Apple beefs up Intel Mac Pro performance with three new pricey GPU options

Apple and AMD have started offering new graphics options for the Mac Pro desktop and there’s no shortage of power. The Radeon Pro W6800X, W6800X Duo, and W6900X are new workstation-class variants of AMD’s very popular consumer RDNA2 graphics cards, the Radeon 6800 and 6900XT. The X6800X Duo is sort of unique in that it puts two Radeon Pro 6800 GPUs on a single card. The cards can now be selected—alone or in pairs—when configuring your Mac Pro.

The Radeon Pro W6800X is similar to the consumer Radeon 6800: it features 60 compute units and a 256-bit memory bus, but it doubles the amount of GDDR6 memory from 16GB to 32GB. Configuring your Mac Pro with one of these cards is a $2,400 upgrade, or you can get two for $5,200.

The Radeon Pro W6900X is similar to the consumer Radeon 6900XT: it features 80 compute units and a 256-bit memory bus, again doubling the GDDR6 memory bank from 16GB to 32GB. One of these is a $5,600 upgrade to your Mac Pro, two of them will cost you $11,600.

The Radeon Pro W6800X Duo is unique in that it has no consumer analog. It puts two W6800X GPUs, each with their own memory, on a single graphics card (pictured below). This card will run you $4,600, or you can buy two to create a four-GPU workstation for a mere $9,600.

The W6800X Duo puts two GPUs and their memory on a single card. You can add two for a four-GPU workstation.Apple

These GPUs replace the AMD Vega II MPX Modules as configuration options, but both those old cards and these new ones and are also available as standalone modules for those who have existing Mac Pros and want to swap out their graphics cards. The price for the standalone cards is $400 more than the upgrade price when configuring a new Mac Pro.

Apple says they’ll offer big performance benefits for professionals, claiming improvements of up to 84% when running Octane X, 23% when using DaVinci Resolve, and a 26% increase in frame rate when doing real-time 3D interaction in Maxon Cinema 4D.