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GeForce GTX 285 Appears in Apple Online Store

My Mac Pro rips a 2 hour DVD and does high quality h.264 using Handbrake in about 3 to 4 hours.
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Really? is that using all 8 cores? I havent seen anything over an hour personally.

I am quite happy they are shipping this card, I feared a mac version would be vaporware. The 8800GT in my early 2008 pro died about 2 weeks back. The ONLY option other than waiting 10 days and paying and extra $100 installation on top of the $250 replacement 880 was to drop a $150 GT120 in there for the moment. I did that and it works...but nothing like it used to. Noticeable delays in all aspects. Ordered the 285 today, says they will deliver the 26th.

On a side note, is there any point (or is it even possible!) to keep the 120 for driving a second monitor? I know that when I had a 30" and a 24" connected to the 8800 the performance dropped somewhat relative to only having the 30" connected.
 
Mac Kiwi said:
Why is there no 2GB version of the same card like the PC ones?.......I also note the 2G PC one is about the same price.


http://www.evga.com/products/prodlist.asp?


I want as much on board memory as possible for throwing polys around in Mud,zbrush etc...
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Evidently the 2 GB model -EVGA GeForce GTX 285 Video Card - 2GB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV - Model: 02G-P3-1185-AR - $404.99 (sold by Tiger) and $399.99 (EVGA) - will work only in a PC, not Mac Pro.

How much difference would be seen in editing photos using the 1 GB 285 card compared to the 512 MB 8800? My Mac Pro has 8 GB RAM now (soon will be 12 GB).
 
I had the opportunity just today to use a Lenovo Thinkpad with a 1GB Quadro FX card. Beastly, but also HEAVY and HOT. The battery in it alone probably weighed more than my MacBook Pro. :p

Someone mentioned ATI cards, and I agree that we need to have a better selection of these for Macs. AMD's CPUs suck, but they can make good graphics cards and have always had better Mac support.
 
doctor-don said:
How much difference would be seen in editing photos using the 1 GB 285 card compared to the 512 MB 8800? My Mac Pro has 8 GB RAM now (soon will be 12 GB).
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I would say probably none. Although CS4 is able to utilise the GPU, you'd have to be editing truly massive images to see a difference. But I'm basing this all on assumption...
 
Sehnsucht said:
I had the opportunity just today to use a Lenovo Thinkpad with a 1GB Quadro FX card. Beastly, but also HEAVY and HOT. The battery in it alone probably weighed more than my MacBook Pro. :p
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Choice is good.

I need to test different laptops as part of my job, so at any point in time I'll have a number of them around - most of them configured with VPN and whatever so that any one can be my "main" laptop.

On one recent trip I took two of them. My Dell Latitude XT2 multi-touch Windows 7 tablet - beautiful, small, under 4 lbs. And a Lenovo T61p behemoth - big, heavy, but a fast dual 64-bit CPU and a 1920x1200 screen.

The XT2 was in my carry-on, and its 6 hour battery got me across the country. The Lenovo was checked, but its big screen (pixel-wise) and fast CPU quickly crunched the CPU/memory intensive tasks that I needed to do. If I had a system that weighed another kilo and was quad core - I would have brought that.

Choice is good. I'm happy that my small everyday laptop weighs less than the battery in the workhorse. I'm happy that I have both.

You have no "choice" with Apple. It's Steve's way, or the highway. Maybe someday Apple will realize how many potential customers are taking the highway. Maybe someday Apple will show Steve the highway....
 
Eddyisgreat said:
VERY telling that this does not include a mini displayport.
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Or more likely, full-size DisplayPort. Mini DP is just for laptops where space is an issue, and used only by Apple so far, as they developed the spec.

