FirePro vs Radeon SolidWorks and gaming

[Cubemmal]

I came across this interesting comparison

FirePro vs Radeon SolidWorks and gaming

So the idea is that the FirePro and Radeon cards are 99% the same (excepting possibly ECC video RAM?). The difference is you get custom, certified drivers optimized for rendering. The example above isn't scientific and I don't know how accurate it is, but taking it at face value it indicates that you can get drivers optimized for games, rendering but not necessarily both.

Obviously we don't know and will hopefully find out, but I wonder what we'll get with the new Mac Pro? The drivers will be Apple blessed (probably written originally by AMD). What about the Boot Camp drivers? Will we be able to install stock graphics drivers at all in Boot Camp?

These are important questions for me as I'd rather buy a Big Beefed Out new Mac Pro for development and gaming, instead of two computers (one for gaming and one for development.) But now I'm wondering if I should just buy a gaming computer and drop the idea of using the new Mac Pro for that?

Obviously time will (or should) tell, but opinions are solicited.

 

[linuxcooldude]

Great example showing that a workstation card and gaming cards are not the same thing and don't have exactly the same hardware. There are differences on the GPU and board level as far as hardware is concerned. The drivers are also tested to work in a variety of professional software and developed to a higher degree.

More information in detail on the difference between workstation & gaming cards on the hardware level.

http://icrontic.com/article/the-real-difference-between-workstation-and-desktop-gpus