Sapphire Launches Radeon Hd 7950 For Mac

• Sapphire Mac Edition 7950

Click to expand.Thanks for the info. Might translate to $499 or 399 €. Quite a heavy 'Mac tax' given the PC version currently starts at 220 €. Do you have any information, whether the card shown a CEBIT was indeed a production sample as mentioned?

That would mean it won't fit into slot 1 of the current Mac Pros due to the long screws at the bottom. I'm pretty sure about this, because I recently had to modify a GTX 570 with similar screws to fit into slot 1.

Radeon 9550xl 256mb drivers for mac. That would be a real bummer. And if that is the case, I really wonder, why Sapphire would develop a card, that won't fit into the only 2-slots-high PCIe slot 1 (aka the one especially made to take those bigger graphics cards without blocking additional slots) of the Mac Pro, unless they made the card for a new Mac Pro with a different layout of the PCie slots.

Intro: The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition. This new graphics card from Sapphire is the first of its kind from the company for the Mac market. Like us, many longtime Mac users may not know of this company, which has been an ATI (now AMD) Add-in Board (AIB) partner for many years now. Sapphire spies a very large - and, more to the point, profitable - gap in the market and is bringing a Radeon upgrade for existing and potential Mac Pro owners. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac.

Thanks for the info. Might translate to $499 or 399 €. Quite a heavy 'Mac tax' given the PC version currently starts at 220 €.

Do you have any information, whether the card shown a CEBIT was indeed a production sample as mentioned? That would mean it won't fit into slot 1 of the current Mac Pros due to the long screws at the bottom. I'm pretty sure about this, because I recently had to modify a GTX 570 with similar screws to fit into slot 1.

Sapphire Radeon HD actual item shown in pictures. Radeon HD 7950 launches, beats GTX 580; HD 7990 and 7870 launch date leaked. The serial number sticker is the most important thing that sapphire hd 7950 located on the back of this card. Battlefield 3 Page 6: FFmpeg application may experience corrupted output for H video streams. Seen and detailed at Cebit 2013 earlier this month, Sapphire has now officially launched its new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card designed to be used with Mac Pro desktop systems.

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That would be a real bummer. And if that is the case, I really wonder, why Sapphire would develop a card, that won't fit into the only 2-slots-high PCIe slot 1 (aka the one especially made to take those bigger graphics cards without blocking additional slots) of the Mac Pro, unless they made the card for a new Mac Pro with a different layout of the PCie slots. Click to expand. Pragmatically they need to be a Mac developer. They will need access to the lower level bug submission queues. Also some software is necessary even if early access to new OS X drops to run the early access driver drops AMD/Nvidia might give them to use for development and tracking long term evolution of OS X. But yes, no heavyweight gating function.

If a 3rd party wants to take on support for old, very low volume configs stuck on previous generation OS X version levels they can if they want. It won't be inexpensive but they could. For 3rd part GPU card vendors though, it doesn't make much sense though to try to swim upstream from what Apple and the basic GPU driver support is aligned with.

There are multiple chefs in the 'kitchen' here and they aren't the head chef. Click to expand.Apple doesn't actually have very much control here. I've heard noise about it from Apple before (can royally screw up their testing cycles).

AMD and NVidia can do whatever they want with the driver, whenever they want, and include whatever card support they want, and Apple's role is to slipstream the drivers into OS X. It may not be in AMD's/NVidia's interest to spend time working on cards that Apple isn't shipping, but they sure seem to be doing it, as evidenced by the wide range of cards they're supporting these days. Click to expand. They'd be suicidal not to be expanding the card options right now. First, Apple has totally screwed up the Mac Pro product management. There is a substantial opportunity created by Apple falling on their face to sell cards to those 'stuck' on this basic 2009-2012 model to significantly move forward on performance based on buying PCI-e GPU card upgrades. Apple selling cards from the 2009 era only opens the door for others to fill that gap.

If Blackmagic and Nvidia can walk in and say '. DaVinci Resolve, colorists seek the highest performance possible from their systems, and with just one of the new Kepler GPUs our users will be able to work with 4K imagery on their Mac Pros in real time.