I hate the fact that they actually made a monitor that uses Mini DP**, they should've made it have a proper DP and a DVI input, then included both a mini-DP to DP (with sound) and a DP to DVI adaptor with all laptops, but hey, ****ing people around to score an extra $30 or so for every laptop seems like the go these days. :rolleyes:

**Then again, it is a such a cheap, consumer style screen that you wouldn't want to use it with a Mac Pro anyway.
 
Transeau said:
My Mac Pro rips a 2 hour DVD and does high quality h.264 using Handbrake in about 3 to 4 hours.
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Something's got to be wrong here. I do a 2 hour movie with the legacy Apple TV preset in about 35 mins. The iPhone preset runs me about 15 mins. I have an 8 core 2008, but still. You must be using a lot higher preset or something?

Edit: I just ran a test and the Matrix (2 hours and 16 mins) looks like will take ~38 mins with the legacy ATV preset.
 
slicecom said:
Thats why I stick to ATI cards. They all have both EFI32 and EFI64 ROMs. Nvidia could easily do this too, but choose not to. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Nvidia cards anyways. 4870 here I come!
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Totally. Machine won't boot without driver installed (not an issue with ATI), no EFI32, worse drivers. I'll stick with ATI (got a 4870 already, just need to plug it in).
 
AidenShaw said:
You have no "choice" with Apple. It's Steve's way, or the highway. Maybe someday Apple will realize how many potential customers are taking the highway. Maybe someday Apple will show Steve the highway....
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Once Teh Jobs is gone, I'm *hoping* Apple will figure out that people buy Macs for the OS, not for how orgasmically "thin and light" they are. Then perhaps they'll make the MacBook Pro thicker so there'll be room for a dedicated graphics card. I don't want/expect/need Apple to roll out 15 different models/shapes/sizes like Dell or Lenovo...all I want is the Quadro FX for my Maya work.

I have the "orgasmically thin and light" 15" MBP, and while three of mine stacked up are still thinner than my friend's Dell XPS :)D) his dedicated NVIDIA card beats mine rather solidly.
 
Transeau said:
In most benchmarks, the 4870 offers no advantage over the 8800.
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What benchmarks are you referring to?

The 4870 is far more powerful than *any* 8800 in most 3D games on windows at least --- it mostly beats the Nvidia GTX 260.

The 4870 is also faster in Mac OpenGL stuff, like the Pro apps.

Finally, for future OpenCL/GPGPU, the 4870 has twice the raw computational power. Here is an example:


Nvidia Tesla C870GPU (Based on optimized G80/8800GTX)
518 Gigaflops (FP32)
40 Gigaflops (FP64*)

RV770 stream card (Based on Radeon 4870)
1200 Teraflops (FP32)
240 Gigaflops (FP64*)


* And if you noticed, the ATI card has a far better single-precision to double-precision performance ratio. And even the beastly new Tesla card based on the 240-core GTX285 is very powerful in raw computation, it too can only muster 75 Gflops in double precision, 3X less than the far smaller 4870
 
If apple continues to offer video card upgrades for the Mac Pro at a nice pace maybe I will consider it as my next desktop pc. I've really enjoyed my MBP being able to run Windows and OSX is great. Best of both worlds. :)

Yeah I know its not a gaming desktop pc its a workstation but you can't swap video cards in the iMac :D
 
Let me at it...

You can never keep everyone happy but buying a video card that A) I don't have to mess around with upgrading the ROM and B) no requirments for a display port adaptor to use with my 23" Cinema Display's to me is everything I need of course there are points against here but they don't bother me in the slightest.

Just release the damn thing's in the UK and I'll be one happy Mac user :)
 
cgc said:
Thank you Apple for not supporting us 2006 MacPro users...I have an upgradable Mac that has no (new) video card upgrades...how long til my nVidia 8800 becomes obsolete (if not already)?
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One hell of an argument for me not to get a Mac Pro. Not as upgradeable as one would except. 2006 is not that old.
 
theBigD23 said:
That is pretty expensive. I hope the price drops soon, since this seems to be the only new card that will be available from Nvidia for a while. There is also no mini display port so you can't make it work with the LED monitor.
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Pretty expensive? Look at the price of say EVGA for a similar card. It is actually the first time that I think Apple is selling upgrades at reasonable prices.
 
podiki said:
One hell of an argument for me not to get a Mac Pro. Not as upgradeable as one would except. 2006 is not that old.
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This is completely untrue! I have the new ATI 4870 (from Apple) sitting in my mac pro working away with no problems at all. All I did was unplug the 1900x and plug this one in, not issues, no problems, no drama. 5 Minutes work.

