MP All Models So long, old friend.

[theluggage]

No one buys Macs for gaming in general but you're saying you can't seriously play games on them which is false.

Your personal definition of "seriously" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

If you buy a Mac for WP/DTP, video production, audio production, development etc. and sometimes want to goof off with a game then there are plenty of Mac games that are perfectly playable on Apple Silicon GPUs.

If, however, you're the sort of "serious" gamer that cares about FPS and latency, and want to be certain that you'll be able to run the latest AAA 3D titles at high detail settings - i.e. the sort of people that buy PCIe gaming GPUs and plug them into their LED-encrusted PC towers - i.e. where the money is in 3D gaming - then "perfectly playable" is not for you, and a Mac has never been an attractive option.

Even if Apple completely U-turned on the whole Apple Silicon concept, invested zillions in developing a new AS die with substantial PCIe bandwidth and released a PCIe tower, gamers are not going to turn up in droves and pay the premium for a MacOS capable computer.

Especially on a Mac Pro which you can use a console gpu and boot into windows. I've been doing that since 2006.

You mean you bought an expensive dual Xeon workstation- which offered no advantage to mostly single-threaded games, insisted on the most expensive RAM known to humanity - even if you went third party, and didn't support SLI (which was a thing at the time) - primarily because it allowed you to play games?

The 2006 MP was actually pretty good value for what it was - but what it was was a workstation-class dual Xeon tower that cost twice as much as a half-decent PC gaming rig while offering no advantage for gaming workloads.

I mean, maybe you did but I doubt enough people did to make it important to Apple, and the fact that you could fit GPUs didn't make it competitive as a gaming system.

For most, any gaming capability was an after-the-fact bonus once they'd decided to get a Mac Pro.

Also, I had a 2006 Mac Pro and you certainly didn't get a frictionless choice of GPUs unless you were up to re-flashing them so things like boot screens worked properly. I justified the Mac Pro because I wanted to be able to edit/process video, triple-boot and/or virtualise Linux and Windows alongside MacOS. Yes, I played games on it too, but the default GPU was enough for that. If there'd been something like the Mac Studio then at a lower price, I'd have got it. (The Mac Mini of the day had Intel graphics. Nuff said).

 

[Mac3Duser]

The Mac Pro is first and foremost a workstation. A machine built for computing (video, image processing, coding, 3D, AI, science, finance, etc.).
The fact that TinyGPU allows the use of an Nvidia (or AMD) graphics card with Apple Silicon for computing is, in my opinion, a major advancement that alone would justify the creation of a Mac Pro M5 Ultra with free PCIe lanes in a mini-tower SFF form factor at a minimum.
Ironically, it's when the Mac Pro is discontinued that we learn about these kinds of innovations (TinyGPU).

As for gaming, it doesn't really matter, even though it could obviously be an additional selling point, or a minor one.

I do note, however, that Linux with Proton and Steam OS delivers better or equally good results than Windows. If Apple truly wanted to gain market share in video games, it would need to create a kind of "proton" for Apple Silicon and enable an Nvidia/AMD driver—a sort of TinyGrad but geared towards gaming. At that point, we would certainly see a rapid increase in Mac sales. Because casual gamers would buy a Mac mini with at least 24GB of RAM to play games.

 

[maflynn]

As for gaming, it doesn't really matter, even though it could obviously be an additional selling point, or a minor one.

There's no way a Mac Pro pro type computer (priced as a Mac Pro) would be feasible as a gaming rig

I do note, however, that Linux with Proton and Steam OS delivers better or equally good results than Windows.

I have a M4 Max Studio and a PC desktop (cpu amd 3700x/gpu 7800xt), where the GPU for the Studio largely beats the desktop in raw processing power, yet playing games through crossover is significantly slower then playing games on my PC running Linux. (CachyOS). You're right, the wine layer (proton) is as good as playing natively in windows. That's simply not the case for the Mac, and it will never be.

for the Mac, you have to pump the game through Rosetta and Wine, where as the instruction set for the 3700x needs no emulation layer.

in my opinion, a major advancement that alone would justify the creation of a Mac Pro M5 Ultra with free PCIe lanes in a mini-tower

The market has largely moved on, Apple killed off the Mac Pro because they were not making money, its as simple as that. If it was profitable, this thread would not exist. There's no scenario where Apple rolls out a tower (or mini-tower) with PCIe expansion that does more then the Studio (And priced accordingly) will succeed.

