I have to disagree, the "Clucker 3000" is more than just a pretty beak and claws. It offers alot of scratch.
darned auto-correcters....
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Sapphire is launching Radeon 7950 Mac on Tuesday
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I have to disagree, the "Clucker 3000" is more than just a pretty beak and claws. It offers alot of scratch.
darned auto-correcters....
We need to stop the puns before they hatch, or we may run a fowl of the moderators who will hen peck us to death.
I ignored that one, but it was pretty funny.
First this is way too general. Not everything when it comes to graphics or video benefits from the gpu. There are certain functions that have been ported in specific applications. It is likely that highly parallel functions will continue to be written or rewritten this way. Even in those circumstances, can you think of any applications on Windows where SLI is supported for CUDA based processing? I don't know that Crossfire/SLI even have OpenCL support. Can anyone comment on this? As for multiple displays, what is the advantage over two separately installed gpus?
Wow, the Motion test shows the 7950 as slower than even the 5770. I wonder what is going on there.
I'm painfully aware of which rendering tasks run on the CPU, GPU or SPU for that matter.
My Original question was why would Crossfire/SLI support on the mac be a bad thing? what harm would it do to users that don't need it?
It seems like it could be a driver issue. I wonder if the drivers that came with the card are different than the ones that shipped with 10.8.3.
Regardless of whether it's a driver or hardware issue, it effectively makes it a non-upgrade over the 5870 for now.
I'll quote myself on this one so that I can look like an egomaniac
.Where did I suggest added support would hurt anyone? I stated that as a feature it doesn't seem to align with mac pro purchases or benefit the kind of work you later suggested. Apple could add any number of things. This seems like an unlikely one, and you have yet to give an example of any application that significantly benefits from the use of SLI/Crossfire for OpenCL/CUDA under Windows or Linux. What harm would it do has little to do with system design.
I'm not saying SLI support is likely, but anyone doing 3d work would benefit, and a few other industries, beyond people playing video games. Making your 2 gpu's act as 1 GPU means double the vram pool for textures and calculations, and double the processing power to work on that data set - Save CUDA or OpenCL.
A short off the top of my head list of Software that would benefit..
Maya, Lightwave, Cinema4d, Modo, Blender, Houdini, The entire Gaming world, Octane, Kray, Mudbox, Bodypaint, TurbulanceFD, Rhino, The CAD world, AfterFX, Nuke, Realflow etc to name some.. Thats not even going into the scientific visualization and VR spaces..
I'm quite fluent with a number of those packages. Some under Windows are tuned for the use of workstation gpus, but most of them lack SLI support. I'm not even sure if the Quadros that are recommended for a number of those packages support it at all. In the case of After Effects, it has a CUDA based raytracer and a couple other things as of CS6, yet no SLI support. Mudbox is a good example of an extremely OpenGL heavy application. Here is the list of certified graphics hardware under Windows, as OSX lacks SLI support. I found a number of forums debating whether or not SLI presents an advantage there, but Autodesk certainly doesn't certify or support such configurations. I used Windows 7 as SLI is in fact supported under Windows.
Looking through that list, Octane is probably the most likely candidate.
Seriously awesome. I mean everybody was complaining about insufficient video game range of Macintosh computer however with that news, companies will release more mac games than they used to do in the past.
The far more straightforward solution to that is to just double the VRAM for a GPU if it is capped by storage issues.
range on Mac Pros over the years.
2006-7: 256-512MB
2008: 256-1500MB
2009: 512-1500MB
2010: 1000-1500MB
2011: 1000-2000MB
2013: 1000-3000MB
Nevermind that the textures are usually redundantly copied into the two split pools. So the memory doubling isn't what the solution does. SLI/Crossfire are more geared at shrinking the amount of area the memory has to cover and increasing GPU side caching to reduce traffic through a throttled PCI-e channel.
Again is it is really increasing the GPU "horsepower" to pixels rendered ratio.... not really about working on a larger set. We're past the point where any screen in mainline usage is so big in pixel count to overwhelm a single card. Cards at this point can drive multiple screens.
Hence the kludge factor on the solution.... on data around the size of a frame buffer can actually be shared.
The primary reason have these proprietary back-side bus solutions was because at one point AGP and initial version of PCI had bandwidth issues. In a context of PCI-e v2.0 and not v3.0 that is a solution in search of a problem. Especially when it is capped at frame buffer sizes.
Price is the bigger driver on the added complexity the solution requires. The larger memory cards typically have non-linear pricing. To side step that and to kludge around the throttled mainstream PCs limited 16x cap on PCI-e lanes the problem is split into two pieces, duplicating the textures , and only consolidating the frame buffers. If the pricing were linear and/or the PCI-e lanes aren't capped then it is less of an issue.
Amazon has upped their price to $480, assume to match Newegg, but it is still not available. Newegg is showing inventory right now, so they're not sold out, yet...