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AMD Announces New Mac Pro-Suitable Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card
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This guy is a perfect for example for why you shouldn't drink and post.
At least not in that order.
!! 7970 Implements John Carmack's MegaTexture in Hardware
This is very cool:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
I'm currently running Rage on a Mac Pro 8-Core 2.93 GHz (3.33 with Intel Turboboost), Radeon 5870, Boot Camp, XP Pro. I have 2.6 TB of storage with 3 drives: Snow Leopard boot, XP boot, and a third drive with 2 partitions to hold backups of those boot volumes.
I am tweaking away playing with the various cvars that control MegaTexture performance and options.
I will be very excited to see what a hardware acceleration of the MegaTexture streaming system will do for Rage.
The game is gorgeous on the 24" Apple LED Cinema Display.
PC gaming is not dead. Community-generated content is not dead, but it did slow down as engine and art complexity shot up. You almost need a full-time game development studio these days to tackle creating new levels for modern games. But it is still beeing done, and it is very rewarding. I participated in creating an Israel theater of operations for Falcon 4 Allied Force, for example, and enjoyed it immensely.
Mac Pro is not dead.
I get so tired of trolls and wonks who post "absolute" knowledge about business trends. If these guys were that good, they wouldn't be posting from the basement flat in which they live rent-free below their aging mothers, but rather from an executive corner office at a computer company.
Comparing PC gaming to console gaming is a non-starter. As has been pointed out in this thread, many of the major AAA titles are running at 30Hz and 720p on consoles (which gets scaled up for TV display in a lossy process after rendering that adds some lag). Yuck. Doom 3 chopped significant content to shoe-horn it into consoles -- the console versions have only three-fourths of the rooms and corridors per level compared to the PC version because of RAM constraints. That's why Prima has different printed strategy guides for the console and PC versions. Maybe a *lot* of undiscerning kids will accept it without caring, but not "enthusiasts". What's the point of not exploring Crysis in all its developer-intended glory? And what's up with split-screen FPS gaming, anyway? Is it not the height of obsurdity to see your opponent's view? Console controls? Try a modern flight simulator like Falcon 4 on a game pad. Next.
Comparing Mac Pro to over-clocked liquid-nitrogen-cooled PC gaming rigs makes no sense anymore because all gaming output gets scaled to 60Hz on modern LCD monitors. At 1920 x 1200 on the beautifully color- and black-saturated IPS Apple LED Cinema Display, I'm running just about evey single modern game there is that runs under XP at the max frames the LCD will display, 60! And I know my server-class Xeon components are running cool in the best thermal enclosure ever designed, extending their life and my investment. Someday I'll upgrade to Windows 7 to catch the few games that need it (Battlefield 3). Heck, maybe I'll just chuck another drive in there and dedicate it to Windows 7. That's a five-minute task with the sleek Mac Pro design.
So there I am, on my clean-lined, babe-impressing, brushed-aluminum monster enjoying max gaming. And sometimes, I even switch over to the fantastic OS X Snow Leopard desktop publishing environment to do some work with the great Adobe professional toolset!
This is very cool:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
I'm currently running Rage on a Mac Pro 8-Core 2.93 GHz (3.33 with Intel Turboboost), Radeon 5870, Boot Camp, XP Pro. I have 2.6 TB of storage with 3 drives: Snow Leopard boot, XP boot, and a third drive with 2 partitions to hold backups of those boot volumes.
I am tweaking away playing with the various cvars that control MegaTexture performance and options.
I will be very excited to see what a hardware acceleration of the MegaTexture streaming system will do for Rage.
The game is gorgeous on the 24" Apple LED Cinema Display.
PC gaming is not dead. Community-generated content is not dead, but it did slow down as engine and art complexity shot up. You almost need a full-time game development studio these days to tackle creating new levels for modern games. But it is still beeing done, and it is very rewarding. I participated in creating an Israel theater of operations for Falcon 4 Allied Force, for example, and enjoyed it immensely.
Mac Pro is not dead.
I get so tired of trolls and wonks who post "absolute" knowledge about business trends. If these guys were that good, they wouldn't be posting from the basement flat in which they live rent-free below their aging mothers, but rather from an executive corner office at a computer company.