 

[SDAVE]

Your personal definition of "seriously" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

If you buy a Mac for WP/DTP, video production, audio production, development etc. and sometimes want to goof off with a game then there are plenty of Mac games that are perfectly playable on Apple Silicon GPUs.

If, however, you're the sort of "serious" gamer that cares about FPS and latency, and want to be certain that you'll be able to run the latest AAA 3D titles at high detail settings - i.e. the sort of people that buy PCIe gaming GPUs and plug them into their LED-encrusted PC towers - i.e. where the money is in 3D gaming - then "perfectly playable" is not for you, and a Mac has never been an attractive option.

Even if Apple completely U-turned on the whole Apple Silicon concept, invested zillions in developing a new AS die with substantial PCIe bandwidth and released a PCIe tower, gamers are not going to turn up in droves and pay the premium for a MacOS capable computer.


You mean you bought an expensive dual Xeon workstation- which offered no advantage to mostly single-threaded games, insisted on the most expensive RAM known to humanity - even if you went third party, and didn't support SLI (which was a thing at the time) - primarily because it allowed you to play games?

The 2006 MP was actually pretty good value for what it was - but what it was was a workstation-class dual Xeon tower that cost twice as much as a half-decent PC gaming rig while offering no advantage for gaming workloads.

I mean, maybe you did but I doubt enough people did to make it important to Apple, and the fact that you could fit GPUs didn't make it competitive as a gaming system.

For most, any gaming capability was an after-the-fact bonus once they'd decided to get a Mac Pro.

Also, I had a 2006 Mac Pro and you certainly didn't get a frictionless choice of GPUs unless you were up to re-flashing them so things like boot screens worked properly. I justified the Mac Pro because I wanted to be able to edit/process video, triple-boot and/or virtualise Linux and Windows alongside MacOS. Yes, I played games on it too, but the default GPU was enough for that. If there'd been something like the Mac Studio then at a lower price, I'd have got it. (The Mac Mini of the day had Intel graphics. Nuff said).

Circular logic my friend.

No one, especially me said it's common for "gamers" to buy a Mac just to game.

My beef with what you said was that you said "no serious gamer will use a Mac for gaming" and my point was that you can run games fine on a Mac Pro for example using Bootcamp since it runs Windows natively. Works just like a normal PC (which I've built many).

 

[deconstruct60]

...but systems-on-a-chip integrated GPUs, NPUs and on-chip SSD controllers (sharing on-package unified RAM) and relying on Thunderbolt for other I/O are an integral part of the Apple Silicon architecture. The only Apple Silicon chips that have enough PCIe lanes to support substantial internal expansion are the top-end Ultra chips which have a "spare" SSD interface as a side effect of being two complete Max dies fused together... and we've yet to see whether that's going to be true of future "ultra" chips given that M5 Pro/Max uses a more modular system of fused-together dies.

This "spare" SSD only notion is not accurate. This is old meme from back when the MP 2023 model was released that won't go away. Did some digging but this was posted in threads way back in 2023. ( the notion that Apple is 'cheating' when they did structurally the same thing in the MP 2019 to get the slot count higher is flawed. Both systems have a two input , server class expensive PCI-e switch in them. )

Mac Pro 2023 is a scam

To summarize—correct me if I'm wrong—it seems the chip has a total I/O of 32 Gen 4 lanes, subdivided as follows (based on the post from Hector Martin shown in the video): 16 (PCIe cards only) + 8 (PCIe cards + built-in ports + SATA & USB-A internals) + 8 (internal SSD) = 32. For comparison...

forums.macrumors.com

The SSDs do soak up some of what could have provisioned to the backhaul of the PCI-e switch (that in turns provisions all the slots), but it isn't a x8 'max' coming out of the previous SoCs (e.g., M2). And it is not just the SSD.

