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2007 Harpertown Stoakley-Seaburg Motherboard With New Graphics Cards 8-Core Mac Pro
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I'm going to assume you meant to say the 8800GTS 640mb needs to the minimum?
The specviewperf numbers I've seen show it beating the FX 4500 slighty (ever so slightly, probably same performance from an end user's perspective). The FX 4500 of course vastly outperforms the 8800GTX on the pro applications specviewperf benchmarks. ATI/AMD really went all out with their new Pro cards.
Fixed. Thanks.
I had the GTX on the brain as my preferred card, while stating that the 8800GTS (640) would be the minimum acceptable midrange card IMHO. Fixed. Thanks.
How would you feel if Apple went with an all FireGL line up, offering a great priced and performing lineup for non-gamers, but basically giving gamers the finger? Maybe you can't write such words on macrumors though.
Somehow, some way, Apple is going to screw-up the video cards.
They did it with the iMac so why not the Mac Pro?!
And your idea there would certainly do it.
Oh they will indeed! Part of the fun is waiting around to find out. Then getting angry
Maybe if we whine enough like the iPhone early adopters they will give us what we want?
I can't see it be a problem. I would be dandy with the FireGL line of graphic cards in the new Mac Pro. The professional cards do not suck at games (granted, their drivers are optimized for specific applications) but this is a workstation after all, so I don't quite see it as a problem.
Wrong, very wrong!
The Quadro FX 4500 can't compare to the X1900 XT when it comes to games as shown by the chart below.
The two high end FireGL cards (V8600, V8650) are based on ATI's HD2900 XT chipset.
As you can see by the second chart, the HD2900 XT gets smoked by Nvidia's 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra cards.
On top of that, how much do you think the V8600 or V8650 FireGL card will cost?
Answer: A friggin' fortune. A 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra card would be a lot cheaper.
"The Quadro FX 4500 can't compare to the X1900 XT when it comes to games as shown by the chart below."
I believe this was his point, which is still valid after 6mths and will be for the foreseeable future. The fact is Quadro cards are simply not designed for gaming and never will be. A specialized, consumer level gaming card will completely smoke a Quadro every single day of the week.
It's not what they're made for and a Quadro is no better at gaming then a hammer is at polishing. Different tool, different purpose.
Yet it is newer than the latest Mac Pro, so how old is 6 months?
By the way, it is less than 5 months old.
And 100% of all people on this forum have seen it? Was there a poll taken?
Thank you.
I am talking about the new ones to come, not the ones we currently have.
In OpenGL optimized applications the R600 chip will do much better than the G80 chip, according to rumours. I am still much more interested in Mac OS X and their multithreaded OpenGL.
Forgive me if this is completely wrong, but from what I can see on those graphs, every one of those cards (except G7300) seems perfectly adept at playing games. All but one game ran at over 60fps at full specs, with Prey just barely dipping below that. I'm pretty sure our eyes can't even process much more than that, especially not the close-to-200fps of UT. For that matter, most monitors can't even process that. Isn't this kind of like bragging about a car that can go 200mph, even though you're stuck in a 60mph speed limit?
So what's the problem? Or is this merely a future-proofing argument?
Again, I might be wrong here. I don't play a lot of PC games, but most console game reviews tend to call 60fps "buttery smooth." So is there really going to be any noticeable difference between these cards or are we just trying to gloat over having the fastest cards when we'll only be using a fraction of that speed?
Maybe, but the drivers are the important thing, right?
FireGL cards will be a godsend to Mac Pro professionals.
Except for Cinema 4d and video editing, I don't think they will work that well for me.
Indeed, drivers can totally cripple an otherwise great product.
From a gaming perspective I can see your point but I rarely game and the few games I occasionally play do not require much. However we can only hope that Apple decides to include more cards in the new line-up. I would not be surprised if they, as with the current Mac Pro, offer cards from both ATI and NVIDIA.
One of them should be a godsend to gamers
Newer games can be much more demanding, especially the big name FPS games comming out like Crysis. It is also about future proofing, but really first generation directx 10 cards were not a good way to future proof. Though I guess more a value for money thing that future proofing.
60 FPS are very nice, but FPS drops dramatically as you increase things like Resolution, FSAA, Anistropic filtering, physics effects, and all the other goodies that make PC games so immersive and fantastic to look at.
When you see the "max fps" type benchmarks, they're normally turning all those settings down to see what the maximum FPS potential is. It's a good metric for the GPU because it normally eliminates confounding variables like CPU, video memory or system memory bottlenecks.
Anecdote: Let's take the 8800 uber mega ultra or whatever catch phrase their using for the top models now. My buddy picked one these up not too long ago. If it were possible to buy a card that was "overkill" and for "bragging rights", this would be it.
