At the early stage of photovoltaic plants feasibility study, the assessment of the power production and the technology performances is a necessity. To do so, engineers usually use software's and prediction models. Plenty of models are available in the literature, nevertheless, the selection of the most suitable one to be use in a specific climate is a hard task since no study deals with the inter-comparison of the existing PV production models. In this paper, the output of 12 -from the most used- PV production models were evaluated, and their accuracy has been assessed versus one-year of ground measurements from a PV module at different time resolutions. Results show that the models developed by Twidell, Yamawaki and Nishioka -or M1, M2 and M3 as sited in the manuscriptare the most adequate to simulate the PV performances under semi-arid and hot climatic conditions, with an hourly nRMSE of 7.07% during spring, 4.23% during summer, 7.56% in autumn and 10.11% in winter. Furthermore, and based on site measurements, Mid-south of Morocco can be considered as a very good location for PV plants with a PR higher than 80% and an average efficiency of 16%.