MSI HD 7950 OC 3GB GPU For Apple Mac Pro w/EFI, Boot screen, METAL and 4K. Radeon HD 7970 3072 MB for Mac Pro or PC.
With the new options available in the Mac Pro video card world (at least for 2008 and later model Mac Pros), many people are asking which is the better card, AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 (or its bigger brother, the Radeon HD 7970), or NVIDIA’s GTX 680? The HD 7970 and 7950 are 3GB cards and the GTX 680 comes in 2GB and 4GB varieties.
The answer really depends on the applications you are planning to use. The AMD cards really excel at openCL, which is what Apple is pushing developers toward more and more. If you use Final Cut Pro X extensively, for instance, I would recommend going with the HD7950 or HD7970. However, for any CUDA enabled app (Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Octane Render, etc) you would definitely want the NVIDIA card, since AMD doesn’t support CUDA.
For general use, gaming etc, the difference is not so clear cut. We did notice that the GTX 680 4GB ran X-Plane on three 2560×1600 displays really well, while the 7950 struggled to keep up (X-Plane is openGL based, not openCL). In simple openGL benchmarks we found that GTX 680 performed about the same as the HD7970, and faster than the 7950. The GTX 680 is quieter than the HD7970, and uses less energy. Both the 7950 and 7970 are pretty loud cards, especially the 7970. Hopefully this helps in making your decision.
This entry was posted in on. Post navigation.
Well, what have we here? A new Mac Pro video card? What year is it?
![Radeon Hd 7950 3gb For Apple Mac Pro Radeon Hd 7950 3gb For Apple Mac Pro](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125430846/107207682.jpg)
Is at the CeBit trade show in Hannover where AMD partner Sapphire is showing off a Mac version of the Sapphire HD 7950 graphics card for the first time. In November, for the AMD 7000 series was discovered in a 10.8.3 beta. We speculated at the time that the added support was likely for future Mac Pro-level cards, and that’s exactly what Sapphire, one of the larger suppliers of AMD products, is showing off at CeBit.
According to the report, the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition is based off the original 7950 that packs in 850MHz Engine Clock (up to 925MHz with Boost), 3GB GDDR5 memory, 240GB/s memory bandwidth, and 1250MHz Memory Clock. PCGamesHardware said Sapphire plans to sell the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition for $450. The report noted that the Mac Edition has been redesigned: Quite new is the hood, which approximates by milky white the famous Apple design. The cooler is based ansich on the AMD reference design, provides a radial fan in the rear, a large Vapor Chamber on the GPU as well as plenty of vents for heat dissipation. On the slot panel both a dual-link DVI and one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort outputs can be reported. The well-known of the original HD 79×0 video cards BIOS switch on the top of the PCB is on board.
The hardware of the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition, the Windows version is similar ergo strong, we assume that the changes are mainly found in the BIOS. As a result of use in a Mac Pro is possible. Go below for a hands-on video of the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition from CeBit.