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tony3d

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 6, 2006
377
2
Is buying a Radean 7950 Mac Edition going to be a big improvement for gaming over my ATI 5780, or is it really not worth the money? Running on a Mac Pro 2012 3.06gig 12 core.
 
Radeon - not Radean.

You probably have Radeon 5870, not 5780.

It is not worth the money.

If you have 5770, then you will see solid improvement with 7950.
 
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Radeon - not Radean.

You probably have Radeon 5870, not 5780.

It is not worth the money.

If you have 5770, than you will see solid improvement with 7950.

Then - not than.


And it depends - check Barefeats for a multitude of tests. I think OpenCL was vastly improved over the 5870. Apps like Final Cut X heavily use OpenCL. 5870 is still a pretty powerful card, even in these days, though.
 
What about the Nvidia 680 for Mac?

I had a GTX 680. It's a good card and a decent upgrade from what you have. As long as you don't get one that's too weird, it's incredibly easy to flash the PC version into a MAC version.
 
Is buying a Radean 7950 Mac Edition going to be a big improvement for gaming over my ATI 5780, or is it really not worth the money? Running on a Mac Pro 2012 3.06gig 12 core.

that card has had allot of defects reported on here as is screen flicker and heavy artifacting in intensive open cl applications.
 
Then - not than.


And it depends - check Barefeats for a multitude of tests. I think OpenCL was vastly improved over the 5870. Apps like Final Cut X heavily use OpenCL. 5870 is still a pretty powerful card, even in these days, though.

OP is interested in games, so i don´t see how is OpenCL relevant here.
 
OP is interested in games, so i don´t see how is OpenCL relevant here.

Doesn't matter - the 7950 is still an improvement, and if/when OP wants OpenCL he'll/she'll have it. I don't see why you bothered replying - more info the better.

Also, I do believe I remember seeing pretty significant gains in FPS on at least a couple of titles for OS X with the 7950.

That's all there really is to say.

Check out Barefeats OP - you'll get "Yes" and No" here on the forums, but the benchmarks there will tell you what you want to know.

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that card has had allot of defects reported on here as is screen flicker and heavy artifacting in intensive open cl applications.

This is true - Yosemite - at least used to - have some serious compatibility issues with the 7950. I personally have the 5770 with Yosemite and no issues at all, so far.

I'm sure Apple will fix it, but for now it's one reason I haven't gotten a 7950 yet.
 
I considered that GPU but in the end went with the MVC HD7970. It doesn't (and never did) have the screen flicker issue, it's faster and very good with OpenCL. It's pretty much identical (except for physical form) to the D700 in the nMP. This is a big plus if you are looking for continued driver support from Apple for future OS X releases.

With this, Apple wireless AC/BT, and Apple SSD w/native Trim, upgrades, resets etc... are all pretty much assured to be a fairly smooth process.
 
I considered that GPU but in the end went with the MVC HD7970. It doesn't (and never did) have the screen flicker issue, it's faster and very good with OpenCL. It's pretty much identical (except for physical form) to the D700 in the nMP. This is a big plus if you are looking for continued driver support from Apple for future OS X releases.

With this, Apple wireless AC/BT, and Apple SSD w/native Trim, upgrades, resets etc... are all pretty much assured to be a fairly smooth process.

Most games use OpenGL right? What is Open CL used for?
 
Most games use OpenGL right? What is Open CL used for?

Better to read it here.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

Basically it's a way to offload processing work to your GPU and accelerate applications. The application has to be aware of OpenCL in order to make use of it though. FCPX makes great use of OpenCL so that was the final deciding factor for me.

nVidia's version of GPU computing is called CUDA. It's very powerful but not utilized in FCPX. As of late however, newer nVidia GPUs support both OpenCL and CUDA but they are MUCH more expensive than the 7970, and are not supported by OS X out of the box, so you always have to wait for nVidia to release new drivers before upgrading OS versions. nVidia locks it's drivers to the specific OS X build number, so every time you update OS X, it breaks the video driver unless you have preinstalled the new driver first. That's why you generally have to wait a few days after an update is released. You have to wait for nVidia to catch up and release their driver before you update.
 
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For gaming, put a GTX 970 or GTX 980 in your Mac Pro.

Up until yesterday, I would have said the same thing. But when I swapped my GTX 970 back into my cMP4,1, I noticed more stuttering in Shadows of Mordor (win7) than I had with my GTX 680 (4GB). I suspect the average frame rate is higher, but every once in a while i got a noticeable delay with the GTX 970.

Its possible that the game is using >3.5GB of video memory and getting hurt by the low bandwidth for that last 0.5GB on the card. Or some other weird specific to that game issue. It was the first time I was disappointed in the card, but to be fair I've been using the GTX 680 more since the 970 is the only card I can get working as a e-gpu for my macbook.
 
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