fire cards, but I can speak about the Nvidia consumer cards vs the Nvidia Quadro cards. The Quadro cards are incredibly fast and efficient when using pro apps like Maya. However, they suck when it comes to gaming. So it's very possible that the AMD Fire cards are only going to be fair when it comes to gaming.

----------
slughead said:
Are you kidding me? OS X is awful for gaming. Ignoring the I/O problems, the card drivers are G*d awful.

http://www.barefeats.com/imac11e.html
Image
Image
Image
Click to expand...


Let's be fair.... this is from 2011. Mavericks may change this up with their support for OpenGL 4.2 and, apparently, more focus on drivers. Of course only time will tell.
 
slughead said:
Are you kidding me? OS X is awful for gaming. Ignoring the I/O problems, the card drivers are G*d awful.
Click to expand...

Allthough telling, those tests are also on a 2010 MacPro, with a Radeon 5780, under 10.6.7, a lot might have changed...

That said.. it also depends on the games. If you are pulling 90 fps on Blizzard titles, you really don't need much more. Other games that might not be true.

Since there is a nMP on display at one of my local Apple stores, I may go in there and find out if I can bring in WoW on an external HD, and give it a fps test.. :) (Or just download the demo at the store, if they will let me).
 
anticipate said:
For gaming it only uses one GPU as we know. It's still a more than capable card if you want to run even with all bells and whistles in most games on at 1080p. It'd be a lot faster under Xfire but as you said that's not happening.

Then again, this is not a gaming computer. In fact, people would be acting pretty unreasonable and contrary to known fact to purchase this expensive beast for gaming when there are much cheaper alternatives for similar quality (heck even a PS4 competes on gaming and that's 10x + cheaper). If they buy it for gaming alone, it's purely an emotional not empirical purchase.

This is a creative professional's computer. The 2nd GPU is used currently purely for creative software, where it allows people like myself to render & export out much faster than was possible before on, say, an iMac. It allows me to run Resolve with 2x the GPU power and get many more nodes running in real time or close to. It allows us to edit 4K fluidly in real time. You need that 2nd GPU to get that done. And it's been proven the AMD chips run OpenGL much faster than Nvidia, though that will change as drivers improve.

Even Dual D500's are faster than a single 290x card for getting work done. The 6 core base model is super fast for getting work done too.

Anyone can build a more than capable souped-up PC gaming machine for a fraction of the cost of a Mac Pro. If people want to game, and I mean core and not casual gamers, they should get one of those, or buy a PS4/XB1. The Mac Pro is extremely fast... at getting work done.

If you're a once in a while gamer and want good 1080P gaming as a bonus when you have some down time for work, (like me) then consider it a bonus... not the reason to buy the machine.
Click to expand...

Are you getting the D300 or D500?
 
slughead said:
Are you kidding me? OS X is awful for gaming. Ignoring the I/O problems, the card drivers are G*d awful.

http://www.barefeats.com/imac11e.html
Image
Image
Image
Click to expand...
You just proved my point. Blizzard titles run perfectly fine on OS X. Yes they run slower than Windows but all those results show 60+ fps, and 60 is the fps you need. Nothing more. Not to mention, like others have pointed out, those tests are really old. Blizzard themselves said that they are dropping support for 10.6 this year, that means so far Blizzard titles weren't utilising Open GL 3.0, let alone 4.0.

slughead said:
You can run a Titan in a Mac Pro. There is also a flashed GTX780 if you really need boot screens.
Click to expand...


You can, the problem is the last time I checked the drivers weren't good enough and Titan/780 weren't that much faster than 680. Maybe they improved with Mavericks though.
 
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