2009 Mac Pro - Gaming Benchmarks?

[seer]

Please stop pretending you all use your mac pro's for real work and start posting any gaming benchmarks, especially with the Radeon Card!

I will use my Pro for 50% work and 50% gaming, so whilst it's nice to see that my photoshop files will be done in nanoseconds and video encoding in real time please start letting me know how fast these beasts are in some real tests such as the source engine, COD4, and Empire Total War Synthetic tests such as 3d Mark are very welcome too

 

[netkas]

read any radeon 4870 reviews with i7 cpu.

there is a lot of it over net,

 

[Freyqq]

the radeon 4870 is good enough to play all the games you listed at high quality at 1900x1200 easily

 

[grue]

the radeon 4870 is good enough to play all the games you listed at high quality at 1900x1200 easily

It'll hit the wall at 1900x1200 with anything visually demanding, though. Case in point. For gaming, it really should have been the 1GB model, or better yet a GeForce 260 Core216… but Apple doesn't give a damn about gaming, so whatever.

 

[eelmac]

It'll hit the wall at 1900x1200 with anything visually demanding, though. Case in point. For gaming, it really should have been the 1GB model, or better yet a GeForce 260 Core216… but Apple doesn't give a damn about gaming, so whatever.

orrr better yet a GeForce GTX 295 but thats abit to killer, in both price and amazing-ness

 

[Eisen Feuer]

Sorry for the Necro, but if anyone's interested in getting a Mac Pro for gaming, my Nahalem Octo 2.26 with the Radeon 4870 gets 185fps on TF2 @ 1920x1200 with all the settings at max. 100fps minimum when things get busy.

Doesn't seem take advantage of all the corage though, the framerate dips a LOT when capturing with FRAPS. I'll be plugging in a RAID to see if it's a datarate problem with my current single external HDD I'm capturing to.

 

[gugucom]

If you have a storage bottle neck SSDs are like after burner.

 

[Eisen Feuer]

But unfortunately SSDs are way out of the budget range right now... hopefully in two years the price-per-gigabyte will match HDDs (which I don't doubt, tons of money is probably flowing into SSD research)

 

[kntgsp]

Couple of things.

1.) the 4870 with 512MB will hit a wall with a lot of current games in terms of draw distance and texture size. They really should have offered the 1GB model (it came out like a month afterward, can't believe they jumped on the 512MB model that quick. ATI even announced the 1GB model).

Games like GTAIV can actually hit a wall on a 1GB card already if you max out the draw distance and details. So sadly we've reached the point where 1GB is already a bottleneck with some games. Also, just to note, a dual GPU card with 2GB still only has 1GB available to each core, so that won't help with the before stated problem. It has to be 2GB per core.

2.) The GTX285 is the best current option for the Mac Pro (officially). When the injectors get working properly on the SSC and 2GB models, those will be sweet. The 4890 1Ghz model is also a speed demon. It'll beat the 285 in a lot of frame rate tests. But it's not officially supported by OSX.

3.) If you're only gaming in Windows under Boot Camp, just throw any PC card in there and make sure you have enough power flowing to it via the slot and two miniPCIe adapters. Although make sure the model will work properly with the injectors if you want it to work in OSX.

Best single GPU option on the PC right now is the 4890 1Ghz model and the GTX 285 2GB with the higher clocks. I believe they make an SSC or whatever edition on that card.

Dual GPU cards still get microstuttering in some titles and won't help with problems like the draw distance in GTA IV since there's only 1GB available per core.