Regards,

John.
 
appleguy123 said:
I was using apple store chat and they told me that there were external graphics cards tht go through the express card... Where do i get them and what is the performance like?
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Sorry if I'm repeating what someone else wrote ( don't have time to go though a 100 posts ) but I think they were referring to this

http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/expressbox1/index.html

I've head that the company is working on a way of connecting a "double wide" video card to the box but I have no idea of you can do that atm. You should keep in mind that regardless of what card you connect you are still going though a 1x bus so if you are looking for performance this is not the solution. Plus the box alone costs like $800.
 
Heres hoping this release makes EVGA look at releasing more cards in the future.


I also would love a quadro,but not the most expensive model in the lineup.A fireGL would also be nice.


Maybe the market share growth has some companies re thinking Mac releases.
 
I just got the GTX 285 Yesterday. Ordered it on Apples site on Wednesday overnight shipping.

You have to install the Driver first which is a 5 second process. This is because OS X 1.5.7 does not have the updated Nvidia Driver install. This is not a big deal.... why even post about it as a negative?

The winner in this post was the guy who stated that the card was not on Apple's OpenCL list.... Its an Nvidia card genius of course Its OpenCL compatible 100%.

The GTX is fast. All of you are posting about Barefeats.... but did you even look at the Benchmarks he has on the website. It shows the GTX 285 handily bests ever other graphics Card on the Mac.

1- The Card is Very Quiet. My previous card the 8800 GT was a very noisy card. I barely hear the GTX 285

2- I play ARMA II on Bootcamp. This is a Military simulator that brought the 8800 GT to its knees. I could not run the game with all the graphics options on and still get 30 fps. I now can turn up all the options to VERY HIGH as well as up my screen resolution and still I am above 30 FPS.

3- The Card has 1GB of Video memory.... Its the most VRAM in any consumer card that has been released for the Mac and yet we complain about " where's the 2 GB version" Are you kidding me....its one friggin GB!

So far I am VERY happy. The GTX 285 is MUCH MUCH faster than my 8800 GT...
:apple:
 
dusanv said:
Totally. Machine won't boot without driver installed (not an issue with ATI), no EFI32, worse drivers. I'll stick with ATI (got a 4870 already, just need to plug it in).
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I have to say this.... Are you kidding?!.....SO WHAT! you have to install a new driver... Basically your saying ATI uses the same OLD driver. Where the Nvidia is getting the latest Graphics updates that are available. I'm not going to get into an ATI vs Nvidia war but its clear you want to start one since having a Driver to install apparently the end of the world.
 
Transeau said:
No, that's using all 4 cores.
You have 2x more processors than me, and much more memory bandwidth.
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yeah, i was gonna say man, on my 8c 2.8 early 2008 mac pro i am seeing high quality handbrake rips of full length DVDs in about 25 minutes, 35 tops with the 8800GT

I'm really stoked to get my hands on a GTX 285. Should be bitchin' for FinalCut Pro, eh?
 
slackpacker said:
I have not tested FCP yet but I don't think its going to make a difference. FCP really does not use the graphics card for anything. Motion I'm sure will be much faster.
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Actually you are wrong, FCP does use the graphics card for transitions and effects; and also embedded Motion projects within sequences.

Hardware encode/decode of H.264 once Snow Leopard is out is going to be a big deal; hopefully Apple does not shaft the people who have bought this card.

-mark
 
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