AMD's Radeon VII graphics card can now power Mac computers

AMD may not have the crown when it comes to GPU performance next to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, but its graphics processors have held the advantage in one regard, thanks to Apple's reluctance to use Nvidia's hardware. Now, the company's latest graphics card, the Radeon VII, has received support in the macOS Mojave 10.14.5 Beta 1, as Reddit user rsoatz posted.

In follow-up testing by AppleInsider, the Radeon VII graphics card was confirmed to work in high-power external GPU (eGPU) enclosures, but malfunctioned when used with a Mac Pro tower.

Since the support is coming in the form of a beta update to macOS, it's not surprising there are flaws here in there in the functionality across the range of possible setups. But, it's still promising news for creative users and gamers looking to boost the performance of their machines with the latest AMD card.

What Radeon VII can do

The Radeon VII is built on new 7nm architecture and offers a claimed 25% performance boost over its predecessors. There's no doubt gamers using an eGPU with their MacBooks would love to get that extra performance, and creative professionals can immediately benefit from the 16GB of HBM2 video memory. Hackintosh users could also eye the new graphics card for their builds.

This support for the Radeon VII is almost suggestive of what we could find in a new Mac Pro. Though, since the Radeon VII still doesn't top the 2080 Ti, power users might hope for Apple to skip right past the Vega-based card and go for an upcoming Navi GPU with ray-tracing.