Sapphire Launches Graphics Accelerator for Mac Pro

SAPPHIRE Technology, the leading manufacturer and global supplier of graphics solutions based on AMD technology, has just announced an exciting new graphics accelerator compatible with the Apple Mac Pro series of desktop computers. 


Exclusive to SAPPHIRE, the HD 7950 Mac Edition is based on AMD's latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. This highly acclaimed architecture delivers a significant graphics performance boost for Mac Pro users in a wide range of applications including gaming, audio or video editing and content creation. For example, gaming frame rates are increased by over 200%, general benchmark performance increased by around 30% and graphics intensive benchmarks increased by as much as 300% compared with the NV 8800GT commonly used in these machines (SAPPHIRE internal data).

The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Mac Edition is equipped with 3 GB of the latest GDDR5 memory, and its Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE) deliver up to 2.87 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power. It provides hardware support for Open GL 4.2 and Open CL 1.2 as well as AMD HD3D technology and APP acceleration. 

AMD's GCN architecture supports a number of advanced post-processing and scaling operations. These include de-blocking, de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering. The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Mac Edition features AMD PowerPlay technology which provides automatic power management during operation and ensures low power consumption under idle conditions.

Cutting-edge integrated display support includes two mini DisplayPort outputs with a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160 per display under MacOS X. The card also features a 3 GHz HDMI 1.4a port. This output also supports a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160.

Finally, there is a Dual-link DVI port with HDCP, which supports a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600. As this is a DVI-I port it can also be used with the older style VGA monitors, with adapter supplied. The card supports two display outputs to be used at the same time, allowing dual monitor configurations to be used for increased productivity.

The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Mac Edition is compatible with Apple Mac Pro models from 2010 and later with an available PCI-Express x16 slot. Two six-pin power cables required are supplied with the card. A driver disk is provided which enables the card to be used with Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion), 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) or later.

The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Mac Edition can also be used in the latest PC architectures. It has Dual Firmware support via a simple Firmware (Dual BIOS) switch. In one position the Sapphire HD 7950 MAC Edition supports Mac OS X/Windows under non-UEFI compliant mode and in the other it supports Windows with UEFI hybrid firmware enabled. A Windows driver disk is also included.

Under Windows, additional features are supported, including hardware acceleration of video decoding, HDMI audio pass through and additional display resolutions.

Source: Techpowerup.com