Comparing PC gaming to console gaming is a non-starter. As has been pointed out in this thread, many of the major AAA titles are running at 30Hz and 720p on consoles (which gets scaled up for TV display in a lossy process after rendering that adds some lag). Yuck. Doom 3 chopped significant content to shoe-horn it into consoles -- the console versions have only three-fourths of the rooms and corridors per level compared to the PC version because of RAM constraints. That's why Prima has different printed strategy guides for the console and PC versions. Maybe a *lot* of undiscerning kids will accept it without caring, but not "enthusiasts". What's the point of not exploring Crysis in all its developer-intended glory? And what's up with split-screen FPS gaming, anyway? Is it not the height of obsurdity to see your opponent's view? Console controls? Try a modern flight simulator like Falcon 4 on a game pad. Next.
Comparing Mac Pro to over-clocked liquid-nitrogen-cooled PC gaming rigs makes no sense anymore because all gaming output gets scaled to 60Hz on modern LCD monitors. At 1920 x 1200 on the beautifully color- and black-saturated IPS Apple LED Cinema Display, I'm running just about evey single modern game there is that runs under XP at the max frames the LCD will display, 60! And I know my server-class Xeon components are running cool in the best thermal enclosure ever designed, extending their life and my investment. Someday I'll upgrade to Windows 7 to catch the few games that need it (Battlefield 3). Heck, maybe I'll just chuck another drive in there and dedicate it to Windows 7. That's a five-minute task with the sleek Mac Pro design.
So there I am, on my clean-lined, babe-impressing, brushed-aluminum monster enjoying max gaming. And sometimes, I even switch over to the fantastic OS X Snow Leopard desktop publishing environment to do some work with the great Adobe professional toolset!
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)
Atari 2600 Darth Vader edition when I have time once a year. Mac Pro every waking hr for rendering graphics so I can pay rent.
Atari 2600 Darth Vader edition when I have time once a year. Mac Pro every waking hr for rendering graphics so I can pay rent.
??
I almost feel as if I've erroneously wandered onto forums.gaming.macrumors.com . . . but that's not what it says in the address bar.
I can't be the only schmuck who requires Cocoa under XCode and OpenCL for my major career-changing project, can I? Ah, well; perhaps I am after all.
I am very curious about this new card, when released in an Apple version. A new Mac Pro might be nice, but it would probably run on my 2009 with an os update.
I've barely squeezed enough power out of my 5870 to generate frames at 60 per, 1024x768. That's enough for showtime. But I'd like to go to a higher resolution in the near future. Or multiple screens. Yes, I did vectorize using float4s for the AMD, which only doubled the throughput (and what a mountain that was to climb!). Even if it were still to use VLIW, this card looks to be at least 30% faster. AND, with the architecture change, who knows HOW much better the squeezins will be??
Fun!
I almost feel as if I've erroneously wandered onto forums.gaming.macrumors.com . . . but that's not what it says in the address bar.
I can't be the only schmuck who requires Cocoa under XCode and OpenCL for my major career-changing project, can I? Ah, well; perhaps I am after all.
I am very curious about this new card, when released in an Apple version. A new Mac Pro might be nice, but it would probably run on my 2009 with an os update.
I've barely squeezed enough power out of my 5870 to generate frames at 60 per, 1024x768. That's enough for showtime. But I'd like to go to a higher resolution in the near future. Or multiple screens. Yes, I did vectorize using float4s for the AMD, which only doubled the throughput (and what a mountain that was to climb!). Even if it were still to use VLIW, this card looks to be at least 30% faster. AND, with the architecture change, who knows HOW much better the squeezins will be??
Fun!
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Well it looks like the HD 7950 was pushed back into February. Maybe we will see a paper launch on January 9th.
Anybody think these new cards when they come out will work in the used 2009 2.93 8core I have coming in the mail? I just ordered a new 5770 to put into my old 2006 MacPro to replace it, because the card I have currently is bad.
If someone can convince me that it's possible these new cards could work in my 2009 MacPro, I'll return the 5770 coming in the mail, and put the 5770 from my 2009 MacPro in the 2006 when I get a new card for my 2009.
Hopefully that makes sense, lol. Anybody think it's possible?
If someone can convince me that it's possible these new cards could work in my 2009 MacPro, I'll return the 5770 coming in the mail, and put the 5770 from my 2009 MacPro in the 2006 when I get a new card for my 2009.
Hopefully that makes sense, lol. Anybody think it's possible?
How long.....
Must have been a long time since you built systems. It been 5 years since you could buy a mid-high end graphics card that didn't require at least one additional power supply cable.
Must have been a long time since you built systems. It been 5 years since you could buy a mid-high end graphics card that didn't require at least one additional power supply cable.
