It is full of PCI-E slots but the new Mac Pro will not allow you to connect a graphics card. Those who had the idea of installing, for example, a Radeon Pro there… will simply have to look elsewhere.
Announced at the start of the WWDC 2023 conference, the new Mac Pro was somewhat overshadowed by the presentation with great fanfare of the Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset. And yet, the machine is transfigured. Without changing anything to its design, the Mac Pro indeed changes radically, inside, with the adoption of an M2 Ultra chip replacing the Intel Xeon processors which it always had to make do with. This long-awaited hardware upgrade also completes the transition of all Macs to Apple Silicon chips… Good news, then, but which comes with a frustrating limitation compared to older models.
Apple Insider indeed confirms a fear we had during the presentation of this Mac Pro M2 Ultra: despite its seven PCI Express ports, the device no longer supports the addition of graphics cards, such as the Radeon Pro from AMD, yet offered as an option a few days ago on the old model.
The M2 Ultra chip will have to be enough on its own
It must be said that Apple can hide behind a fairly simple argument: the M2 Ultra chip is sufficient on its own in terms of graphics. And it is true that on paper, it provides. Apple explains that Mac Pro M2 Ultra users should see performance 3 times higher than that of older Intel / Radeon models in 3D simulation. The M2 Ultra chip also offers enough graphics power to allow video engineers to manage up to 24 separate 4K streams, while encoding them in ProRes in real time when using six video I/O cards.
On the strength of these arguments, Apple has obviously felt that the use of dedicated graphics cards has become superfluous. It remains to be seen whether all professional users of the Mac Pro will agree. As a reminder, the new vintage of the device incorporates an M2 Ultra chip comprising a 24-core CPU part, up to 76 GPU cores and a 32-core Neural Engine. A massive APU to which can be added up to 192 GB of unified memory and a maximum of 8 TB of SSD.
The new Mac Pro’s PCI-E ports are limited to the 4.0 standard… not 5.0, which is probably related to the channel allocation limits of the M2 chip. And in the absence of being able to accommodate a dedicated graphics card, the latter are supposed to offer up to twice as much bandwidth according to Apple.
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