Sapphire HD 7950

The Sapphire HD 7950, also marketed as Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition, was a high-end graphics card released in March 2013 by for the 2010 and 2012 1st-generation Mac Pros. It is based on a GPU chipset developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Description
The Sapphire HD 7950 is based on AMD's high-end Tahiti Pro workstation graphics chip that was fabricated on the 28 nm process. The GPU clock speed was 800 MHz, which could be boosted to 1.25 GHz, producing up to 2.867 teraflops. It contained 3 GB of GDDR5 video RAM. The card features one DVI port, one HDMI 1.4a port, and two Mini DisplayPort 1.2 ports. It took up the space of a double-wide PCIe x16 slot, and required two auxiliary power cables.

Support
The Sapphire HD 7950 supports Mac OS X 10.7.5 and later with the installation of driver software; Mac OS X 10.8.3 and later needs no driver software to be installed. Unlike other earlier graphics cards for the 1st-generation Mac Pro, the Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition does support Metal and will run on macOS Mojave (10.14) and later.

Due to its ability to support Metal, the Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition has maintained higher resale values on the aftermarket than its PC counterpart. However, power users have found that it is possible to flash the cheaper PC version of a Radeon 7000 series GPU card with the firmware from the Mac Edition. To maintain optimum compatibility, finding a matching HD 7950 is recommended.