Back in April, we caught wind of a new Mac Pro upgrade featuring new AMD Radeon Pro graphics options. It has taken a couple of months but today, Apple brought the updates live, with the new AMD Radeon Pro graphics cards boasting 50 percent better performance-per-watt compared to the previous Vega II GPUs offered to Mac Pro buyers.  

Apple is working on its own graphics solutions, but the company is still a long way off from being able to replace AMD in its pro-grade desktop offering. The Mac Pro is now available with AMD's Radeon Pro W6800X, W6800X Duo and W6900X graphics cards, replacing the Vega II and Vega II Duo graphics cards previously available with the Mac Pro.

The new W6000 series graphics cards make the jump to the RDNA 2 architecture, delivering 50 percent better performance-per-watt. Some of Apple's own tests show up to 84 percent gains in Octane X rendering, 26 percent better performance in Cinema 4D and 23 percent better performance in DaVinci Resolve. All three cards also have pro-grade features, such as Thunderbolt 3, and support for Infinity Fabric Link to allow multi-GPU setups.

Of course, as with any Mac Pro upgrade, configuring the system with one of these GPUs won't be cheap. The new Mac Pro with a W6800X will cost you an extra $2,400, while the top of the range W6900X will cost you an extra $5,600. Multi-GPU configurations can cost up to and over $10,000.

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KitGuru Says: The Mac Pro just received a major GPU upgrade, but these performance gains also come at a high price. 

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