"..The M2 Ultra chip provides 32 lanes of PCIe gen 4 to the system, with 8 lanes dedicated to the internal SSD. The M2 Ultra chip connects to the PCIe slots through a PCIe switch and provides 24 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth. Pool A provides a maximum of 16 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth and Pool B provides a maximum of 8 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth.

These built-in components are connected to the system through the PCIe switch and assigned to Pool B:

• SATA controller
• 10Gb Ethernet controllers
• Wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) controller
• USB-A port
• PCIe Slot 7 (Apple I/O card)

..."

The there is a Pool 'A' and 'B' from the slot configuration utility interface. If the SSDs (and other standard configuration I/O) used up all of the PCI-e from one of the dies then Apple would not have to stuck a expensive PCI-e switch into the MP 2023 to allow users to tweak the flow between TWO pools. If there was just one pool, they could use a substantively cheaper switch.

Probably will generation similar 'drama' as before but a MP 2019 versus MP 2023 is included in the link below. In terms of total bandwidth it is up. MP 2023 has fewer practically available lanes after allocated a GPU to run the GUI interface (i.e., drop the MPX slots in the 2019 model and look at what is left in both systems) , but they are faster. ( most of the grumbling is about wanting "even faster than that" aggregate bandwidth).

Mac Pro (2023 - M2 Ultra) - Limits and possibilities of PCIe slots

The 2023 Mac Pro allows users to directly connect PCIe cards. Apple gives some recommendations on how to install and configure them and which cards can be installed in the Mac Pro. Below are some m...

softron.zendesk.com

So real issue is that saddling the other Macs that use a "Max" die with a substantive lanes they are never going to use. The M1/M2 dies were 'tweaked' for the Mac Pro ( x16 total output when none of the other systems needed that).

The M3 Max first appeared with no UltraFusion. I suspect that it also didn't have the 'extra lanes to no where' PCI-e provisioning either.

The alt version composed for the M3 Ultra may have just gotten the UltraFusion added back but still had dropped the 'extra' lanes.

Even the M2/M3 Ultra have pretty pathetic PCIe lanes/bandwidth compared to Xeon or AMD systems (including the 2019 Mac Pro). Apple aren't being mean with PCIe for the sake of it - they'd have to produce totally new PCIe-oriented SoC dies to provide that bandwidth, and with the relatively low volume of sales for a new Mac Pro those chips would cost a fortune.

Apple traded off move CPU/NPU/etc to GPU bandwidth for modularity. The bandwith to the GPU when way up. But that isn't 'free'. It isn't just a hardware trade off. To entangle and complicate the GPU driver stack would cost more in software costs also. It is an overall system increase; not just the chips.

It was also a 'trade-off' to saddle the other Max Mac products with PCI-e lanes overhead they didn't need. With wafer costs getting higher and higher each generation that is increased overhead over time. It the Mac more can't carry the costs by itself then it has problems.

 

[deconstruct60]

A driver stack for dGPU. Or at least allowing one for 3rd parties. It would keep the door open for xMax, and for a real Mac Pro. Or anything not possible at this point in time.

They (Apple) used to support intel iGPU and discreet AMD and NVIDIA GPU, and at the same time, in a professional laptop at least they did. Please do that again.

Classically the discrete/integrated GPU driver stack was a collaborative effort. Apple was in charge of a certain segment of OpenCL and the external GPU developer was in charge of another. It never was 100% one or the other. The GPU vendors put in effort largely because Apple was buying their GPUs directly. The biggest GPU buy was Intel (because it was bundled). Apple supported them because they were buying them for the higher volume Macs. As you went up the product line (in laptop and desktop) Apple also additionally bought discrete GPUs (dGPU). Again Apple is the principal buyer here. Where Apple is the principal buyer they are also the seller so can easily collect the fee for doing the software work that goes along with the system.

