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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OreoCookie - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
You link to a $2000 workstation without graphics cards and just 8 GB RAM. How does that invalidate Anand's claim?DukeN - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
I paid $144 for the extra RAM and re-used my old workstation cards.Hardly double the price.
zsquared - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
So you are not counting the original cost of the workstation cards but you think you proved you point.And you're telling Anand "Shame"?
Ppietra - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
memory: 1600 MHz vs 1866 MHzSSD: SATA600 vs PCIe
no thunderbolt
no graphics
clearly the same specs
DukeN - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Even with a decent card it's something like $1500 less.This is a fact that isn't acknowledged by Anand, of course because not cozying up to Apple is potentially bad for business.Oh well I'll never be able to convince the Apple fanboys writing or reading here.
Ppietra - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
the comparison wasn’t about what you can get with the same processor, but how much does it cost to have the same specs, and your comparison doesn’t do that, and you certainly don’t get a machine with the same performance since memory and storage are slower.How do you get it for $1500 less when your machine base price is 1000$ less. If you add 2 decent graphic cards (with comparable performance) and the extra memory to match you quickly get at the Mac Pro price and still you would probably get worse performance!
Liquidmark - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Where's your graphics card?8GB of ram?
SATA SSD?
Here's what I got so far from lenovo's site...
Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 Processor (10MB Cache, 3.70GHz)
Windows 8 Pro 64 Downgrade Windows 7 Professional 64 English
Tower 5x6 Mechanical Shell with low inrush current power supply
Windows 8 Pro 64 RDVD English
16GB ECC 2Rx4 PC3 1600MHz RDIMM
NVIDIA® Quadro K2000D (2GB Dual link DVI+DVI, Mini DP) - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
NVIDIA® Quadro K2000D (2GB Dual link DVI+DVI, Mini DP) - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
DVI to VGA Dongle
Integrated Audio
Intel SATA HDD support (1-3 HDDs)
Internal RAID - Not Enabled
2.5" 256GB SATA SolidState Drive
29-in-1 Media Card Reader - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
DVD Burner/CD-RW Rambo Drive (SATA) - Win7 ME8.0
Integrated Ethernet
USB Preferred Pro FullSize Win8 US Euro English 103P
Lenovo USB Optical Wheel Mouse
LineCord - US
Publication - English
$4,128.00
Mac Pro with 16 gb instead of 12 for ram...
$3,099.00
Come on man...
Liquidmark - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Oop, I forgot the Applecare!Ok, Mac Pro= $3,348.00
Lenovo Lenovo S30= $4,128.00
RollingCamel - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
No engineering software performance review?wheelhot - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I wonder why as well, I don't see anything wrong to do some windows engineering software tests