Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 7,1 Mac Pro 2019 and Gaming
- Thread starter seasurfer
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
$12k for a gaming rig that is no better than an XBOX at the task of gaming. Think about it.
Presently an RX580, but when I played it was the HD 5770 it came with. Like I said, they are not demanding games.
Not a dumb question. I think the last big porting house is Aspyr - maybe Feral Interactive too? from Wikipedia:
In the beginning, many ports were poorly done, often missing features and with greatly reduced performance vs. the original. As for identifying ports, I've always relied on reviews. That info may be in the system requirements page as well.
If you're already getting 300 FPS on game X, and 150 FPS on game Y, are you really going to boot into Windows for 50 FPS more? Seems silly. The performance is already sufficient.Running games under OSX seems sort of silly if you’ve ever played the same title in windows. The performance delta is significant.
That being said, I would love to have a nCMP to put windows on
Upgrade pricing from D300 to D700 was not horrible - around $600 I think, so these could be reasonably priced. Only time will tell. Remember D700 was just a 7970 with double the VRAM.
Yes. Why wouldn't you? Why would you choose to play it on the second best system if you had both of them in front of you? I actually played Tomb Raider: Rise of The Tomb raider on Linux on my machine because it outperforms the Windows version. I didn't install Linux for that purpose, but If you are a gamer and don't have Windows installed for gaming on a machine you are missing out. I have a large game library and not even a quarter of the games are available on Mac/Linux.
People who buy systems like the Mac Pro are generally not the kind of people who settle for "good enough" or "sufficient".
Well it's Tim Apple's Apple now. I have learnt to take any of my expectations and multiply them by factor 2 to get to their idea of a price.
Pro Mac's are built for video editing.
If you want to play games, get an XBox or Playstation.
If you want to play games, get an XBox or Playstation.
Already have both, still play games on my computers, including my Macs. Thanks for your original and thoughtful feedback though.
Not sure anyone here has suggested getting one for just gaming?
If someone asked in a Ferrari forum if their Enzo was capable of fitting the weekly shopping in the boot I doubt they're looking for recommendations about a more practical and affordable Toyota Prius.
I'll be getting a new Mac Pro later this year for Audio production and software development. I might play games on it now and then too.
People always crow "it's not meant for gaming", and "it's not optimal" as if you're going to have some sub-par experience. It's a 14 TFLOP card - of course it can play games. I plunk down that kind of money, it damn well better be able to game after a hard day's work. You expect 7,1 owners to buy a GeForce just to game on? The AMD cards will do just fine. Rock on, seasurfer.
I wouldn't expect to run WoW at 6k though.
Now if you want to have an interesting discussion, let's talk about this new Metal feature (I forget what it's called) that allows the OS to see all the GPUs as a single device. That might bring some interesting performance gains.
Let’s ignore metal.
Let’s go back to the questions about GPUs.
I am taking both about the driver support and firmware feature set.
Workstation GPUs have a different feature requirement. The first things I can think of is polygon calculation count. This is typically lower in games compared to CAD/scientific applications which have non burstible, sustained high polygon calculation counts and more complex geometry throughout the lifetime of the running application. The workstation card may have ECC whilst the gaming one will not. We don’t know the full specifications of this card.
I am guessing that the driver and firmware of the workstation GPU used here favours a balance of performance and sustained load in favour of super high performance. In other words, it’s important for workstation GPUs to be accurate first and pretty second. It would then be reasonable to say that the inverse is true for gaming cards. Yes, they are both powerful, however have two different contexts.
Now I only have the worst case. In the best case and it might be the case, but given that no one has tested it, who knows, the GPU may exhibit the same behaviour as a gaming GPU.
Errhh.. No.
Consoles are garbage compared to a computer. Not to mention you get forced onto a 3 year, replace your boxen treadmill.
That's really nice, but has diddly squat to do with getting a good gaming experience on Diablo III, World of Warcraft, or almost any game you could possibly name. The card is fast enough. Simple as.
Classy.
They’re not designed for the same workloads. Simple as.
I wonder why most people don’t use workstations GPUs in their gaming rigs, they’re something cheaper and are both “fast enough” then.
There are gaming benefits to windows besides the superior GPU performance of dx11 & 12. True mouse polling, unlocked refresh rates, streaming and capture software, customized control over all of these settings and more, not to mention the fact that most titles are built with windows chiefly in mind among them. Now basic games running on Mac is fine. But if you have any intent of running a AAA title at high resolutions and hz then OSX is not going to be your jam. If you want to play indie games and blizzard titles that are approaching a decade old then you’d probably be satisfied playing them on just about anything, so why spend $6000 on a workstation that in all likelihood will underperform compared to a premium windows box you could build at a fraction of the cost?