' by dropping several thousand dollars on their solution to make a current Mac pro a real-time editing bay then why not. If Apple gets screwed for the next couple of years until that user has money to pay for a new base unit then that is Apple's problem. Apple snoozed and lost. Second, they have to stay in the game to be eligible to land the job of being selected the default for the next Mac Pro. Yeah the other Macs tends to all swing the same way ( all AMD or all Nvidia) this is the one Mac those vendors can keep a foot in the door even if they loose the much larger contract.

Given Intel is increasing taking a larger share of the graphics work home, being picky isn't an option. They can keep a subset (if not all) of the driver team active just with filling competitive gaps on Mac Pro if necessary. The expertise on a Mac Pro oriented driver could be used on next's mobile driver also. There is no huge long term downside in staying in the game if Apple is going to continue to buy significant numbers of discrete GPUs. Everything Apple is doing right now, or lack of doing like shipping, on the Mac Pro is indicative that they 'mothballed' the Mac Pro team and now are stumbling around trying to get it restarted. Keeping a team active, even downsized slightly, is generally more competitive than doing what Apple apparently did.

Just because Apple chose to screw up the Mac Pro as a platform for revenue growth doesn't mean their partners need to do the same thing. In fact, taking advantage of Apple screw ups is generally a good place to make money. Apple does screw up.

This sub-market is one of the major instances over last 6-8 years.

I have a dual-quad 2.26ghz Mac Pro and was using it with the 4870 card from Apple. It's a great box, even as it's approaching 4 years since I bought it, but the video capabilities of the 4870 were showing their age BADLY. Like many Mac Pro users, we're on pins and needles waiting for Apple's newest system. Since it looks like it's going to be a while still, I wanted to bump the older system up and move the new card to the new Mac Pro when it comes. My impressions of the 7950: The card is a very nice looking white, full-length card, but is slightly shorter than the 4870 card it replaced. Packaging is on a par with what you'd expect with a commercial product. It came with a well-written users manual, a PC driver disc, a Mac OS X disc, two power cables (the card draws too much power to be powered only from the PCIe bus) and some random bits of paper.

Installation was very easy. Be sure to read the manual, because it will ask you to install the driver software FIRST. It's very simple, launch the correct installer for your OS (either Lion or Mountain Lion), reboot the system.

After reboot, I shut the system down, removed the power cable from the back of the system, cracked the case, removed both power cables from my 4870, removed the card retention device, slide out the old card, blow out any dust, install the new card, replace the card retention device, reattach the internal power cables (or if you're upgrading from the stock card, install the supplied power cables in the sockets inside the system and attach them to the card, making sure they're firmly attached and click into place). After that, close the case, reattach the main power cable and power the system up. The system worked without any changes or reconfiguration. I noticed immediately that showing the open windows and desktop in Expose were greatly faster than before.

Sapphire Mac Edition 7950

I brought up some OpenGL apps and they were spectacular. I was able to go to the highest detail level on games like SecondLife and everything was very snappy. I've not noticed any increase in background noise moving from the 4870 to the 7950, but I also have 50+ year old ears. I'm very happy with the 7950 card and consider it money well spent breathing new life into an aging system. Update: (Aug 1, '13) Now that we've all learned of Apple's plans for the Mac Pro, I'll be keeping this card where it is and use it for Final Cut Pro rendering and experimenting with OpenCL. I don't regret this purchase in the slightest, since it's make my 2009 Mac Pro extremely usable again. Update: Dec, 2013 I've noticed that i was having many more kernel panics that were related to the video driver chain after I'd upgraded to Mountain Lion, once i went to mavericks, the crashes went away, but then I'd noticed sluggishness related to video.

After 10.9.1 came out, all of the stability issues remained gone and performance was once again what it was before. I highly recommend upgrading to Mavericks. I installed this in my MacPro 2009. Easy installation, great performance boost over my 5770 and of course over the original Nvidia GT120. If you don't toggle the little switch (PC/Mac) to Mac, it still works fine, you just don't see the gray boot screen with the Apple logo.

Toggle the switch and all is well. Long term update after 18 months: had to remove it from my MacPro. It appears to lose sync randomly and that is very annoying.

I removed it from the Mac and tested it in a PC and the same problem occurs. This card is now in my scrap pile. I have a dual-quad 2.26ghz Mac Pro and was using it with the 4870 card from Apple. It's a great box, even as it's approaching 4 years since I bought it, but the video capabilities of the 4870 were showing their age BADLY. Like many Mac Pro users, we're on pins and needles waiting for Apple's newest system. Since it looks like it's going to be a while still, I wanted to bump the older system up and move the new card to the new Mac Pro when it comes. My impressions of the 7950: The card is a very nice looking white, full-length card, but is slightly shorter than the 4870 card it replaced.