This is very cool:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
I'm currently running Rage on a Mac Pro 8-Core 2.93 GHz (3.33 with Intel Turboboost), Radeon 5870, Boot Camp, XP Pro. I have 2.6 TB of storage with 3 drives: Snow Leopard boot, XP boot, and a third drive with 2 partitions to hold backups of those boot volumes.
I am tweaking away playing with the various cvars that control MegaTexture performance and options.
I will be very excited to see what a hardware acceleration of the MegaTexture streaming system will do for Rage.
The game is gorgeous on the 24" Apple LED Cinema Display.
PC gaming is not dead. Community-generated content is not dead, but it did slow down as engine and art complexity shot up. You almost need a full-time game development studio these days to tackle creating new levels for modern games. But it is still beeing done, and it is very rewarding. I participated in creating an Israel theater of operations for Falcon 4 Allied Force, for example, and enjoyed it immensely.
Mac Pro is not dead.
I get so tired of trolls and wonks who post "absolute" knowledge about business trends. If these guys were that good, they wouldn't be posting from the basement flat in which they live rent-free below their aging mothers, but rather from an executive corner office at a computer company.
Comparing PC gaming to console gaming is a non-starter. As has been pointed out in this thread, many of the major AAA titles are running at 30Hz and 720p on consoles (which gets scaled up for TV display in a lossy process after rendering that adds some lag). Yuck. Doom 3 chopped significant content to shoe-horn it into consoles -- the console versions have only three-fourths of the rooms and corridors per level compared to the PC version because of RAM constraints. That's why Prima has different printed strategy guides for the console and PC versions. Maybe a *lot* of undiscerning kids will accept it without caring, but not "enthusiasts". What's the point of not exploring Crysis in all its developer-intended glory? And what's up with split-screen FPS gaming, anyway? Is it not the height of obsurdity to see your opponent's view? Console controls? Try a modern flight simulator like Falcon 4 on a game pad. Next.
Comparing Mac Pro to over-clocked liquid-nitrogen-cooled PC gaming rigs makes no sense anymore because all gaming output gets scaled to 60Hz on modern LCD monitors. At 1920 x 1200 on the beautifully color- and black-saturated IPS Apple LED Cinema Display, I'm running just about evey single modern game there is that runs under XP at the max frames the LCD will display, 60! And I know my server-class Xeon components are running cool in the best thermal enclosure ever designed, extending their life and my investment. Someday I'll upgrade to Windows 7 to catch the few games that need it (Battlefield 3). Heck, maybe I'll just chuck another drive in there and dedicate it to Windows 7. That's a five-minute task with the sleek Mac Pro design.
So there I am, on my clean-lined, babe-impressing, brushed-aluminum monster enjoying max gaming. And sometimes, I even switch over to the fantastic OS X Snow Leopard desktop publishing environment to do some work with the great Adobe professional toolset!
I work at a television station and we bought 10 new Mac Pro computers last year. There is basically only one reason we had to buy them and it is called Final Cut. Then Apple decided to ditch development of this unique product and provide a gimicky piece of crap called Final Cut X as a replacement. It suitable for making low quality you tube videos.
I've been a mac qualified technician for over twenty years, but prefer to make my own high quality Intel based builds for almost all tasks.
The idea that the Mac Pro tower is "the best thermal enclosure ever designed" is laughable. It is pretty looking and reasonably effective, but there are much better deigned cases out there in the real world. Manufacturers such as Thermaltake and Lian-Li spring to mind. You can buy some very good quality cases for under $400, and then choose a power supply to suit your build needs.
Realistically though the Mac Pro is a workstation class computer than should be compared to other similar machines. A quick browse through the offerings from Hewlett Packard ie Z400 series towers or the amazingly well designed Z1 will show you what others can provide in the same market. Both come with "server class xeon processors".
The Z400 or similar machines from HP, Dell and IBM can be customised. Sort of a concept apple forgot about at least 10 years ago. I can buy the offerings from the original manufacturer or I can go and buy upgrades such as graphics cards from any company I want too. And I can get drivers for them. I don't have to wait months for the next version of some endangered animal named operating system to use the latest and greater consumer or professional grade cards. I don't have to wait for HP to start selling 2 year old graphics cards for double what anyone else does either before i add the driver to the operating system.
So, what's your plan? Keep using the old Final Cut until you can't anymore, or, switch to ... ? On Windows or Mac?
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition unveiled
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/22/3109653/amd-radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition-unveiled
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/22/3109653/amd-radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition-unveiled