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OS X New Mac Pro for Gaming?

I

in2tech

macrumors regular
Original poster
I think I know most people would not even give this a thought, but I know people in the flight simulator community that spends thousands and thousands of dollars on systems and also add on's for their hobby and enjoyment?

Could it be possible you have to do heavy content editing and games could just end up being run on the mega expensive (we think) machine!

What do you think the entry level price will be? Under a Retina Macbook Pro or way over.

Just wondering! Would love to have one of these new systems....I think 🙂

Just say it starts at $1999.00, would you even consider it for a HIGH end gaming system and (professional system)?
 
No good. The graphics card it comes with are workstation graphics card. Great for number crunching, and intensive tasks but not so great for games.

The drivers for them are not written for games.
 
I don't see how a Mac Pro is ever worth its price... I love Apple laptops... but a Mac Pro? The new ones coming out aren't even upgradable.

For a fraction of the price you can build a hackintosh that will actually be a much better machine. Building them are relatively simple.
 
in2tech said:
I think I know most people would not even give this a thought, but I know people in the flight simulator community that spends thousands and thousands of dollars on systems and also add on's for their hobby and enjoyment?

Could it be possible you have to do heavy content editing and games could just end up being run on the mega expensive (we think) machine!

What do you think the entry level price will be? Under a Retina Macbook Pro or way over.

Just wondering! Would love to have one of these new systems....I think 🙂

Just say it starts at $1999.00, would you even consider it for a HIGH end gaming system and (professional system)?
Click to expand...

For gaming you'd be wasting your money since workstation cards are not good for games. My Quadro k5000 is amazing for Houdini, Mari, Realflow, Modo, Maya, After Effects, etc but for games it is a bit laggy playing Portal 2. For 3D, video, audio, or really any creative/scientific work these machines would be worth it. I'd love to have one..

doh123 said:
I don't see how a Mac Pro is ever worth its price... I love Apple laptops... but a Mac Pro? The new ones coming out aren't even upgradable.
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I'm not sure why people are saying this when absolutely no one knows if its true or not. Apple could have deals with multiple manufacturers for Mac Pro versions of their cards. Current manufacturers do it, its not strange to assume they'll continue doing it.
 
I read a Tomshardware article about the graphics card that'll be in the Mac Pro (W9000, but there'll be two with an outrageous 6 GB of VRAM), evaluating its gaming potential, and it was able to hold its own. From a price/performance ratio, of course, it's terrible, but you should be able to max things out no problem. That is, as long as the OS X drivers aren't awful.

Also, with dual 6 GB graphics cards, there's no way it's going to be under $3000.

+1 for the Hackintosh suggestion. I spent about $800 for mine in 2010, and thanks to the ridiculously long console generation, it still plays games at max, 1080p. (When The Witcher 3 comes out, it'll probably be time for a new graphics card.)

chrono1081 said:
Apple could have deals with multiple manufacturers for Mac Pro versions of their cards. Current manufacturers do it, its not strange to assume they'll continue doing it.
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Apple seems to have trouble getting graphics card makers to make timely releases of its cards currently, when they are the same exact card, just flashed differently for OS X. Mac Pro cards require a unique design. I hope Apple can get some arrangements going, but I'm skeptical.
 
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chrono1081 said:
I'm not sure why people are saying this when absolutely no one knows if its true or not. Apple could have deals with multiple manufacturers for Mac Pro versions of their cards. Current manufacturers do it, its not strange to assume they'll continue doing it.
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its pretty safe to bet a highly proprietary design will not have many if any options available. Its hard enough to get that when they were using standard cards. Even if they are made, they'll be insanely expensive. Apple also doesn't really have a history of doing anything like that... many models of iMacs and such have the GPU on separate proprietary cards.... and there aren't upgrades for those.
 
Cougarcat said:
I read a Tomshardware article about the graphics card that'll be in the Mac Pro (W9000, but there'll be two with an outrageous 6 GB of VRAM), evaluating its gaming potential, and it was able to hold its own. From a price/performance ratio, of course, it's terrible, but you should be able to max things out no problem. That is, as long as the OS X drivers aren't awful.
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I came here just to post that article.

In fact I'm very interesting the AMD drivers on OS X. Apparently the reason the Mac AMD 7950 performed so bad in early reviews was all down to drivers. That card is currently still faster than even the NVIDIA GTX 680 in OpenCL, and since Apple is now moving towards AMD cards for the next MP; I do wonder if the drivers will greatly improve.