Packaging is on a par with what you'd expect with a commercial product. It came with a well-written users manual, a PC driver disc, a Mac OS X disc, two power cables (the card draws too much power to be powered only from the PCIe bus) and some random bits of paper. Installation was very easy. Be sure to read the manual, because it will ask you to install the driver software FIRST. It's very simple, launch the correct installer for your OS (either Lion or Mountain Lion), reboot the system. After reboot, I shut the system down, removed the power cable from the back of the system, cracked the case, removed both power cables from my 4870, removed the card retention device, slide out the old card, blow out any dust, install the new card, replace the card retention device, reattach the internal power cables (or if you're upgrading from the stock card, install the supplied power cables in the sockets inside the system and attach them to the card, making sure they're firmly attached and click into place). After that, close the case, reattach the main power cable and power the system up.

The system worked without any changes or reconfiguration. I noticed immediately that showing the open windows and desktop in Expose were greatly faster than before.

I brought up some OpenGL apps and they were spectacular. I was able to go to the highest detail level on games like SecondLife and everything was very snappy.

I've not noticed any increase in background noise moving from the 4870 to the 7950, but I also have 50+ year old ears. I'm very happy with the 7950 card and consider it money well spent breathing new life into an aging system.

Update: (Aug 1, '13) Now that we've all learned of Apple's plans for the Mac Pro, I'll be keeping this card where it is and use it for Final Cut Pro rendering and experimenting with OpenCL. I don't regret this purchase in the slightest, since it's make my 2009 Mac Pro extremely usable again.

Update: Dec, 2013 I've noticed that i was having many more kernel panics that were related to the video driver chain after I'd upgraded to Mountain Lion, once i went to mavericks, the crashes went away, but then I'd noticed sluggishness related to video. After 10.9.1 came out, all of the stability issues remained gone and performance was once again what it was before. I highly recommend upgrading to Mavericks. I'm sing the HD 7950 to power a Seiki 39' 3940 X 2160 @ 30 Hz using a mini display port to HDMI active adapter, anApple 30' display using the d/l DVI port @ 2560 X 1600 @ 60 Hz & a ViewSonic 28' that is a 1920 X 1200 display but under Mac OS 10.9.1 it will convert the display to what it says is 2560 X1600 through the HDMI port. All of this with no problems.

I'm also running anATI 3870 to run an HP 30' 2560 X 1600 display & a Sharp 10809 screen with the Displays panel saying that it is 2560X 1440. So like others here I have 1 splitter to run the 3870. This is all in a 2012 Dual 3.06 GHzMac Pro. I tried to see how the HD 7950 would work under Mac OS 10.6.8. It would not power the 3840 X 2160 display but would power the Apple 30' & the ViewSonic 28' displays without a problem. I never tried to install any drivers with OS 10.6.8 & the word is that after OS 10.8.2 or maybe OS 10.9, no drivers are needed to be added. I would believe 10.9 as the card ran theUltra HD display correctly but tried to make it a 1960 X 2160 display & was totally unreadable.

I did not downgrade the video card for this as I did not follow the directions & load any drivers. Another person did not like the card because it would not power 4 displays even though it has 4 video output connectors. The directions actually says on all ATI video cards that they will only run 2 displays. But 3 is an advertised number if active adapters are used. As I only have 1 screen that has a display port on it & it doesn't like to work all of the time I have nothing to connect without an adapter to the Mini display port connectors without an adapter.

So 3 is possible & 3 that is in general larger than 1920 X 1200. Try it you'll like it.

I'd recommend Mac OS 10.9.1 as another has said as this worked best. OS 10.8 will do & contrary to the Sapphire advertised it will work under Mac OS 10.6. I installed this in my MacPro 2009. Easy installation, great performance boost over my 5770 and of course over the original Nvidia GT120.

If you don't toggle the little switch (PC/Mac) to Mac, it still works fine, you just don't see the gray boot screen with the Apple logo. Toggle the switch and all is well. Long term update after 18 months: had to remove it from my MacPro. It appears to lose sync randomly and that is very annoying. I removed it from the Mac and tested it in a PC and the same problem occurs.

This card is now in my scrap pile.