The Mac Pro Review (Late 2013)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2013 3:18 PM ESTGaming Performance
As I mentioned earlier, under OS X games have to specifically be written to use both GPUs in the new Mac Pro. Under Windows however it's just a matter of enabling CrossFire X. I ran the new Mac Pro with dual FirePro D700s through a few of Ryan's 2014 GPU test suite games. The key comparison here is AMD's Radeon R9 280X CF. I've put all of the relevent information about the differences between the GPUs in the table below:
| Mac Pro (Late 2013) GPU Comparison | ||||||
| AMD Radeon R9 280X | AMD FirePro D700 | |||||
| SPs | 2048 | 2048 | ||||
| GPU Clock (base) | 850MHz | 650MHz | ||||
| GPU Clock (boost) | 1000MHz | 850MHz | ||||
| Single Precision GFLOPS | 4096 GFLOPS | 3481 GFLOPS | ||||
| Texture Units | 128 | 128 | ||||
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | ||||
| Transistor Count | 4.3 Billion | 4.3 Billion | ||||
| Memory Interface | 384-bit GDDR5 | 384-bit GDDR5 | ||||
| Memory Datarate | 6000MHz | 5480MHz | ||||
| Peak GPU Memory Bandwidth | 288 GB/s | 264 GB/s | ||||
| GPU Memory | 3GB | 6GB | ||||
Depending on thermal conditions the 280X can be as little as 17% faster than the D700 or as much as 30% faster, assuming it's not memory bandwidth limited. In the case of a memory bandwidth limited scenario the gap can shrink to 9%.
All of the results below are using the latest Radeon WHQL drivers at the time of publication (13-12_win7_win8_64_dd_ccc_whql.exe) running 64-bit Windows 8.1. Keep in mind that the comparison cards are all run on our 2014 GPU testbed, which is a 6-core Ivy Bridge E (i7-4960X) running at 4.2GHz. In other words, the other cards will have a definite CPU performance advantage (20 - 30% depending on the number of active cores).
You'll notice that I didn't run anything at 4K for these tests. Remember CrossFire at 4K is still broken on everything but the latest GCN 1.1 hardware from AMD.
Battlefield 3 starts out telling the story I expected to see. A pair of 280Xes ends up being 16% faster than the dual FirePro D700 setup in the Mac Pro. You really start to get an idea of where the Mac Pro's high-end GPU configuration really lands.
Bioshock ends up at the extreme end of what we'd expect to see between the 280X and D700. I tossed in a score from Bioshock under OS X, which obviously doesn't have CF working and ends up at less than half of the performance of the D700. If you're going to do any heavy 3D gaming, you'll want to do it under Windows still.
Not all games will scale well across multiple GPUs: Company of Heroes 2 is one of them. There's no performance uplift from having two 280Xes and thus the D700 performs like a slower single GPU R9 280X.
Metro is the one outlier in our test suite. Although CrossFire is clearly working under Windows, under Metro the D700 behaves as if it wasn't. I'm not sure what's going on here, but this does serve as a reminder that relying on multi-GPU setups to increase performance does come with a handful of these weird cases - particularly if you're using non-standard GPU configurations.
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stevesup - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Great review, per usual. Even Leo Laporte couldn't dig out a negative nugget to bash Apple with.milkod2001 - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
In a few months a market will probably be flooded with similar cases. Something like semitransparent case in this shape with decent led lighting could actually look quite nice.Back in Windows Vista times I was working with Mac Pro and iMac as graphic designer. It was a pleasure to work with compared to crappy, slow Vista based Pc.
Now with w7 I can't think about single reason I'd want to spend almost twice for Mac Pro compared to W7 Pc(obviously nobody is forcing me to).
Good job with review Anald.
milkod2001 - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
sorry about misspelled name, can't find edit option for postMat9912 - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Can someone comment on the power consumption of the new Mac Pro when in standby/sleep mode?knweiss - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
You'll find the info in the Mac Pro Environmental Report:http://images.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/M...
nomorespam - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Any idea why the three networking ports couldn't have been combined into a single PCIe 2.0 lane with a switch/bridge?By my math this comes to at most 3.3Gbps (412MB/s) unidirectional with all three ports saturated.
Is this not a possibility or are there other considerations that make this impractical or undesirable?
I'm thinking it would be really nice to get another 2 (ideally 3 for no bottleneck) of the PCIe 2.0 lanes to the USB 3.0 ports and this seems like a valid way to triple available USB 3.0 bandwidth.
The only other place I can see to steal an additional PCIe 2.0 lane back to get to 4 port bottleneck free USB 3.0 I/O is to take one lane away from the SSD controller?
Surely doing so reduces the bus width and resulting net performance even though the theoretical 1.5GB/s that three PCIe 2.0 lanes provide is still faster than the Mac Pro's shipping SSD's?
Like Neil above, I would also like to know more about IP over thunderbolt 1 and 2 and how it works in the real world today - I would suspect the network stack is not in any way optimized for it at this point.
OreoCookie - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
@AnandAny reason why you haven't posted results on your SSD consistency tests for the Mac Pro?
wozwoz - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Nice review - though rather too long. Sometimes, less is more :)Unfortunately, what is not answered, and remains 'unknown' is:
* Is a D500 graphics card actually any faster than a D300 in real-world tests? [Note that the D500 has a lower clock speed]
* Since the D700 apparently consumes vastly more power than the D300, how does the graphics card effect noise levels and thermal performance of the entire machine?
I liked your chart of CPU turbo boost, as the number of cores in play changes ... first decent explanation of that issue.
bizarrefish - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Excellent review Anand, very comprehensive and just what I needed to help seal the decision to buy. I believe some of your benchmarks and stress testing was under Boot Camp Windows correct? I too want to use the system as my main Workstation/PC at home but for occasional gaming also. The system will spend most of its time in OSX but Is the driver support good enough to perform well in Boot Camp for modern gaming needs? Thanks.jackbobevolved - Saturday, April 19, 2014 - link
I got the 12 core D700 model and it works great for gaming. The latest Catalyst drivers installed without issue and performance has been amazing. What really blew me away though was comparing the render and export speed on this machine against my old 3,1 8 core with a Radeon 5870. Several hour exports from FCPX were cut to just minutes.