When Apple decided to switch to Metal has the display GPU stack they took a larger percentage of the workload (and in some aspects made workload smaller by narrowing the API complexity.), but still needed two sides. AMD and Intel tended to let Apple do all the driver distribution also. Nvidia presented illusion that it was 100% all them , but it wasn't. As Apple stopped directly buying their GPUs they increase went rogue and disaligned themselves with Apple's work ( can't be some wildcatter down in the kernel doing whatever you want. Over time Apple just stopped signing their drivers. ).

Apple's move to Metal was a transition from Open graphics standard to their own stack. Similar to Rosetta it effectively has been a structured as a way for folks to both transition over and to more unify the graphics stack along all of Apple's major products that have a GUI. (iOS , iPadOS , macOS).

Was Metal originally a "embrace, extend, extinguish" plan all along? I suspect not. Nvidia (and others) screwing around with OpenCL/GL standards probably was a bigger initial motivation. But as Apple's hardware GPU efforts grew things drifted into that direction. Apple supported OpenCL because it was already there. But for Apple Silicon long term future.

For the Mac Pro 2006-2019 the choice as to whether to support an iGPU or dGPU wasn't even Apple's choice to make. It was Intel's. And it really wasn't oriented around the Mac Pro (or systems like it). It was a datacenter design constraint that just happened to trickle down to workstation.

You can still keep your SoC GPU, it's pretty amazing for laptops, and even for some desktops I agree. But it's not everything you could hope for, nor is it the best there is for every use cases. So both of the best worlds, in one mean of a machine.

It is really not that simple, because how the code approach is implemented around a dGPU is slightly different than iGPU. For example, all the drama Intel had when they tried to jump into the dGPU market with their largely iGPU evolved GPU driver implementations.

The entire rest of the Mac line up has no dGPUs. iOS/iPadOS never had it.

There never was a state where there was a large number of serious Mac programs to had a hard, fixed requirement that they only ran on a Mac Pro. The Mac market is relatively small enough that to be a viable Mac program , the target has to a larger fraction of the Mac ecosystem than just the Mac Pro by its lonesome.

There is some 'tag wags dog' in this forum where there is a disconnect as to what products drove the GPU driver development. the embedded dGPU placement in Mac products got new drivers. The single dGPU Mac Pro didn't primarily provision driver development. The MP 2019 low end GPU was a 580X which baseline chip arch appeared in another product. When the other macs dropped out ... no more MP 2019 GPU updates.

Yes I know, I'm not a software specialist, maybe all this is unachievable, or it's too expensive or whatever. But that would convert me possibly back to Mac. Even with those horrible upsell prices of Apples.

"too expensive" is basic constraint. Even when Apple was doing the Mac Pro the dGPU market was disfunctional. Apple would approve a vendor to do a card and large segments of folks on this same forum ... who skip it and buy the Windows card because it was more affordable. Essentially same thing happened with MP 2019 only it was Apple "MPX" modules.

 

[maflynn]

My beef with what you said was that you said "no serious gamer will use a Mac for gaming" and my point was that you can run games fine on a Mac Pro for example using Bootcamp since it runs Windows natively. Works just like a normal PC (which I've built many).

Gaming on a Mac Pro has largely been problematic, particularly since 2023, given that bootcamp is not longer an option for Apple Silicon based Mac Pros.

Here's my take on who games on a Mac Pro - just my unofficial perspective.

• Enterprise customers, those organizations that buy Mac Pros for professional usage in an office - they will not have games installed by and large
• Professionals, those that do work in their home office - they can play games. not sure of the extent that these professional users will install games on a system that makes money for them but if they do, I suspect they're in the minority.
• hobbyists, people who buy the Mac Pro but didn't need too. I'd say a lot of people in this forum fall into that category and they are probably the most likely to have games installed on their Mac Pro.

Prior to Apple Silicon, the Mac Pro was a poor chose to game, even with bootcamp. It was more likely to occur for some users, but if someone considers themselves a gamer, they would have a dedicated machine and not risk impacting their professional rig or a console.

