Hi! I'm thinking about selling off my 1st Gen Mac Pro and buying a new one. I use boot camp once in a while to run Vista 64-bit just for playing the Total War series of games, specifically Medieval 2 and now Empire. Any advice on best graphics card setup for those particular games under bootcamp? I'm not at all worried about on the OS X side of things as I don't really do anything graphic intensive there. I saw the new Nvidia GTX 285 is coming out soon. Any thoughts on that vs the Radeon 4870s? I'm currently running dual Radeon 3870s with crossfire but because I'm on a 1st Gen Mac Pro I can't get everything out of them so I think I may want to upgrade to a new Mac Pro.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Best Graphics Card for new Mac Pro
- Thread starter stenackj
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Crossfire does not work on mac's. Why not just buy a gaming PC? Either of the cards you mentioned would be fine.
The PC GTX 285 is at least 34 percent faster than the PC 4870 512MB card.
The only ATI card that can beat the GTX 285 is the HD 4870 X2.
If you are playing games in Bootcamp, then the GTX 285 is definitely the way to go.
nVidia cards are much better for PCs than than ATI.
For Macs, ATI cards have better drivers but we'll have to wait and see how the Mac GTX 285 performs.
A bit off-topic: In the iMac with ATI 4850 freezing fiasco do you think ATI or Apple didn't write good drivers/firmware that caused all the problems. It's encouraging to hear you think ATI writes good drivers. I don't need the GTX 285 and may just get the 2.66 Quad with the 4870 after June 8th (WWDC).
Note I don't know the difference between drivers and firmware. I think firmware is more encompassing. Apple put out an EFI (whatever that means) firmware and it seems to fix the vast majority of iMacs with the 4850 card.
Note I don't know the difference between drivers and firmware. I think firmware is more encompassing. Apple put out an EFI (whatever that means) firmware and it seems to fix the vast majority of iMacs with the 4850 card.