[rob_ART]

I've been trying all the different graphics cards in the Nehalem Mac Pro 8-core 2.93. I was puzzled when I installed the GeForce 8800 GT. The Core Image apps ran really great -- better than ever.

However, when shifted over to 3D games, I received a shock. It ran painfully slow. One third the speed of the GeForce 120 GT. I've learned today a patch is forthcoming from nVidia via Apple to fix the problem.

[The Liberator]

How odd, it would be interesting to see the difference when the patch comes through, (and also to see how it should run).

Liberator.

[rob_ART]

I received a pre-release of an nVidia driver set for the Nehalem Mac Pro that brings the GeForce 8800 GT back to "par." It now matches the numbers I was getting on the 2008 Mac Pro:
http://www.barefeats.com/nehal07.html

If you have a Nehalem Mac Pro with a GeForce 8800 GT and are not pleased with the performance, the fixed drivers should appear with the next Apple system update.

I'm very happy with the Radeon HD 4870 but I'm sure there are consumers who bought the GeForce 8800 GT kit and want to migrate it to the 2009 Mac Pro. The guys at nVidia realize this. I give them props for stepping up to the plate.

[The Liberator]

Hmmm, well that is interesting how close, and also sometimes how far away the 8800 is to the 4870 in terms of FPS. I thought it would generally be a bit higher overall, as the 4870 is (as I know it) in between the power of the 9800GT(X?) and the 280GTX. Am I right?

Liberator.

[ltcommander.data]

The Liberator, on April 1st 2009, 05:28 PM, said:

Hmmm, well that is interesting how close, and also sometimes how far away the 8800 is to the 4870 in terms of FPS. I thought it would generally be a bit higher overall, as the 4870 is (as I know it) in between the power of the 9800GT(X?) and the 280GTX. Am I right?

Liberator.

Well the 8800GT was renamed the 9800GT. The HD4850 competes against the 9800GTX+ which was renamed as the GTS250 and the HD4850 generally wins. The 512MB HD4870 competes against the 216 core GTX260. I'm pretty sure the HD4870 should average 50% faster than the 8800GT/9800GT with Windows drivers. (http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15752/4) Hopefully there are more performance gains to come with the drivers in 10.5.7.

And in regards to the closeness between the 8800GT and HD4870 in Halo and WoW, these games aren't exactly graphics intensive anymore, so I'm betting they are more CPU bound than GPU bound.

The latest rumours say the Quadro FX 5800 is going to be made available soon for the Mac Pro, I guess at WWDC. Using a 55nm core like the GTX285 it'd definitely be a screamer as Jobs would say. However, it's price doesn't really make it suitable as a modern high-end GPU. Maybe Apple will add the upcoming 1GB HD4890 as a high-end GPU option since it can share the same driver as the 512MB HD4870 which is really a mid-range GPU.

Oh for Rob, do you think you could try testing some of the latest Cider games like Red Alert 3 or Prince of Persia? Seeing Cider isn't going away, it'd be great to know what the performance characteristics of these games are. Particularly do they seem more CPU or GPU bound than they should be? I guess you can figure that out be seeing the performance scaling you get between different CPUs and GPUs on the native Windows version in Boot Camp and then seeing if that scaling is reduced in the OS X Cider version.

Also, on the visual front does the Cider port look worse at max settings than the original Windows version. I believe the early Cider ports didn't support DX9.0c and SM3.0, only SM2.0, so the Mac versions looked worse than they should have. Not running SM3.0 could also be kind of cheating to allow the OS X version to do less work compared to the Windows version and run faster.

[teflon]

you could even strip the game from its wrapper, stick a nocd patch on it and run the same tests in windows...

no wait, scratch that...

[The Liberator]

Eh¿

Also, to LT: thanks for the reply on all of the GPU comparisons.

Libertor.