 

[theluggage]

Did some digging but this was posted in threads way back in 2023.

You've posted as lot of detail about switches and PCIe banks that is beside the point. What the article actually says is that:

• Each Mx Max die provides 16 PCIe lanes.
• 8 of the lanes from Die 0 are dedicated to the internal SSD.
• All 16 lanes on Die 1 are available for slots 1-5
• That leaves 24 "real" PCIe lanes left for both internal I/O and cards.

...which doesn't change the fact that 1/3 of the MP's real PCIe lanes (before switching) are there because Die 1 doesn't have an Apple SSD attached and another 1/3 because Die 1 doesn't have to take care of the internal I/O.

The M3 Max first appeared with no UltraFusion. I suspect that it also didn't have the 'extra lanes to no where' PCI-e provisioning either.

Doesn't make sense. We know that the Max die has 8 lanes of PCIe going to the SSD, plus enough regular PCIe lanes to run WiFi, BT, 10G Ethernet and a SD card slot in the Studio. Given that the Ultra is two complete Max dies, "ultrafused" there are no extra PCIe lanes to account for. The whole idea of "ultra" is that you can double-up existing dies without expensive design changes.

the notion that Apple is 'cheating' when they did structurally the same thing in the MP 2019 to get the slot count higher is flawed. Both systems have a two input , server class expensive PCI-e switch in them.

True, using switches and bank configurstion is SOP for workststions and not "cheating". Except the 2019 MP had a Xeon W processor with 64 "real" PCIe lanes vs. the M3 Ultra with only 24 "real" PCIe lanes. The 2024 equivalent workstation-grade x86s have even more. Yes, they both used switches & configuration utilities to share out the lanes, but the 2019 started with more lanes to share out.

 

[theluggage]

Circular logic my friend.

Straw man, my friend...

My beef with what you said was that you said "no serious gamer will use a Mac for gaming"

I said:

The Mac is not, has never been and probably never will be a platform of choice for serious gamers.

That's not "no serious gamer will use a Mac for gaming" (and even if I did say that, taking it completely literally would be a stretch). I've never denied that people game on Macs - I've used a Mac for gaming (and I've said so). If you've got a Mac and want to run games, games are available - even on a slotless Apple Silicon machine.

...but would anybody buy a Mac if "serious" gaming - by which I mean wanting to run the latest AAA games/simulations at high quality settings that demanded NVIDIA or AMDs latest and greatest - was a high priority for them? Even in 2006 when Apple at least offered a $2500 x86 PCIe tower workstation, that would be a stretch.

This whole topic is about whether Apple should produce a Mac PCIe Tower - which, being ARM based, would be an even weaker proposition for gaming.

 

[SDAVE]

Straw man, my friend...

I said:


That's not "no serious gamer will use a Mac for gaming" (and even if I did say that, taking it completely literally would be a stretch). I've never denied that people game on Macs - I've used a Mac for gaming (and I've said so). If you've got a Mac and want to run games, games are available - even on a slotless Apple Silicon machine.

...but would anybody buy a Mac if "serious" gaming - by which I mean wanting to run the latest AAA games/simulations at high quality settings that demanded NVIDIA or AMDs latest and greatest - was a high priority for them? Even in 2006 when Apple at least offered a $2500 x86 PCIe tower workstation, that would be a stretch.

This whole topic is about whether Apple should produce a Mac PCIe Tower - which, being ARM based, would be an even weaker proposition for gaming.

Literally going over the same thing I just said.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

I gamed "seriously enough" to invest in several MPs over the years - because they have the best performance in the Mac lineup. They're not going to beat any contemporaneous high end gaming boxes, but they do damn well with a good GPU. Still. Anyway, dead horse and all that.

 

[AlexMRGB]

The MacOS system requirements for the new version of DaVinci Resolve no longer include Intel CPUs. End of an era. Looks like it's time to fully transition to Linux...

