It is up to the game developer to recognize and split rendering across both GPUs, which no one is doing at present. NVIDIA sought to address a similar problem with their Maximus technology, combining Quadro and Tesla cards into a single system for display and compute.ĭue to the nature of the default GPU division under OS X, all games by default will only use a single GPU. GPUs are notoriously bad at context switching, which can severely limit compute performance if the GPU also has to deal with the rendering workloads associated with display in a modern OS. By default, one GPU is setup for display duties while the other is used exclusively for GPU compute workloads. There is no system-wide CrossFire X equivalent that will automatically split up rendering tasks across both GPUs. Under OS X the situation is a bit more complicated. Disabling CFX would drop power consumption, but I didn't always see a corresponding decrease in performance. I did the latter and found that despite the option being there I couldn’t actually disable CrossFire X under Windows.
#APPLE MAC PRO 2013 DRIVERS#
Apple’s Boot Camp drivers ship with CFX support, and you can download the latest Catalyst drivers directly from AMD and enable CFX under Windows as well. Under Windows, that amounts to basic CrossFire X support.
#APPLE MAC PRO 2013 PRO#
With two GPUs standard in every Mac Pro configuration, there’s obviously OS support for the configuration. I believe Apple also integrated CrossFire X bridge support over this cable.
#APPLE MAC PRO 2013 FULL#
Similarly, CrossFire X isn’t supported by FirePro (instead you get CrossFire Pro) but in the case of the Dx00 cards you do get CrossFire X support under Windows.Įach GPU gets a full PCIe 3.0 x16 interface to the Xeon CPU via a custom high density connector and flex cable on the bottom of each GPU card in the Mac Pro. FirePro GPUs ship with ECC memory, however in the case of the FirePro D300/D500/D700, ECC isn’t enabled on the GPU memories. I’ve tossed the specs into the table below:ĭespite the FirePro brand, these GPUs have at least some features in common with their desktop Radeon counterparts. The D300 is Pitcairn based, D500 appears to use a Tahiti LE with a wider 384-bit memory bus while D700 is a full blown Tahiti XT. FirePro D300, D500 and D700 are the only three options available on the new Mac Pro. These are 28nm Graphics Core Next 1.0 based GPUs, so not the absolute latest tech from AMD but the latest of what you’d find carrying a FirePro name. The new Mac Pro comes outfitted with a pair of identical Pitcairn, Tahiti LE or Tahiti XT derived FirePro branded GPUs. The new Mac Pro is no exception as it is the first Mac in Apple history to ship with two GPUs by default.ĪMD won the contract this time around. This is true regardless of whether we’re talking about phones, tablets, notebooks or, more recently, desktops. The modern Apple is a big fan of GPU power.
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