I'm rather interested in the 7950, and I do wonder if there will be new 8xxx series cards for the current Mac Pro.

If Anything the current Mac Pro is great for gaming, and at resolution over 1920x1080 the differences in CPU tech is a new FPS ranging from 1-5 at most.
The GPU is the primary factor.

This review of the Ivy-Bridge EP cpu is one of the few to also include the i7 980x which is the W3680 or 3.33Ghz Xeon on my Mac Pro.

The W3680 is still a very good CPU, even today.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/551?vs=142

Unless you're playing at a low resolution( which is more CPU intensive), or a game that uses the GPU more;you won't notice much at resolutions over 1920x1080.

This is one of the few reviews to include the i7 980x in reviews with the latest tech. It holds up extremely well at HD resolutions and higher. We're talking about 1-3 fps differences.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...review,11.html
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...review,15.html

To quote their handbrake scores
The Gulftown Core i7 980X pushed out 28 FPS in 2008.
The Sandy Bridge-E based Core i7 3960X pushed 30 20 2011.
Now the Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 4960X manages 33 transcoded frames per second in 2013.

You need to wonder, what happened to the raw processor performance increase? This is not exactly Moore's Law anymore.
Click to expand...


So if Apple can get AMD to sort out it's drivers the New MP will be more than capable of playing games, especially since the W9000 has similar performance to the 7970, all be it in a Windows/Direct X environment.
 
Yeah, waste of money.

The New Mac Pro doesn't have the correct hardware to be a good gaming machine, nor the right operating system. Its supposed to be an OSX Workstation, not a high end Windows Gaming machine, so do not treat it like one.

Gaming is best on Windows, there is no contest, which is why none of my Macs were ever gaming rigs, the cloest I ever came was with a G4 MDD in College when I couldn't afford to fix my Dell PCs blown power supply until next semester.
 
doh123 said:
I don't see how a Mac Pro is ever worth its price... I love Apple laptops... but a Mac Pro? The new ones coming out aren't even upgradable.

For a fraction of the price you can build a hackintosh that will actually be a much better machine. Building them are relatively simple.
Click to expand...

Why not? I'm shocked that the MacPros don't come with 2gb video cards.
 
I used to have a G5 tower. It was a beautiful piece of engineering and I remember upgrading it's cards. What I don't remember is how I had to approach the drivers... if it was Apple or AMD who was supplying drivers. Is this still the case? I thought by going with an intel processor, and conforming more to a PC standard, that drivers would not be a big deal?
 
Huntn said:
I used to have a G5 tower. It was a beautiful piece of engineering and I remember upgrading it's cards. What I don't remember is how I had to approach the drivers... if it was Apple or AMD who was supplying drivers. Is this still the case? I thought by going with an intel processor, and conforming more to a PC standard, that drivers would not be a big deal?
Click to expand...

At the moment OS 10.8.3 and up support most cards from AMD or NVIDIA straight from the OS. With NVIDIA you can down their web drivers if you like though.

Personally I just got burnt by NV's latest drivers, they'd crash iMovie and FCP X.
Swapped backed to the OS X drivers, and it's smooth sailing.

Your best route is to use an AMD 7xxx, or NV 6xx and they're basically plug and play in OS X.
 
N19h7m4r3 said:
At the moment OS 10.8.3 and up support most cards from AMD or NVIDIA straight from the OS. With NVIDIA you can down their web drivers if you like though.

Personally I just got burnt by NV's latest drivers, they'd crash iMovie and FCP X.
Swapped backed to the OS X drivers, and it's smooth sailing.

Your best route is to use an AMD 7xxx, or NV 6xx and they're basically plug and play in OS X.
Click to expand...

So can you pop one of the 2GB cards into a MacPro?
 
Huntn said:
So can you pop one of the 2GB cards into a MacPro?
Click to expand...

If the New Mac Pro can be upgraded and it just takes heatsink and fanless gpu's i'm sure it can.

Now if you're using a current Mac pro, it's super easy. I'm using a NVIDIA GTX660 3GB superclock+ card and it works perfectly. I replaced my old mac GT120 512MB with it.
 
N19h7m4r3 said:
If the New Mac Pro can be upgraded and it just takes heatsink and fanless gpu's i'm sure it can.

Now if you're using a current Mac pro, it's super easy. I'm using a NVIDIA GTX660 3GB superclock+ card and it works perfectly. I replaced my old mac GT120 512MB with it.
Click to expand...

