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In our recent review of the late 2013 Mac Pro, one of our sticking points was the OpenGL performance that trailed Windows on the same hardware. A particularly damning case was the high-polygon-scene performance in Autodesk Maya showing how OpenGL viewport 2 performance fell off a cliff when you pushed into very high polygon counts of over 20 million with the D700 in OS X.While this issue still needs to be resolved for some programs like modo, some quick sleuthing by Apple and AMD shows that the problem was on the Autodesk side. Maya was not simply querying the GPU RAM; for some reason, it was using a hard ceiling on OS X, so the brutal performance hit was the result of that ceiling. Once you explicitly tell Maya to use your available VRAM with the environment variable MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT=6000 in ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2014-x64/Maya.env, performance is perceptibly the same as in Windows in Boot Camp with very large scenes:
Mac Pro 'Six Core' 3.5 (Late 2013) - is powered by a single 3.5 GHz Six Core 22-nm Xeon E5-1650v2 processor with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 12 MB of level 3 'Smart Cache.' By default, this model has 16GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors with 3 GB of GDDR5 memory each. Hi, Does anyone managed to get their Mac Pro (late 2013) with Firepro D500 working with Oculus Rift? Hi, Does anyone managed to get their Mac Pro (late 2013) with Firepro D500 working with Oculus Rift? This is implemented by AMD and Nvidia in their drivers. It amuse me that the AMD Catalyst Driver is different from the Mac Pro (AMD FirePro D700/D500/D300) running Windows, in the case of Nvidia the same Windows drivers applies for all video cards.
I could have gone higher than that, but 145 million polygons pushed me past the RAM ceiling of my 32GB Mac Pro. It will be rare to hit that polygon count in Maya because people use render-time displacement maps, memory-efficient instances, and render proxies (low resolution stand-ins that render at full resolution) for giant scenes like forests. Actually, all you have to do to see full resolution and 300 million polygons for a scene like that is to use memory-efficient instances that are GPU-aware:
If you have a GPU with more than 1GB of VRAM, I highly recommend setting this environment variable to your GPU's VRAM amount. This issue will reportedly be fixed in Maya 2015, but Maya is clearly an absolutely massive program with some annoying issues—here is my blog post on how to fix Maya performance when the Help Line is visible in OS X.
![D700 D700](/uploads/1/1/9/5/119550746/203714166.jpg)
So, fellow Maya users, I just need to implicate Apple in another 17,000-word article about our other bugs, and we'll have them fixed in no time! This brings us to the question of why I thought to blame this on drivers and not the Mac Maya version to begin with. It's odd that this Mac-only hard-coded VRAM amount existed at all because Maya is very much the same beast on all platforms, and from my knowledge of it as a beta tester, platforms don't get specific attention for tuning, and that's the case for the dominant platform as well. That's why I assumed that this was a driver bug and not Maya-specific.
Anyway, we'd like to thank AMD and Apple for their quick work with Autodesk to resolve this issue. We'll be updating the review today to account for this new information.
This article applies only to video cards that originally shipped with a specified Mac Pro or were offered as an upgrade kit by Apple. Similar cards that were not provided by Apple may have compatibility issues and you should work with the vendor of that card to confirm compatibility.
Mac Pro (2019)
Learn more about cards you can install in Mac Pro (2019) and how to install PCIe cards in your Mac Pro (2019).
Mac Pro (Late 2013)
Amd Firepro D700 Benchmark
- Dual AMD FirePro D300
- Dual AMD FirePro D500
- Dual AMD FirePro D700
Mac Pro (Mid 2010) and Mac Pro (Mid 2012)
- ATI Radeon HD 5770
- ATI Radeon HD 5870
Learn about graphics cards supported in macOS 10.14 Mojave on Mac Pro (2010) and Mac Pro (Mid 2012).
Mac Pro (Early 2009)
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 120
- ATI Radeon HD 4870
- ATI Radeon HD 5870, offered as an upgrade kit
The Radeon HD 5870 card requires Mac OS X 10.6.4 or later and the use of both auxiliary power connections.
Mac Pro (Early 2008)
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (part number 630-9191 or 630-9897)*
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600
- ATI Radeon HD 4870, offered as an upgrade kit
The Radeon HD 4870 card requires Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later.
Mac Pro (Original)
Amd Firepro D700 For Mac Pro Download
- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
- ATI Radeon X1900 XT
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 (part number 630-7532 or 630-7895)*
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (part number 630-9492), offered as an upgrade kit.*
The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card requires Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later with the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 or the computer may not start up properly.
Amd Firepro D700 For Mac Pro 8gb
* To identify a graphics card part number, check the label on the back of the card.