Architosh

Product Review: AMD Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition

  • Anthony Frausto-Robledo, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP

    • 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.

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    The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition is identical to its PC-based version and even–at least with our test kit–shipped with two CDs, one for Windows drivers and one for Mac OS X. Presumably we could have installed our Mac Edition board directly into a Windows box. (see image 01 below)

    The Sapphire HD 7950 has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, the most memory ever available to a Mac GPU that we know of. Let’s summarize the specs quickly and then we’ll get into our testing process.

    There are many more details about the Sapphire HD 7950 but we’ll point you to the official product page for those. The one key item we want to point out is the compatibility.

    01 – The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition, is cased in white, unlike the PC versions, and there are several of those. This card takes up two slots and should be ideally placed in one of the two PCIex16 expansion slots.

    Officially this new GPU from Sapphire requires Mac OS X Lion (10.7.5) and was created to offer an upgrade path for users of Mac Pros from the past few generations. The company makes reference to the Nvidia 8800 GT series GPUs commonly used in these machines. They recommend 2 GB of minimum RAM and an early 2009 Mac Pro (MacPro4,1). Our minimum recommendations are a bit different.

    For our test purposes we installed the Sapphire card into an aging Mac Pro with those stats above. Our (MacPro3,1) tower was outfitted originally (BTO) with a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB of 256 memory. The specs on this GPU can be found here. Some key comparison data included for this reference card include:

    Based on Sapphire’s website our testing scenario is basically identical to what this GPU card was created for: replacing GeForce 8800 GT’s in aging Mac Pros with something fresh and new.

    Our Test Suite

    While others have already tested and reviewed this graphics card, here at Architosh what concerns us most is professional CAD and 3D applications, not games. On the other hand, some of the best OpenGL tests are in fact games oriented.

    For our more “Pro” oriented tests we are still interested in frames per second but less so than other metrics which suggest a benefit befitting of CAD and 3D applications. We tested OpenCL performance and did a selection of hand-evaluative tests using a few Mac professional applications, in particular Trimble’s popular SketchUp.

    Architosh GPU Test Suite:

    In the future we will endeavor to improve upon this test suite in a direction that puts even more emphasis on professional applications, especially the types of CAD and 3D applications readers of Architosh are using. We have detailed explanations of each test in what follows.

    next page: Test Results for Sapphire HD 7950

    Test Results for Sapphire HD 7950

    We have started our testing using more of the games-oriented benchmarks, then moved onto OpenCL and then to professional benchmarks and hand-evaluative tests. Results and comments follow.

    Unigine Valley Testing

    We ran the UNIGINE Valley Advanced 1.0 benchmark under high settings, and ran into some issues with having anti-aliasing on. We could not get consistent workflow and kept running into screen-drawing issues, despite success with several instances. So we ran our Valley Advanced tests with quality set to High, resolution set to Full-Screen (1680 x 1050) and anti-aliasing set to off.

    01 – UNIGINE Valley 1.0 Advanced FPS test benchmark. Longer bar is better.

    The test resulted in the Sapphire producing nearly 4x performance in frames-per-second measure compared to the Nvidia card. Valley Advanced 1.0 offers extreme GPU hardware testing. Both cards could handle the load but the aging Nvidia card really struggled at times, with staggers, slight pauses, et cetera. In other words, smoothness was hard to obtain for this card. The Sapphire GPU produced incredibly fluid and smooth full-screen views as it flew through the intensely detailed terrain. The computed “score” for Valley between the two cards is shown below. (see image 02 above and 03 below)

    Unigine Heaven Testing

    We also ran UNIGINE Heaven 4.0, the free version, again with no anti-aliasing (AA). Quality was set to High and Tessellation was set to Normal. Again also full screen. Heaven is an extreme hardware GPU test benchmark tool that generates true “in-game rendering” workloads. Again, the Sapphire HD 7950 card blew away the original BTO Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT. (see images 04 – 05)

    02 – UNIGINE Valley 1.0 Advanced – Score. Longer bar is better.

    03 – UNIGINE Heaven FPS test. Longer bar is better.

    04 – UNIGINE Heaven Score benchmark. Longer bar is better.

    It is important to point out that our results were mostly in-line with what the manufacturer noted on their website, which was gaming frame rates of over 200 percent. We actually have FPS improvements well over 300 percent. Of course, the general strength of our (MacPro3,1) system is at the very weak end of the performance spectrum of what the Sapphire card is actually compatible with. I say and emphasize “actual” here because Sapphire says only (MacPro4,1) systems, those Mac Pros from 2009 and beyond are supported.

