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OS X New iMac grfx: 780M vs "old" 680MX

MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

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Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
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So, the new iMac is here, and as I expect that the 2013 Mac Pro will only get the Pro-grfx cards, the "best" gaming Mac will probably be the new maxxed out iMac.

Configure the iMac with the GeForce 780M and it you can't get any better... or can you?

According to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html, the "new" 780M is slightly slower than the "old" 680MX (see pic)

Of course, the new 780M has 4 GB of VRAM which is important for X-Plane 10, but not so important in other games.
Could it be that the newer 780M is actually slower in real-life gaming on the Mac?

Waiting for Barefeats on this one....
 

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cluthz

cluthz

macrumors 68040
Jun 15, 2004
3,118
4
Norway
MacsRgr8 said:
So, the new iMac is here, and as I expect that the 2013 Mac Pro will only get the Pro-grfx cards, the "best" gaming Mac will probably be the new maxxed out iMac.

Configure the iMac with the GeForce 780M and it you can't get any better... or can you?

According to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html, the "new" 780M is slightly slower than the "old" 680MX (see pic)

Of course, the new 780M has 4 GB of VRAM which is important for X-Plane 10, but not so important in other games.
Could it be that the newer 780M is actually slower in real-life gaming on the Mac?

Waiting for Barefeats on this one....
Click to expand...

Both are 28nm GK104 with 1536 cores, 780M is clocked higher than 680MX.
I can't see how it scores lower.

Passmark is pretty much just silly, it has no relation to the real world performance at all. GTX 690 is apparently slower than 670.
GTX 570 and GTX 480 is faster than GTX 660..

Apparantly GT640 is also faster than GTX285... According to sites like tomshardware a GT640 is comparable with a 8800GT.
GT640 has a whopping 64 bit bus @40gb/sec with a texture fillrate of 16.7 bill/sec. (vs a 512 bit bus @160gb/sec and a texture fillrate of 52 bill/sec..)

Do yorself a favor and never visit that site again :)
 
S

Serban

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Jan 8, 2013
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in some test/benchmarks the result on Maveriks DP2 with 680MX was 4373 and for 780M with i7 the result were 4628
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
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cluthz said:
Both are 28nm GK104 with 1536 cores, 780M is clocked higher than 680MX.
I can't see how it scores lower.

Passmark is pretty much just silly, it has no relation to the real world performance at all. GTX 690 is apparently slower than 670.
GTX 570 and GTX 480 is faster than GTX 660..

Apparantly GT640 is also faster than GTX285... According to sites like tomshardware a GT640 is comparable with a 8800GT.
GT640 has a whopping 64 bit bus @40gb/sec with a texture fillrate of 16.7 bill/sec. (vs a 512 bit bus @160gb/sec and a texture fillrate of 52 bill/sec..)

Do yorself a favor and never visit that site again :)
Click to expand...

Cheers.

Over at the X-Plane forums my attention was set on this:
http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/inde...compare=geforce-gtx-680mx-vs-geforce-gtx-780m

In short:
780M is slightly higher clocked (7%), slightly higher texture- and pixel-rate and has double the VRAM.
Added to that OpenGL 4.3 support vs. OpenGL 4.1 support for the 680 MX.

It looks like that "all-round" the 780M will probably have around 10% better performance than the 680MX.
Games exceeding 2 GB VRAM (which X-Plane 10 easily does....) will obviously give the 780M far better results than the 680MX.

I think i just really, really want the new 27" iMac with 780M! :)
 
smoketetsu

smoketetsu

macrumors member
Mar 28, 2008
62
0
Seeing as how Mavericks only supports 4.1 at launch from what I hear most games probably wont support 4.3 anytime soon. 4.3 will eventually be important though for stuff like compute shaders which is a next gen feature.
 
maccompaq

maccompaq

macrumors 65816
Mar 6, 2007
1,169
24
MacsRgr8 said:
Cheers.

Over at the X-Plane forums my attention was set on this:
http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/inde...compare=geforce-gtx-680mx-vs-geforce-gtx-780m

In short:
780M is slightly higher clocked (7%), slightly higher texture- and pixel-rate and has double the VRAM.
Added to that OpenGL 4.3 support vs. OpenGL 4.1 support for the 680 MX.

It looks like that "all-round" the 780M will probably have around 10% better performance than the 680MX.
Games exceeding 2 GB VRAM (which X-Plane 10 easily does....) will obviously give the 780M far better results than the 680MX.

I think i just really, really want the new 27" iMac with 780M! :)
Click to expand...
To run X Plane 10 for best results, use GTX 780 (the desktop grafix). The small difference in performance of the GTX 680mx vs the 780m does not justify the additional cost.
X Plane 10 users, please give your experience.
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
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maccompaq said:
To run X Plane 10 for best results, use GTX 780 (the desktop grafix). The small difference in performance of the GTX 680mx vs the 780m does not justify the additional cost.
X Plane 10 users, please give your experience.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I'm not so sure on OS X.
It seems that OS X doesn't support "instancing" due to the drivers, and has a negative impact on FPS on X-Plane.

Google it, I happened to come across it.

Also, the 780 can only fit into the later Mac Pro's. I don't want to get an old Mac just so that I can use the 780.

As the new Mac Pro pretty definitely is dual grfx only, then the maxxed out iMac seems the best option.
Unless.... the 780M performs worse than a Radeon 7950...
 
M

macguy360

macrumors 6502a
Feb 23, 2011
829
468
Considering Haswell has primarily been designed as a battery saving updated, there is little need to upgrade to the newer iMac this year. Personally, I would suggest that people save the money and buy last years iMac or wait until next year for the bigger intel update combined with a better nVidia update.
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
8,284
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I've done a little playing around with Unigine's "Heaven" and "Valley" 3D grfx benchmarking tool.

2 Macs:
- Mac Pro 2008, 8 x 2.8 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Radeon HD 7950 (3 GB VRAM)
- iMac "late 2012" 27", Core i5 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 675MX (1 GB VRAM)

Both Macs running OS X 10.8.5

Test results:
- "Heaven": Mac Pro around 8% faster on average
- "Valley": iMac around 10% faster on average

In short: the two Macs perform quite similar. According to Barefeats, The GTX 680MX should perform better than both, so I am pretty confident that the GTX 780M in the new iMac should perform better than the Radeon HD 7950.

One interesting tidbit:
I also ran both "Valley" and "Heaven" on the Mac Pro, running Windows 7 (64 bits, Ultimate edition) with latest Catalyst Drivers and the test ran a lot faster (of course) than on OS X (Mountain Lion or Mavericks).
The fact that the FPS were much higher is not exciting news, but I noticed that the temperature of the 7950 running OS X hardly exceeded 35 degrees C, and running Windows it hit the 70 degrees C easily!
Also, the GTX 675 in the iMac running OS X and these benchmark tools also got hotter than the 7950: around 60 degrees C.
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

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J

jeanlain

macrumors 68020
Mar 14, 2009
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Well Unigine runs pretty well on Mavericks and that's a demanding engine (with tessellation and all). But I'm not sure Mavericks will help X-Plane in any way, since that engine doesn't use the openGL 3+ core profile that possibly gained most of the optimization in 10.9. (I suppose X-Plane still uses openGL 2 since it's compatible with Snow Leopard.)
 
S

Serban

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So with maveriks will be no more games experience differences between MACOS and Windows
 
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