Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition Review

Testing a graphics card on OSX isn't quite as straightforward as on Windows. There are a lack of analysis tools such as GPUz and FRAPs, so it takes a little research and time to check the titles and games to use.

Without FRAPS, it can be tricky to monitor in game frame rate and there are topics dedicated to the subject on many Mac centric forums and support sites. It is possible to use the OpenGL profiler to monitor some titles, specifically if you are using emulation software such as WINE.

There are also some developer tools such as Quartz Debug which is part of Apple's free Graphics Tools for Xcode. It has a built in FPS meter, but we found it wasn't completely accurate and didn't work with all the software we wanted to use.

Luckily many of the Macintosh games have built in FPS display options available via the developer console. Sometimes it can take a while to set this up properly and mirror multiple runs to accurately measure frame rate, perseverance is definitely required.

The two cards we are testing today in the Mac Pro are the high end HD5870, which was supplied at extra cost on Apple's website at time of checkout last year. The standard card they supplied with the Mac Pro at the time was the HD5770, which is much weaker than the HD5870. Both cards only have 1GB of GDDR5 memory onboard.

The Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition has 3GB of GDDR5 and should allow for smoother frame rates at higher resolutions with enhanced texture quality. The HD 7950 is clocked at 800 MHz, and the memory at 1250 MHz (actual), 5.00 GHz (GDDR5 effective). Apple tend to be restrictive to work with, so reference AMD certified clock speeds will ensure the lowest possible failure rate, long term.

Before we start testing the hardware it is worth pointing out some differences between the Windows and OSX environments. Macintosh is still a small audience for many game developers and as such we found over the last week that many games are very poorly optimised for OSX. Game titles will often run better on Windows 7/8, than OSX V10.8.

Test System:

Macintosh Pro Desktop Mid 2012
Processors: 2x Xeon e5645 2.4ghz
Memory: 12GB DDR3 1333mhz ECC Memory
Graphics: AMD HD5870 and Sapphire HD7950 MAC Edition
Boot Drive: 500GB Samsung SSD
Monitor: Apple 30 Inch HD Cinema Display (2560×1600 max res)
Storage: 3x2TB Samsung HDD
Operating system: Mac OSX 10.8.3

Software:
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4
Unigine Valley Benchmark
StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm
Half Life 2
Serious Sam 3 BFE
F1 2012
Two Worlds II

All results are recorded via inbuilt FPS monitoring tools available via Console commands. To measure each result we repeated the same in game sections four or five times and took average results. There will be very small performance variance between runs, but the results are indicative of real world gaming sessions.

Some game descriptions are edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

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