 

[maflynn]

They're not going to beat any contemporaneous high end gaming boxes

or even a mid range gaming rig

 

[SDAVE]

or even a mid range gaming rig

FYI you can pop in a RTX5090 just fine in a Mac Pro 7,1.

Also the M5 Ultra's are supposed to hit RTX5080 levels.

With modern machine learning upscalers, "high end gaming" is mute tbh.

For example, I run AAA titles even on this dated 6900XT at 1440p upscaled to 4k with FSR4 in Windows and game on the 5k Apple Studio Display (Gen1). Looks and plays great even with ray tracing. You can easily do Path Tracing if you throw in a NVIDIA modern GPU.

 

[maflynn]

FYI you can pop in a RTX5090 just fine in a Mac Pro 7,1.

fair enough, but the 7 year old CPU will be a bottle neck

Also the M5 Ultra's are supposed to hit RTX5080 levels.

Speculation, given that there is no M5 Ultra ATM

With modern machine learning upscalers, "high end gaming" is mute tbh.

upscaling is not the same as pure performance it often has undesirable effects, particularly when you combine that with frame generation. If it was so great, then people wouldn''t be saying they could put a RTX 5090 in their Mac Pro 7,1

For example, I run AAA titles even on this dated 6900XT at 1440p upscaled to 4k

Like what?

 

[Mac3Duser]

fair enough, but the 7 year old CPU will be a bottle neck

Xeons for workstations ? not yet
for example the W-2140B (only eight cores) + RTX 4060 ti 16 gb in an old Dell T5820 is very good in 4K for Wukong

 

[maflynn]

Xeons for workstations ? not yet
for example the W-2140B (only eight cores) + RTX 4060 ti 16 gb in an old Dell T5820 is very good in 4K for Wukong

I googled around and it seems what I found its largely a capable, budget friendly entry level to mid range gaming performance. So I think my point largely stands that putting a RTX5090 in a mac pro, the cpu will be the bottle neck

 

[Mac3Duser]

I googled around and it seems what I found its largely a capable, budget friendly entry level to mid range gaming performance. So I think my point largely stands that putting a RTX5090 in a mac pro, the cpu will be the bottle neck

with his W-3275 ? ... I think it is ok for gaming

 

[theluggage]

Xeons for workstations ? not yet
for example the W-2140B (only eight cores) + RTX 4060 ti 16 gb in an old Dell T5820 is very good in 4K for Wukong

The point is not so much whether Xeon can run games - but you're paying a premium for Xeon +ECC RAM (even if you buy used) which is optimised for workstation/server workloads and offers no real advantage for gaming. Xeons are often a bit slower on single threading than their contemporary i9s.

...and that was true with Classic Mac Pros which were actually competitively priced c.f. Xeon/ECC PC towers. The 2019 wasn't just a Xeon Tower, it was a super-deluxe-ultra-premium Xeon Tower that could take multiple high-end GPUs and silly quantities of ECC RAM - all completely irrelevant to gaming - at 2-3x the price of a regular Xeon tower.

Plus, if you put a NVIDIA card in a Mac it won't run MacOS any more - which was the whole point of paying the "Apple Tax" in the first place (and the 2019 won't be able to run next year's MacOS release anyway).

New, modern, mid-range Gaming PCs are in the £1700-£2000 range.
Used 2019 Mac Pros seem to be going for well over £1000, £1700+ for a refurb, and then you're going to add a £400 GPU.

So, basically, it's the same ball-park price for a sub-optimal 7 year-old Mac tower (on the verge losing its ability to Mac) vs. a brand new PC with a CPU better suited to gaming.

Even if Apple exceeded all expectations and produced, say, a Mac Ultra Maxi with a GPU-capable PCIe slot (which would need a Mx Ultra) they're not going to sell that for less than $5000 so, basically, you're going to be able to get a Studio Max system and a gaming PC for the same price.