    [Editor’s Note: We want to emphasize that although were were told our system would work and it did work just fine, we make no warrantees on our behalf or Sapphire’s or AMD’s about putting this card into (MacPro3,1) systems will always work without issue.]

    LuxMark Testing

    LuxMark is an OpenCL benchmarking tool associated with LuxRender, an open-source, cross-platform photo-realistic rendering application that is an un-biased renderer. The LuxRays app is built into their LuxMark OpenCL benchmarking tool which accelerates ray-tracing using OpenCL. It can be used in both GPU-only and CPU-GPU hybrid modes to test performance of your hardware. The results for the LuxMark score were hugely different and this may have something to do with the OpenCL implementation capacity of the Nvidia card at the time of its production.

    05 – The LuxMark OpenCL raytracing test. Longer bar is better.

    06 – The Oceanwave OpenCL benchmark test.

    OpenCL Oceanwave Benchark

    We also ran the OpenCL Oceanwave Benchmark. This testing tool measures system bandwidth between CPU – PCIe lane – GPU in MB/sec. In terms of measuring the OpenCL parallel computing capacity of your graphics card, it draws an animated ocean wave using attenuated random fourier spectrum and FFT and uses the GPU intensely and nearly exclusively for this task. This benchmark used original Apple OpenCL demo source code.

    The results from both of these OpenCL tests clearly show just how much more capable the Sapphire graphics card is in OpenCL compute performance over the older Nvidia card. (see images 05 – 06 above)

    next page: Maxon Cinebench and Pro Apps

    Maxon Cinebench and Pro Apps

    One of the most trusted reference Pro apps benchmarks for general GPU and CPU performance is Maxon’s Cinebench, now at version 11.5. It consists of both real-world CPU and GPU tests, unlike the specific function abstract benchmarks commonly available, like some of those listed above.

    The OpenGL based scene is a car chase scene based on a PAL-standard 25 FPS. There are 225,000 polygons but during the test it will process nearly a million polys. Because the scene is designed for 25 FPS and is approximately 30 seconds long, higher performing cards will can and will display a frame count higher than the original scene speed and subframes will be displayed and properly measured. (see image 07)

    07 – The Maxon Cinebench scores were actually very tight. Longer bar is better.

    With Maxon Cinebench the overall system does factor into the resultant performance of a given GPU. Although Maxon has optimized the test to minimize overall system impact on the GPU side of the test, items like main processor, memory bus speed and chipset do play a part in overall GPU ranking. In other words, the same GPU in a higher performing system will result in a better score.

    We were surprised at how closely the AMD Sapphire HD 7950 was to the four year old Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT. But do bear in mind what was just stated above. In results embedded in the application, an ATI Radeon HD 4850 running on a 2.8GHz Core i7 based iMac from 2009 resulted in a 32.26 FPS rating. Like the Mac Pro we tested, that Core i7 based iMac has 4 cores and 8 thread capability.

    08 – Cinebench by Maxon. Systems comparatively reported.

    Within the app the highest performing embedded result came off a 12-core/12 thread 2.62 GHz Opteron Windows 7 workstatioin with an ATI FirePro V8750 workstation GPU with a result of 48 FPS. (see image 08 above). So we feel that if we had a up-to-date Mac Pro with 12-core capacity and many more threads capacity we might see a 40-something FPS score for the Sapphire card as well. We just won’t know for now.

    Real World OpenGL Tests: Trimble SketchUp

    While all these benchmarks are interesting and while many can test against specific functions of a GPU like raytracing based on OpenCL, in the end the real-world is what counts. At the moment Architosh’s real-world tests are limited in this review to Trimble’s popular SketchUp Pro 8 application. We also did some quick Vectorworks tests but nothing officially measured.

    We had three test files to utilize, two of which we have used before for past reviews, including a model we used for reviews of SketchUp and Cheetah 3D, built by associate editor Tim Danaher. Review the images below to get a peak at what we threw at SketchUp Pro 8.

    09 – SketchUp model testing. The Falkestrasse in Vienna.

    10 – SketchUp model testing. Turning Torso tower.

    11 – Large SketchUp model. With both cards this 184 mb SketchUp model made it itself felt.

