Guild Wars 2

So I have a new Mac Pro (Not a Macbook Pro)
3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
16 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
2x AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB

It runs on OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

I have a beautiful 24" 3840 × 2160 at 60 Hz monitor connected via DP 1.2

Now for my question…
The game doesn’t run smooth for me unless I turn the graphics way down, which is a huge bummer with all this power. :-(
So perhaps the game is only using one of the GPUs?
The whole setup for the Mac Pro is totally unique to just the Mac Pro follow this link for further details on the Mac Pro
Or is there something else that is causing this issue.

Thanks

Valhalla.8960:

So I have a new Mac Pro (Not a Macbook Pro)
3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
16 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
2x AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB

It runs on OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

I have a beautiful 24" 3840 × 2160 at 60 Hz monitor connected via DP 1.2

Now for my question…
The game doesn’t run smooth for me unless I turn the graphics way down, which is a huge bummer with all this power. :-(
So perhaps the game is only using one of the GPUs?
The whole setup for the Mac Pro is totally unique to just the Mac Pro follow this link for further details on the Mac Pro
Or is there something else that is causing this issue.

Thanks

what if you drop from the 4k Res down to 3k or 1440P? what happens then? It could be that the MAC client just cannot support 4K yet.

a D500 is a rebranded W8000 that was cut down from 1792 to 1525 steaming processors to get that lower price point.

The 2012 released W8000 was the same chip as a radeon 7950, and the new D500 is the equivalent of a 7870 XT (4.3 billion transistor Tahati LE vs the 7870 LE’s 2.8 billion transistor Pitcairn XT)

Because the new R9 series were also mainly rebrands, the D500 in terms of silicon is a 20% cut down r9 280 (non-x).

So in essence you are running weaker 280’s in CF, but with workstation drivers that are not optimized for gaming. Which would put the expected performance in the 270s range, which are mid/low end cards. I would never ever expect 270s in CF to run 4k well.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/workstation-graphics-card-gaming,3425-3.html
Notice how the W8000 performs at 65% of the identical gaming chip: the 7950.

Factor in the 20%-30% performance hit from the cider wrapper in the OSX client, your performance is pretty expected.

Only one card in the Mac Pro is used for actual rendering, the other is used for compute tasks. They are not running in a Crossfire configuration, as OS X doesn’t support that.
Neither the CPU nor the GPU are particularly well suited to run the game at such a high resolution, especially not with the additional performance penalty of the GW2 OS X client which seems to get worse at higher resolutions. Running at half that resolution should work pretty decently though.

In short, a Mac Pro is a work computer, not a gaming machine.

Would going boot camp windows enable CFX? just asking out of curiousity. If yes boot camping and installing windows would be a better idea for gaming on that machine.

Naqaj.6219:

Only one card in the Mac Pro is used for actual rendering, the other is used for compute tasks. They are not running in a Crossfire configuration, as OS X doesn’t support that.
Neither the CPU nor the GPU are particularly well suited to run the game at such a high resolution, especially not with the additional performance penalty of the GW2 OS X client which seems to get worse at higher resolutions. Running at half that resolution should work pretty decently though.

In short, a Mac Pro is a work computer, not a gaming machine.

So as another person posted in this thread, would running windows on this system via bootcamp help my situation out any?

A google search with “Mac Pro Crossfire” brings up a number of articles detailing how it does seem to work with Windows.

With GW2 being mostly CPU throttled, this shouldn’t actually make that much of a difference, though it may help with other graphic-intensive games.

You will get the improved performance and higher graphics options that come simply from switching to the Windows client though, that alone will probably help quite a bit. I still wouldn’t expect it to run well at full resolution, 4K is just too much.

From my understanding, that system is designed to be used for medium duty 3D modeling and video editing, not a gaming rig (thus the advanced OpenGL support it offers). While it’s Direct X 10-12 performance may be serviceable, I doubt they put ANY effort into it’s performance with DX9 (what GW2 uses).

Definitely not a “gaming” rig laptop.