Sapphire Launches Radeon HD 7950 Mac Graphics Card: Upgrade your Mac Pro or your Hackintosh!
Sapphire recently announced the Radeon HD 7950 Graphics Card that is an "Exclusive Mac Edition with AMD GCN architecture". The Sapphire Radeon 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.
The card is said to boost GPU performance of existing Mac Pro models by up to 200%, which is especially interesting for people doing video and photography work on Apple Mac Pro machines.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition is currently available for $479,00 in the US.
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 3GB 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.
While this is not so big news for Hackintosh owners, it is for people that have to work on an original Apple Mac Pro from 2010. For Hackintosh still the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified, 4GB GDDR5, 2x DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort is the fastest card to get, featuring a chip clock of 1111MHz, shader clock of 1006MHz and RAM clock of 1502MHz.
Apple Mac OSX 10.8.3 brings AMD Radeon 7xxx: 7750, 7870, 7950, 7970 to Hackintosh!
Apple's recent update of Mac OS X 10.8.3 finally brings AMD Radeon drivers (kext) to hackintoshers around the globe.
Here is some other update news of the recent ML update by Apple: About the OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.3 Update, which also contains various security fixes:
New Kexts:
ATI7000Controller.kext
AMDRadeonX4000GLDriver.bundle
nVida kexts (ver. 8.10.18 304.10.65a13) included.
As of March 24, 2013, the AMD Radeon HD 7970, 7950, 7870, 7770, and 7750 have been confirmed to work "out of the box" (without the need for additional drivers), while the AMD Radeon HD 7850 only works with specially edited kext files.
The fastest AMD Radeon (that is confirmed to work) is the the Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB GDDR5 DVI-I/HDMI/2x Mini-Displayport PCI-E 3.0 Graphics Card GV-R797OC-3GD
AMD Radeon 6970 GPU working in Lion, Intel HD4000 and other Kext Updates for Hackintoshing
netkas reported success in getting a AMD Radeon 6970 working in his hackintosh using Mac OSX 10.7 Lion. Besides that news the Nvidia Geforce gtx6xx among Intel HD4000 drivers are also working, as well as USB 3.0 kexts for Z77 based mainboards.
This is all due to the MBP 2012 release adding some drivers (kexts); but the 11G15 Mac OSX Lion 10.7.5 beta update also adds those drivers, so chose whatever way you want to get your 6970 up and running.
We can recommend the Radeon XFX HD 6970 2GB GPU for use with hackintosh. If you are unsure or want some customac built, there are some recommended people setting up hackintoshes in europe.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 still not accelerated in 10.7.3 but usable on Hackintosh
The new ATI Graphics Cards from the 7970 series are super-fast, while being single GPU systems (the upcoming 7990 will be a dual-GPU 6GB Graphics Card). Besides being quite "cheap" (around 500€ in Europe, $589 in the US, they are said to be supported in OSX soon (see also a discovery by netkas) - until then, there is a current way how to use them (although not accelerated) with chimera. Props go to Shrapnl from the tonymac86 forum:
I was able to force my 7970 into a higher res (still unaccelerated of course) via the org.chameleon.boot.plist with the following:
<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>2560x1440x32</string></pre>
Of course, you can overclock the 7900 Series just fine. There are "Waterblocks" from Aquacomputer for the 7900 series, as outlined by Geeks3D.
Of course, the GPU runs quite fast without overclocking, still you could go faster. Below: Shamino has overclocked a Radeon HD 7970 under LN2 with the following clock speeds: 1650MHz for the GPU and 1800MHz real speed (7200MHz effective) for the memory. (Source: geeks3d)
[Update] the best way to cool your AMD Radeon 7970 is the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 which will cool down your GPU for additional 10degrees celsius (at least). Overclocking, here we go!
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