

The mini-DP ports can each drive a 27-inch LED Cinema Display while the DL-DVI port can drive a 30. The 5770 has three outputs in the form of two mini-DP and one dual-link DVI. To average above 30 fps you have to drop resolution and quality settings.
Graphics cards for mac pro mid 2010 full#
In other words it’s not fast enough to play on a 30” at full resolution without feeling a bit choppy at times. Note that this is in our CPU intensive battle test, so peak frame rates will be higher but if you’re doing a lot of unit management that’s pretty much what you can expect. If you’re curious about Starcraft 2 performance of the Radeon HD 5770 at 2560 x 1600, ultra quality settings, I saw an average frame rate of ~21 fps with a minimum at 17 fps and maximum at 27 fps.

Ultra high resolution frame rates improved by over 5x, while even 19x12 performance tripled. The improvement is huge compared to the old GeForce GT 120 that shipped in last year’s Mac Pro. I used Half Life 2 Episode 2 under OS X to get a general idea of gaming GPU performance. The performance difference between the two is staggering! Where the 5770 does disappoint however is in comparison to EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition. The Radeon HD 5770 is a huge step up from the GeForce GT 120 that previously came standard in the Mac Pro. Don't get too excited, the multi-GPU route is explicitly for more displays there's no concept of CrossFire under OS X at this point. For an extra $200 you can get a Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of GDDR5, and for an extra $250 you can have two 5770s instead of one. Clocked and spec'd identically to the PC version, this is the graphics card you get in all three standard models. The GPU of choice in the Mac Pro is the Radeon HD 5770 equipped with 1GB of GDDR5. To be fair though, Apple has alternated between NVIDIA and AMD for graphics every year for the past four years. With the exception of the Mac mini, every single Apple desktop uses an Intel CPU, an Intel chipset and an AMD GPU. In one fell swoop Apple pulled NVIDIA out of almost all of its desktop products.