If he cranks all the visual effects, viewing distance, etc up in Vanguard he gets peak of about 60fps, and dips down to 40 in high traffic areas. The same settings on just about any other card drops FPS to about 10 if it doesn't simply grind the card to a halt.
I might be off a bit, perhaps someone with the card can correct me. The point is, even the monster overkill cards fps drop considerably with settings...then add the next and greatest game coming out in 6mths and, well, those monsters might be the only card capable of running it at a playable fps with all the eye candy.
Ahh, I see. I was under the impression that those scores were with all the graphic settings maxed out.
They are. Krunk I guess failed to notice that in the first set of benchmarks, the demos were run at 1920x1200 resolution and the second set of benchmarks are run at 1920x1200 with anti-aliasing, antisotropic filtering and "Ultra Quality" selected.
Unless I'm reading incorrectly, the best card made today was running the second set at 23.2 FPS...barely playable.
If I am correct in that reading, it verifies what I was saying: monster cards allow you to turn up more eye candy while still being playable. So when you see 200 fps on a card, you should check if the game is really old or the settings are turned way down.
It would also appear that if we want to run some of the current games at their maximum potential we need even better cards. Maybe the next gen will do it. Thus the cycle continues
Why the hell would you waste a Mac Pro playing games
All the "mine is bigger than yours" is pathetic. Why the hell would anyone buy a MacPro to play games on. It's a workstation for bleedin sake. As in meant for work.
If you are someone who spends £1700 min on a MacPro to play games, you must be seriously lacking in your love life. Get out, go on you might like it.
If all you do is play games now and again the cards are ample.
If you really want to have a gaming machine, go back to PC's, where you can all get your rocks off over the latest FPS scores.
All the "mine is bigger than yours" is pathetic. Why the hell would anyone buy a MacPro to play games on. It's a workstation for bleedin sake. As in meant for work.
If you are someone who spends £1700 min on a MacPro to play games, you must be seriously lacking in your love life. Get out, go on you might like it.
If all you do is play games now and again the cards are ample.
If you really want to have a gaming machine, go back to PC's, where you can all get your rocks off over the latest FPS scores.
What someone decides to do with their machine is their business. Regardless of if you should or should not play games. The Mac Pro is still very out of date. Reducing the Mac Pro to a work only machine is ridiculous. If that was the case why the hell does it come with iLife? Heck, iTunes for that matter. They should make it so you can only install Pro apps. Everything else will tell you "You cannot install this because it is not work related and not Pro enough for this computer, please buy an iMac or other Apple computer to run."
Just because it plays todays games ok, does not mean it will continue to play new ones ok. In other words, the fact that the Mac Pro performs well today does not make it exempt from updates that keep it current. Which is what this thread is about. Some people are passionate about work and games, should they not buy a Mac Pro? I mean, it is clear the Mac Pro does work well. We know that, so someone shouldn't have to say I will be doing video work and playing games. Anyway, some people want better cards (including myself even though I don't game) because they want value for their money, which the Mac Pro isn't offering at the moment.
Just because it plays todays games ok, does not mean it will continue to play new ones ok. In other words, the fact that the Mac Pro performs well today does not make it exempt from updates that keep it current. Which is what this thread is about. Some people are passionate about work and games, should they not buy a Mac Pro? I mean, it is clear the Mac Pro does work well. We know that, so someone shouldn't have to say I will be doing video work and playing games. Anyway, some people want better cards (including myself even though I don't game) because they want value for their money, which the Mac Pro isn't offering at the moment.
I'll give you the short version:
If you love working in the osx/unix environment, but also like playing games it's cheaper to buy a mac pro then to buy a mac pro and a gaming machine.
Pretty simple eh? And when really the only thing keeping that work machine from being a perfectly acceptable gaming machine is the drivers for cards that have been out for a year....well, that shows poor vision on the part of apple.
It seems that apple recognizes that not all of their customers are as one-dimensional as you since they do seem to be at least playing lip service to gaming.
You sound like those old crotchety men chewing the cud and complaining about "damn kids nowadays, always wanting to have fun! why in my day, we didn't have 'fun'. 'fun' was for pansies!" *chew* *chew*
And that's saying something considering I'm edging into my mid 30's.
Maybe because Apple doesn't even offer an expandable desktop - also known as a mini-tower?
And really, what's the difference between a workstation and a desktop anyway? It's hard to look at a bunch of spec sheets and sort them into "workstation" and "desktop" categories. (When a $929 HP mini-tower system has quad core, 3 GiB RAM, GbE, and expansion room for 3 TB of disks and 8 GiB of RAM - do you put that in the "desktop" or the "workstation" pile?)
And, remember that when it was pointed out that the PowerMac G5 wasn't the "first 64-bit desktop" as was claimed in Apple's intro ads - the fanbois shouted "but those are workstations, the PowerMac is the first 64-bit desktop".
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