That doesn't stop Apple from introducing drivers in future updates.
This is probably due to a poor selection of older games from 2011 and 2012 at only moderate resolution. Its likely these are CPU limited, as its running on an older mac pro tower. Look at higher resolution tests and we see the GTX 980 separate itself from the 680 (using older drivers). It would be nice to see Barefeats update their gaming benchmarks to include some more modern games.
I would like to see more games that are commonly benchmarked on windows. Unfortunately the selection of games that are benchmarked for windows and are also available for OS X is very small but would include Bioshock Infinite, Civilization: Beyond Earth and Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor. Other candidates would be popular games that are less commonly benchmarked like Elite Dangerous, City Skylines or whatever the newest Blizzard game is. You could also lump in here popular games like league of legends but that one is not exactly the most GPU intensive game. Of course once El Capitan is released, getting some metal based games or benchmarks would be great.
The article quotes a rumor that says it will be cut down from ~3000 cores to ~2500 cores. Its likely down clocked from the desktop version as well.
Certainly 12 GB of VRAM is a lot of memory, especially in a laptop. But in the context of the Mac Pro, professional cards exist in the Quadro and FireGL lineups with 16 GB and up. Its not out of the realm of something that Apple would put in the top tier of a "professional" machine. When the current Mac Pro came out, I think the top of the line Nvidia Titans were sitting at the same 6 GB of VRAM that is in the D700.
Intel has been slowly working its way up the Mac lineup. There use to be a time when all Apple laptops included discrete graphics. Currently and in the future I expect only the top tier Apple machines to include discrete graphics. I bet the upcoming 21" ~4k iMacs have broadwell processors with the improved Iris Pro graphics chip with eDRAM, replacing discrete cards from Nvidia. In general though, I am not sure if intel will try and compete at the very top end against AMD and Nvidia. Maybe it depends on how much workloads start to become GPU parallelized and if Intel continues to hit a wall in terms of single threaded performance on their CPUs.
i think our memories of the good ol days might be a bit different.. to me, apple is about the same regarding speed and performance now as they've always been.. it's important to them. their current lineup (at least mac pro, mbp, and imac)
are certainly fast.. but it's never been the main focus or main salespitch (overall user experience being the main focus).
heh.. i just searched beast computer --playing off hackinBeast : )
but that computer in the video is crap compared to the stuff apple makes.. srry.
($10,000 computer.. hundreds of thousands of dollars for this case design but don't pick it up from the top-- the place you'd expect it to be lifted from.. or else you'll rip the top off.. careful opening the panel.. it's spring loaded and our video guy almost cracked it.. (~2mins in the video))
it's just different expectations from different people.. some people might want 3 radiators in a plastic star wars looking box.. clear panels to see the innards and neon etc..
pretty sure the apple designers might barf at that though
They already ship that. M2 format will take time. They don't even ship 1GB SM951 to OEM. The Apple version was custom made.Samsung has started mass production of 256Gb 3D V-NAND Flash.
2TB SSDs for MacPro in the way?
I would love to see something like a "Mac Mini Pro" fill the price gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro. Use some sort of thermal core like design, skylake core i7 CPU, AMD Fury nano like GPU, SSD and external 5k retina display and you have a really nice machine that could be priced around $2000-$2500. Unfortunately Apple hasn't been motivated enough to introduce a machine like this before, and is unlikely to start now.