There seems to be a debate here about what "serious gamer" means. Let's try and explain it via the magic of role play: (n.b. "you" doesn't necessarily mean you, personally here):

Me: I want to buy a gaming rig
You: Here's a Xeon W tower Mac workstation for twice the price of a basic PC gaming rig, you'll probably want to upgrade the GPU, though.
Me: You cannot be serious!
🙂

 

[SDAVE]

fair enough, but the 7 year old CPU will be a bottle neck


Speculation, given that there is no M5 Ultra ATM


upscaling is not the same as pure performance it often has undesirable effects, particularly when you combine that with frame generation. If it was so great, then people wouldn''t be saying they could put a RTX 5090 in their Mac Pro 7,1


Like what?

Not a huge bottleneck. Maybe 5-12%. When you're gaming at 4k the GPU matters more, it's only at 1440p and 1080p when CPU matters more. And with upscaling none of this will be an issue. DLSS is great so is FSR, Frame Gen has it's own issues. BTW there will be zero issues if you game on a 5080/5090 without DLSS/Frame Gen and just use pure raster performance with these higher end GPUs.

PCIe Gen 3 is still pretty fast. There was a video of someone doing comparisons with Gen 3 / Gen 4 / Gen 5 and the difference wasn't huge.

I'm not saying the hardware isn't dated, just saying it's a feasible option if you still own a Mac Pro. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy a used new one right now lol

I just personally don't want to have a PC under my desk, they're ugly and I hate Windows...and I am a casual gamer anyway, so just need it once in a while.

EDIT:
Here's a good video on PCIe Gen 3/4/5:

 

[Flint Ironstag]

I googled around and it seems what I found its largely a capable, budget friendly entry level to mid range gaming performance. So I think my point largely stands that putting a RTX5090 in a mac pro, the cpu will be the bottle neck

So what if the CPU is the bottleneck. Something always is. We already know MP 2019 is not the gaming king. We are talking about the fact that we can play most modern stuff at high resolutions and settings most will not enjoy till a few years later.

or even a mid range gaming rig

Do you understand the word contemporaneous?

 

[SDAVE]

fair enough, but the 7 year old CPU will be a bottle neck


Speculation, given that there is no M5 Ultra ATM


upscaling is not the same as pure performance it often has undesirable effects, particularly when you combine that with frame generation. If it was so great, then people wouldn''t be saying they could put a RTX 5090 in their Mac Pro 7,1


Like what?

Not much of a bottleneck at 4k as mentioned. Usually its at 1440p and 1080p where CPU/Memory bottlenecks hit.

Watch this video, he says it's a 4% performance hit between Gen 3 and Gen 5 on the highest end consumer GPU RTX5090.

I have been playing Resident Evil 9 (and all their remakes) in the series with no issues. Last of Us I and II Remasters also look incredible. Doom Dark Ages, and any other modern game looks great. 6900XT is a bit long in the tooth, so imagine throwing in an RTX5080/5090 in this it will go berserk. I play on one of my Studio Display's at 5k (gaming at 1440p usually upscaled to 4k)...to get consistent 60fps with no issues. I have to use upscaling because the GPU is old, not because of the PC components like CPU/RAM. I don't have access to Path Tracing so I can't comment on that. With Path Tracing, upscaling is a must since even highest end gaming rigs can't even get a stable 60fps, this is why NVIDIA keeps pushing AI since raw performance in the last 5 years hasn't really advanced that much.

There were some folks in another forum who had an RTX5090 in the MP7,1 and they reported great performance.

Yes if you want to squeeze out the best possible frame rates get a modern DDR5/Intel/AMD PC build, but personally I don't care about 4% performance loss.

I'll be getting an RTX5090/5080 in a few months once industry prices come down a bit.

My overall point is that if you have a MP7,1 and want to turn into a gaming rig, you can, but of course if you want to build a PC that's your right. I know that if I build a PC rig right now it's going to cost me at least 2-3k USD just for the case, perhaps watercooling (if I don't want to run on air), CPU, RAM, Motherboard, and then I have to get a nice looking aluminium SFFPC case...and I am lazy. The Mac Pro looks nice here and low key great for me so I don't have to see a PC near me.