    The first image above is of the Falkestrasse project in Vienna by Coop Himmelblau. This iconic design was modeled by Tim Danaher several years ago. The file itself is not large and there is an animated sequence we run which navigates inside and outside this roof-top glass structure. This animation ran nearly equally well on both graphic cards. (see image 09)

    The second image is a tower that Tim Danaher built years ago. The “Turning Torso” tower is very complex and we have an animated sequence again. The red square helps us orient a stop point. This file too is quite small. Again, we didn’t see any noticeable issues or performance between both cards with these two files. (see image 10)

    Our third file is a heavily textured and image-propped SketchUp model of a house from my firm’s practice. This file is brutally larger at 184 MB. While not the largest SketchUp file on earth is takes literally minutes to load into the program. (see image 11)

    Finally, we opened up a couple of 3D files in Vectorworks 2012 and took them for a navigation spin.

    Results

    On the Falkestrasse project animation we noticed a tiny improvement in overall rendering quality and smoothness. With the turning torso model we couldn’t detect any performance or image quality between the two GPU cards. Bear in mind the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT has 512 GB of video memory, which at the time of its introduction, was a healthy bit of GPU memory.

    Finally, we threw the large estate house at SketchUp. (image 11) This file, did show some differences as we navigated around the site from the sky based on saved SketchUp scenes. With each rotation to a new saved scene textures dropped out of the screen image while others hung on. This varied quite a bit as we ran this tests on both cards. The AMD Sapphire HD 7950 did marginally better. But we are still confused why all those textures couldn’t get cached into its massive 3 GB of GPU memory. But we don’t think the issue is there. We think it lies with the overall system and being 4 years old nearly we don’t feel that the Sapphire is being properly tested.

    With the Vectorworks file tests we saw similar degrading of performance and relatively similar image quality. The bottom line with the hands-on evaluative testing with both SketchUp and Vectorworks is both cards offered solid performance with only the largest of files helping to demonstrate advantages in the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition.

    Wrap-Up and Conclusions

    There are two types of buyers for this Sapphire graphics card. One type is the person who has a very old (2008,2009 or 2010) Mac Pro and would like to spruce it up rather than invest in a new machine. The second type of buyer is a current Mac Pro customers (2011 – 2013). For this latter group because we have not tested the card in a Mac Pro of this vintage we are hesitant to make broad statements about value. Clearly, one can see from the various benchmarks how much more powerful the Sapphire is to the reference Nvidia card in our tests. But what about newer cards? Our answer to that is we hope to do another round of testing soon in a newer Mac Pro.

    For anyone with a Mac Pro who does play games the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition does truly fly, as can be seen in the excellent Heaven and Valley scores. The Cinebench scores are seemingly so close that one might be misled to think that that Sapphire HD 7950 isn’t doing all that much. The same could be said of our hand-evaluative tests in SketchUp. However, we think the overall system is hampering the true Cinebench score quite a bit and a newer Mac Pro might have that score in the mid 30’s in FPS.

    For now we feel the new AMD Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition is a solid investment for an aging Mac Pro and especially in conjunction with a maxed out investment in more RAM would breath new life in your machine. We will hold on further recommendations until we test it in a newer machine and expand our test suite. —- ANTHONY FRAUSTO-ROBLEDO AIA, LEED AP

    Pros: Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition contains 3 GB of memory, has excellent memory bandwidth and supports OpenGL 4.2; dual firmware switch means you can run the card under Windows with non0UEFI compliant mode or Windows under UEFI hybrid firmware mode. Excellent OpenCL performance for pro apps that utilize OpenCL for compute intensive tasks; Very good backward compatibility, will work in (MacPro3,1) machines as long as they support 4 GB of ram and are running ideally Mountain Lion; runs pretty cool thanks to 28 nm process.

    Cons: Although the card did not fully handle much better the mega SketchUp file we threw at it, we suspect this is not entirely the GPU’s issue, but rather an issue with SketchUp. We have little to complain about with this card and the installation process and documentation is solid.

    Advice: We noticed that the drivers are already installed in Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3) signaling perhaps that this card will be a BTO (build-to-order) option in upcoming Mac Pros. For those who cannot afford a new Mac Pro at this time depending on how old your machine is, this card is recommended to breath new life into your machine. General graphics performance is marginal at around 30-50 percent, while those with OpenCL based apps should strongly consider this GPU.

    Cost: 479.USD suggested retail.

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