This is true regardless of whether were talking about phones, tablets, notebooks or, more recently, desktops.
Compatible Graphics Cards Pro 2013 Mac Pro IsThe new Mac Pro is no exception as it is the first Mac in Apple history to ship with two GPUs by default.The new Mac Pro comes outfitted with a pair of identical Pitcairn, Tahiti LE or Tahiti XT derived FirePro branded GPUs.These are 28nm Graphics Core Next 1.0 based GPUs, so not the absolute latest tech from AMD but the latest of what youd find carrying a FirePro name.
FirePro D300, D500 and D700 are the only three options available on the new Mac Pro. The D300 is Pitcairn based, D500 appears to use a Tahiti LE with a wider 384-bit memory bus while D700 is a full blown Tahiti XT. FirePro GPUs ship with ECC memory, however in the case of the FirePro D300D500D700, ECC isnt enabled on the GPU memories. Similarly, CrossFire X isnt supported by FirePro (instead you get CrossFire Pro) but in the case of the Dx00 cards you do get CrossFire X support under Windows. I believe Apple also integrated CrossFire X bridge support over this cable. Compatible Graphics Cards Pro 2013 Download The LatestApples Boot Camp drivers ship with CFX support, and you can download the latest Catalyst drivers directly from AMD and enable CFX under Windows as well. I did the latter and found that despite the option being there I couldnt actually disable CrossFire X under Windows. There is no system-wide CrossFire X equivalent that will automatically split up rendering tasks across both GPUs. By default, one GPU is setup for display duties while the other is used exclusively for GPU compute workloads. GPUs are notoriously bad at context switching, which can severely limit compute performance if the GPU also has to deal with the rendering workloads associated with display in a modern OS. NVIDIA sought to address a similar problem with their Maximus technology, combining Quadro and Tesla cards into a single system for display and compute. It is up to the game developer to recognize and split rendering across both GPUs, which no one is doing at present. Unfortunately firing up two instances of a 3D workload wont load balance across the two GPUs by default. I ran Unigine Heaven and Valley benchmarks in parallel, unfortunately both were scheduled on the display GPU leaving the compute GPU completely idle. By default you will see only one GPU used for compute workloads. Just like the gaming example however, applications may be written to spread compute workloads out across both GPUs if they need the horsepower. Compatible Graphics Cards Pro 2013 Update To FinalThe latest update to Final Cut Pro (10.1) is one example of an app that has been specifically written to take advantage of both GPUs in compute tasks. There are substantial differences in performance between all of the options.
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