Don’t get me wrong, I tricked my cMP out over the years and had a lot of fun doing it. I spent a lot of time in bootcamp and it performed admirably. But it was also a lesson. Gaming is best in windows, and xeons are never best in gaming. I’m sure many ncMP owners will explore the gaming performance of this new machine and I look forward to seeing how the benches fall. But like the old cMP, it will almost certainly come with some concessions, headaches, and a significant hit to the power bill. The nCMPs power supply is almost 50% larger. I’ll be curious to see some killawatt testing when these things are fully kitted out and running at load.
Don’t get me wrong, I tricked my cMP out over the years and had a lot of fun doing it. I spent a lot of time in bootcamp and it performed admirably. But it was also a lesson. Gaming is best in windows, and xeons are never best in gaming. I’m sure many ncMP owners will explore the gaming performance of this new machine and I look forward to seeing how the benches fall. But like the old cMP, it will almost certainly come with some concessions, headaches, and a significant hit to the power bill. The nCMPs power supply is almost 50% larger. I’ll be curious to see some killawatt testing when these things are fully kitted out and running at load.
Re: workstation cards: in my experience this is all about the certification and support regarding certain apps. It's certainly not about performance (unless you are RAM restricted), back when I had one of these they were actually clocked lower than the high end consumer equivalent, probably for better cooling/reliability/installation in rackmount setups.
Way back in the day there were some 'pro' apps that were ported over from e.g. the SGI platform to desktop PCs/Macs. Some of those utilized features nobody had thought of supporting in the consumer card drivers and that meant you were in for a horrible experience (selection overlays not working, etc). For a long time Maya did not work well at all on multi screen setups running on consumer cards. I don't think any of those apps still suffer from that kind of thing - if they are even around still. Certainly no issue on Intel Macs.
Current consoles are going on 6 years, it'll be 7 before a new generation is here, actually it might be 9 till there are enough titles for the new system and no support anymore for the old before you really have to switch. Going by this forum that sounds like an average 5,1's lifespan to me.
Way back in the day there were some 'pro' apps that were ported over from e.g. the SGI platform to desktop PCs/Macs. Some of those utilized features nobody had thought of supporting in the consumer card drivers and that meant you were in for a horrible experience (selection overlays not working, etc). For a long time Maya did not work well at all on multi screen setups running on consumer cards. I don't think any of those apps still suffer from that kind of thing - if they are even around still. Certainly no issue on Intel Macs.
Current consoles are going on 6 years, it'll be 7 before a new generation is here, actually it might be 9 till there are enough titles for the new system and no support anymore for the old before you really have to switch. Going by this forum that sounds like an average 5,1's lifespan to me.
Yes, not demanding but i bet you dont play them at 5k/6k resolution like OP is asking
I dont know if D3 or WOW now has metal like starcraft 2 has, but if they doesn't, i dont think you can play them at native resolution @60hz
Let me just say, back in 2013, I bought the model with dual D700's. It played games at near-maximum specs at 4K resolution. That was my first introduction to high-resolution gaming.
I then bought a dedicated gaming machine, and while the dual Titan X cards were great, the costs were still very substantial to get to that capability.
Dollar for dollar, it's not the best investment. But to say "Mac's aren't for gaming" is absurd. I'm quite optimistic you'll be surprised at its capability. I have a Vega 20 laptop now, and I often take a work break and jump into a game from Steam.
I then bought a dedicated gaming machine, and while the dual Titan X cards were great, the costs were still very substantial to get to that capability.
Dollar for dollar, it's not the best investment. But to say "Mac's aren't for gaming" is absurd. I'm quite optimistic you'll be surprised at its capability. I have a Vega 20 laptop now, and I often take a work break and jump into a game from Steam.
Maybe OP just trolled us all.
I don't think so. OP probably just didn't want to get scoffed and heckled. OP's question was not complicated and got answered aptly pretty fast. Then all the negativity piles on, and that's how it goes.
There are some good games for mac pro...like myst series. My downtime hobby.
5,1 cMP with a 4 year old Nvidia Maxwell card can run modern games without breaking a sweat.
7,1 shouldn't have a problem.
7,1 shouldn't have a problem.
Yeah, thats exactly the point! As others have mentioned, it is about being able to boot into windows after a heavy workday and get some well deserved entertainment, WITHOUT the need to add a second gaming PC (or console) exactly for that purpose. And yes, imho you really should use windows for gaming, it is so much more efficient on that task - I mean windows has to be good for at least something, right?
Yeah, the MacPro is surely a rather bad choice as a pure gaming machine, but for quite some people it is more like a nice "side effect" to be able to play games on the SAME machine.
I think it all boils down to the driver situation on the bootcamp side, i.e. am I able to run those Vega Pros with the original AMD drivers (tuned for gaming)? If thats possible I think this will be a decent gaming machine, just like my old 3,1 was.
If it only runs with some special Apple drivers, this might be different though.
So do I!
I am curious how this plays out (pun intended), so if someone is able to test bootcamp compability, esp. regarding the GPU driver situation I would be really interested in the results.
Closer to 2070 GTX rather than 2080 GTX, most probably (and only by assuming that it will have a decent thermal behaviour) .
On 6k resolution, a no-go anyway for demanding titles.