Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition3. Installing and setting up the Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition4. Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition (Super High Res Gallery)5. Testing Methodology6. Unigine Heaven Benchmark7. Unigine Valley Benchmark8. StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm9. Half Life 2 Episode 210. Serious Same 3 BFE11. F1 201212. Two Worlds II13. Noise Levels14. Closing Thoughts15. View All Pages

While Apple gamers have had a recent influx of quality, gaming titles, they have had to make do with relatively archaic graphics hardware. Many Mac Pro gamers are using the Nvidia 8800GT or HD5770, seriously outdated hardware by 2013 PC standards.

Today we used a fast Mac Pro Tower with dual 6/12 core Xeon processors and the ‘flagship' Apple discrete solution of last year, the HD5870. The HD5870 was an optional store augmentation demanding a substantial price premium on checkout. There is no doubt the HD5870 was a great video card when it was released, and it actually surprised me just how capable it is, even today – several generations later. Many of the games I tested ran well at 1920×1080, and even some at 2560×1600. The only issue is that you can't just buy a graphics card in a retail store and slot it into the Mac Pro, as they require specialised proprietary firmware to work correctly.

Sapphire are the only AMD partner to achieve Apple certification and the release of the new HD7950 MAC Edition is sure to be warmly accepted by the multitude of ravenous Macintosh gamers. As our testing has shown it has a serious performance edge over the HD5870 and would utterly decimate the bandwidth restricted AMD HD5770 and Nvidia 8800GT.

While we tested a selection of quality games available for the Macintosh in this review, there are some games that we just couldn't analyse, primarily because there was just no way to get accurate frame rate readings. Titles such as BioShock 2 and Mafia 2 looked great and presented noticeable improvements when running on the Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition. Higher image quality and resolution settings were possible with the HD7950 MAC Edition without suffering serious frame rate penalties.

While it wasn't the only offender, titles such as The Witcher 2 really should be clocking higher, smoother frame rates with such powerful hardware and we can only blame sloppy, ill optimised coding.

The benefits of adopting the Sapphire HD7950 Mac Edition will not just be limited to gamers. Adobe Photoshop CS6 acceleration seemed smoother and more responsive for instance, undoubtedly assisted with the extra 2GB of fast GDDR5 memory onboard. There was no real way to measure this quantitatively, but it could most assuredly be felt within a real world working environment.

While the release today will merely register as a blip on the hyper critical PC enthusiast gamer radar, for dedicated Apple Mac Pro users this simply is a product too important to miss.

Sapphire have issued US pricing – $479. In the United Kingdom OCUK have this listed as a pre-order for £399.95 inc vat. As expected, there is a significant price premium for MAC users to get hold of this special limited edition HD7950. While PC users would be infuriated at the idea, MAC users are likely to be too excited to quibble.

Pros:

• Brings Mac Pro gaming performance kicking and screaming into 2013.
• Runs quiet.
• Nice styling.
• Excellent bundle, including an indepth manual.
• Dual BIOS, if you want to use it in your PC as well.

Cons:

• Hefty price premium.

Kitguru says: Have a Mac Pro? Play games? If you have the cash on hand no need to even think about it.

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