If Apple has chosen to not allow their new machines to accept upgraded cards, I believe this is a bad decision from a consumer standpoint, but maybe not. Granted these machines will mostly be used by professionals, still, even they will want to extend the life, upgrading machines instead of purchasing new ones. Although I guess it can be argued that for graphic work, there is probably no pressing need to upgrade? For gaming on Mac hardware, iMac seems to be the way to go for a desktop.
 
There is always a pressing need for graphics, or compute work really.

A new card can make the difference between waiting 5 hours, or 3 when doing intensive work.

A better graphics card that makes use of OpenCL can significantly speed up video editing as well.

In the end though, it all depends on drivers. If the drivers allow for both gaming and work it's great. Personally I'll be sticking with my mac Pro for a few more years if I can. A new graphics card will significantly speed up things for me.
 
We don't know enough about what configs they will offer to say if it can game well or not. If they only offer it with workstation cards then its not going to be good.

The current mac pro can be a reasonable gaming machine with a 680 in it tho.
 
I wouldn't recommend a Mac Pro for gaming. Seems like spending a lot of money on something that is going to be mediocre at best at the task in hand. The lack of upgradability combined with the lack of games and DirectX for OS X doesn't make it the ideal machine for games.

The improved OpenGL driver support in Mavericks is a start, but Macs and OS X still has a long way to go for gaming.
 
The old one (Mac Pro 5,1 in my case) does very nicely for gaming. FSX runs very well with the PMDG B777-200/LR airplane addon (a very sophisticated one).

That said, FSX doesn't really play to the strengths of video cards, it is more about sheer CPU speed. 🙄
 
I'm confused about the response here. If someone has the money to buy a Mac Pro, then they certainly have the cash to buy a Windows license. So shouldn't we also be talking about the Mac Pro in bootcamp? And then wouldn't we be using windows drivers on the graphics cards?

So how would this computer perform in Windows bootcamp?
 
TallManNY said:
I'm confused about the response here. If someone has the money to buy a Mac Pro, then they certainly have the cash to buy a Windows license. So shouldn't we also be talking about the Mac Pro in bootcamp? And then wouldn't we be using windows drivers on the graphics cards?

So how would this computer perform in Windows bootcamp?
Click to expand...

If it's running windows you need only look up a few posts for a review pitting the AMD W9000 workstation cards against normal gaming ones in a review. They do rather well actually. Just snippet below a 7970, and the nMP will have two of these. Although we do not know if it will have crossfire or not.

AMD recently announced their new R9 series cards will have functional x-fire directly through the PCIe bus, and no longer require the traditional ribbon cable.

No one knows if OS X will ever support X-fire, or some form of workstation equivalent for the W9000's.


On the note of windows, some like myself moved from it and I certainly have a W7 license. I just choose not to bootcamp my Mac Pro. I do all my gaming in OSX, either natively or I use Wine, crossover, or emulators for what I want.
 
TallManNY said:
I'm confused about the response here. If someone has the money to buy a Mac Pro, then they certainly have the cash to buy a Windows license. So shouldn't we also be talking about the Mac Pro in bootcamp? And then wouldn't we be using windows drivers on the graphics cards?

So how would this computer perform in Windows bootcamp?
Click to expand...

The problem is the hardware and price, not (just) OS X. For the estimated price (3000$+) you can get an extremely high end gaming rig that is much more powerful in that regard than the Mac Pro.

Buying the new Mac Pro as a gaming machine is a really poor investment in my opinion. You aren't even going to use OS X! Get a cheaper Mac + a top end Windows PC or build a hackintosh.
 
Mac Pro is a very bad choice for gaming.

A gaming PC is 1/3 of the price and twice the performance.
 
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I bought the 2010 6-core Mac Pro at launch to replace my old gaming PC. I do much more than gaming, but gaming is a major activity for me. At the time I was very happy with my purchase, having a beastly computer that could play games and run OS X. It's served me well over the years, I even upgraded that 5870 that came with the system to a GTX 680 Mac Edition. I'm hoping my system will last me another couple of years.

I'm still happy overall with my Mac Pro with regards to gaming, but if I could do it all over again, I would not have purchased the Mac Pro at all. I don't personally need the workstation class hardware for what I do, so it was a big waste of money. I was simply paying a premium for the ability to play games and run OS X on the same system. When the time comes for me to replace my Mac Pro, I'll be looking at building a gaming PC and purchasing a MacBook Air or 13" rMBP for my day-to-day work.
 
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