Regarding the M5 Ultra, even though its speculated, the M5 Max is out. You can measure it's performance and how Apple silicon scales historically and come to a conclusion that it will hit 5080 levels of performance (maxed out config of course). But personally I would not get a Mac to do any gaming. Crossover is not a great solution usually buggy and there's consistent lag. If I didn't have a Mac Pro 7,1 I would consider a PC for sure.

 

[mattspace]

You can measure it's performance and how Apple silicon scales historically and come to a conclusion that it will hit 5080 levels of performance (maxed out config of course).

Performance at what, though?

Video processing?
Compute?
Realtime 3d engines in high resolution?

This is the thing I'm always skeptical about when it comes to AS performance claims, sure Apple might be great about video processing*

*ProRes video in a codec explicitly built into the processor

...but show me an Apple silicon machine hooked up to a VR headset, driving stereoscopic dual high resolution viewports at 90-120hz competitively with a 5080.

A sports car that's competitive in a drag race with a tow truck isn't the achievement some would claim.

 

[JoeG4]

Prior to Apple Silicon, the Mac Pro was a poor chose to game, even with bootcamp. It was more likely to occur for some users, but if someone considers themselves a gamer, they would have a dedicated machine and not risk impacting their professional rig or a console.

I mean, it might not have been THE BEST choice, given outdated xeons vs a 5800x3d (at the time) or a 12900k or whatever intel was selling in 2019, but with a decent GPU a 7,1 would have been more than good enough for gaming.

The use case? A machine that doesn't have sloppily controlled fans and still looks clean and professional. You can build and tune a machine like that, but tuning the fans correctly does take an annoying amount of time.

If the 2019 didn't cost what was it, $6k? I would have purchased one. $4k maybe. Those damn xeons. lol.

But I do agree with the sentiment said here a few times - a Mac Pro (and the PowerMacs that came before it) was never a machine you'd buy for gaming but I could see someone choosing to buy one instead of a Mac Mini or iMac, if they intended to play around with games and 3d rendering and machine learning and other CUDA things.

So that aside, I ended up building a nice PC in 2018, replacing half the parts in 2023, and buying a new Mac Studio about a year ago. Instead of having one nice little tower that does both, I now have two computers. Yaaaay. Oh right, that PC is running Fedora Linux because I hate Windows lol. Every game I enjoy playing runs fine on Linux. Yay!

Also other things? Apple displays don't like being used with multiple computers, you need a KVM for that. Having two computers starts to get a little messy and annoying. I wish my Mac Studio had PCIE expansion so I could stuff the m.2 drives I bought in it and not have them in external enclosures.

I guess you could say, it's nice having a machine that can do it all, even if it can't do it the best. A true jack of all trades! One that doesn't run Windows! 😀

I could totally see lots of people spending an extra $2k over a Mac Studio for a Mac Pro if it meant they could toss a 5080 in there and play around with AI and games and stuff.

Hell, a 5090 costs $3k these days. For someone like that, a $6k-9k mac pro really isn't that big a deal.

IDK this could go either way. Most of the people who can afford a Mac Pro can also afford a pretty sick gaming machine.

 

[maflynn]

he use case? A machine that doesn't have sloppily controlled fans and still looks clean and professional. You can build and tune a machine like that, but tuning the fans correctly does take an annoying amount of time.

Please expound on sloppily controlled fans?
For PCs, there's a lot more flexibility, control and freedom to define a fan curve that fits a lot better for your usage, then what the Mac offers. If you're referring to Apple's fan control, and needing a utilty to give you manual control, yes, I agree

As for the looks, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I agree when that mac pro came out, it was a head turner, and its still eye catching, but and I think its big but. There are other beautifully designed and professional looking computer cases available that offer more freedom/flexibility in building out a great computer

If the 2019 didn't cost what was it, $6k? I would have purchased one.

And this was probably one of the major reasons why Apple killed off the Mac Pro. There were people willing to buy the MP, just not at the price apple was charging 700 dollars for wheels? That's just insulting to consumers.