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What about AMD's R9 Series (280x, 290x) on our Hackintoshes?. Further explanation.

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NewEgg just released an R9 290 card an hour ago, and it's even lower than the projected price! Although we were told that they would sell for $550 or above, the Sapphire Radeon R9 290 with 4GB of GDDR5 is being sold for $400 on release day at NewEgg. If it works with Mavericks, this is a great price...
 
okinawanmatt said:
NewEgg just released an R9 290 card an hour ago, and it's even lower than the projected price! Although we were told that they would sell for $550 or above, the Sapphire Radeon R9 290 with 4GB of GDDR5 is being sold for $400 on release day at NewEgg. If it works with Mavericks, this is a great price...
Click to expand...

I think it will be fully supported once we get to the 10.9.2 update. Here's some more info about the 290.

The R9 290 is now considered the ultimate price/performance beast in the high-end video card category. According to Anandtech, "The 290 is so fast and so cheap that on a pure price/performance basis you wont find anything quite like it. At $400 AMD is delivering 106% of the $500 GeForce GTX 780s performance, or 97% of the $550 Radeon R9 290Xs performance." Of course there is a downside, and that is the noise. Just get yourself some noise-isolating headphones.
One heck of a lot of performance for just $399.00 I'd buy one today if I was hard of hearing ;)
Will be interesting to hear just how noisy it actually is and whether sound dampening case material
could quiet it down some. Just checked, under load this card hits 55.6 dB, not an option if you're into
quiet computing. Read about the test results here:

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/495...x-780-energy-consumption-and-noise-production

Looks like AMD is marketing this to gamers who are usually wearing high end gaming headsets anyway.
 
i'm planning on replacing my Asus HD5870 and I'm quite interested in those R9 cards.
Any news on R9 290 (not X) compatibility with Mavericks ?
I could go for a 7970 but I think it would be better for long term use that I buy a new architecture. (I won't change it again for at least 3/4 years)
 
i7
GA-X58A-UD3R |  i7 950 |  Radeon HD 5870
Jan 2011 / Updated April 2014
P8P67 Pro |  i7 2600K |  GeForce GTX 780 Ti
September 2015
Z97I-PLUS |  i7 4770K |  GeForce TITAN
Dell 7060 Micro
Other |  i7 8700 |  HD 630
Procyon said:
Why specifically 10.9.2, and not 10.9.1?

Also, Epson seems to think that 10.9.2 will come out mid November...
Mavericks will fix this issue by OS update 10.9.2 Nov. Middle, 2013
Click to expand...

I'm basing that statement on what Apple has done with Lion and ML in the past. The 10.7(8).1
update has been very small and not very significant. The .2 has included the support for more
new hardware and has been a significantly larger update. It may be different, it's just speculation.
Apple is usually fairly predictable when it comes to OS X updates.
 
Ah, interesting. Well, that makes sense.

If we're lucky the new Mac Pro might be released earlier than 10.9.2. It might be running a newer version of OS X that contains newer graphics drivers, similar to what happened with the new MacBook Pros in June last year that had newer Kepler drivers.

I guess we'll see. My R9 290X should be arriving in a couple of weeks, and should work well with Windows in the mean time. I just don't want to have to swap out cards a second time just to install 10.9.2 so that the 290X works on Mavericks :p
 
Jan 2011 / Updated April 2014
P8P67 Pro |  i7 2600K |  GeForce GTX 780 Ti
September 2015
Z97I-PLUS |  i7 4770K |  GeForce TITAN
Dell 7060 Micro
Other |  i7 8700 |  HD 630
n00b question, what is the difference between a super powerful 'consumer' video card like the r9 290 vs a 'workstation' card like the w8000 ? i'm not a gamer (i'm an audio guy) but would like to get into video editing.

my understanding is that it takes longer to develop 'workstation' cards and their drivers. they're likely more stable and less likely to introduce errors but more and more i've seen gtx cards and whatnot in video editing builds.

the 'd500' in the 6-core mac pro is similarly spec'd to the w8000 and costs like $1300 (x2 is like $2500). an r9 290 is $400 (x2 is like $800).

on paper it seems the r9 290 is either the same or more powerful, and 1/3 the price ? what's the catch ?

in a customac pro if you save $1700 from the video cards alone thats enough to buy an 8 core xeon.
 
craigwer said:
n00b question, what is the difference between a super powerful 'consumer' video card like the r9 290 vs a 'workstation' card like the w8000 ? i'm not a gamer (i'm an audio guy) but would like to get into video editing.

my understanding is that it takes longer to develop 'workstation' cards and their drivers. they're likely more stable and less likely to introduce errors but more and more i've seen gtx cards and whatnot in video editing builds.

the 'd500' in the 6-core mac pro is similarly spec'd to the w8000 and costs like $1300 (x2 is like $2500). an r9 290 is $400 (x2 is like $800).

on paper it seems the r9 290 is either the same or more powerful, and 1/3 the price ? what's the catch ?

in a customac pro if you save $1700 from the video cards alone thats enough to buy an 8 core xeon.
Click to expand...

I've been wondering the same thing lately. Is the cost of the FirePro/W versions of AMD cards just
jacked up because the market they sell to is accustomed to paying top dollar for hardware whereas
gamers are often breaking their piggy banks open to buy a gaming card? Here's some answers I found
that may be justifiable reasons for the huge price differences but I can't really say for sure. What do you think ?

When it comes to workstation cards:
You are paying for the drivers (R&D) and testing. Totally different(opposite)behavior from how a gaming card renders the screen. Catered to rendering DDC and CAD apps. And working gracefully with large data sets. a gaming card is much less efficient with its rendering style (drivers).
You are paying for the certification. Testing that the card is compatible with a miriad of 3d and CAD apps. Look at any mid-to-highend software and notice there is a list of recommended and certified graphics cards. This is the result of testing the cards with every new version of the software and making sure the drivers preform well. Which is likely back and forth between the software vender and AMD.
You are paying for more VRAM Up until recently you'd only see more than 2GB of memory on a workstation cards. Right now you only see 6 on Titan and W9000, but 8 and 12 are coming.
You are paying for ECC VRAM. This eliminates artifact and floating point errors. CAD apps definitely use this where every millimeter matters or the application may be open for days straight.
You are paying for technical support - It costs money to pay tech support people by the hour.

The following tests from Tom's Hardware show that a 7970 actually outperforms a W8000

 TRS 2013-11-08 at 2.19.05 PM.jpg

It was about the same difference in Unigine Heaven benchmarking too. The Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB shows up as FirePro D700 in LuxMark, the actual specs (with 3gb memory) are more like the
D500 which will be used in the 2013 Mac Pro.

This kind of performance makes the Radeon 7970 look like the value gfx card of the century for a Customac if you don't need one of the more costly workstation cards for your build.

Newegg is selling the GA version for around $300.00

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125413
 
^excellent info thanks

in theory it's possible to do more with less, depending on the drivers, os, and software optimization.

this may be a bad example but looking at iphone "a" series chips people reported them as really fast regardless of the specs. the way everything is optimized can obvs make pretty big differences regardless of the cpu, gpu, etc you throw at it (like multi-core support, etc)

I've read that it's possible these d300, d500, etc gpus may be released in the future so I might wait at least until after the Mac Pro is released.

I need to read up on how video rigs work, how they utilize the cpu, gpu, ram, etc to make a more informed decision.
 
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