This has been known for ages. Nehalem doesn't really offer much for most existing games. There are many, many benchmarks out there showing this.
Well, it is limited by the graphic card at that resolution.
I wonder if he disabled v-sync or if the game is capped at 60 FPS.
Still it was know beforehand that Nehalem would not give a major increase in games.
You're ignoring the other tests which showed better improvement. Plus CoD4 for Mac is a terribly optimized game, and it's even possible that the game limited framerate to 60fps (definitely so if they had Vsync on). GPU will be the limiting factor and since both systems have the same card, there you go. The games aren't going to benefit from 16 virtual cores or whatever else the Nehalem offers. It's probably going to come down to clock speed and also the drivers for the 4870. It'd be interesting to see some Windows game results.
P.S.
I'm slightly disturbed to see links to the Apple Store on the BareFeats
page. While I'm sure Rob-ART is principled and unbiased, the ad might
be seen by some as creating a conflict of interests.
Weren't gamers claiming that FB-DIMM latency was a major issue?
I seem to recall that.
Those are ads that help them pay the bills. I'm not sure why you are disturbed to see them. Show me a page on the 'net now a days that doesn't have ads!
Where is the conflict of interest?
Very surprising the 8800GT beat the 4870 in Core Image performance, if only barely. I had always been hearing that the ATI cards performed much better in those cases due to better drivers. And seeing the 3870 beat the 4870 in a few spots, maybe the 4870 drivers really need some tweaking.
Is it not obvious? He's advertising the thing he is reviewing.
If he gets paid for people clicking on that link, saying positive
things about the 2009 Mac Pro may mean he gets paid more.
That is a potential conflict of interests.
Very surprising the 8800GT beat the 4870 in Core Image performance, if only barely. I had always been hearing that the ATI cards performed much better in those cases due to better drivers. And seeing the 3870 beat the 4870 in a few spots, maybe the 4870 drivers really need some tweaking.