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GeForce GTX 285 Appears in Apple Online Store

Lol, how are people getting their cards already? I ordered it the second I saw this article and they are projecting a June 26th ship date. Has it been on stealth sale for 2 weeks or more? I swear I checked about 10 days back.
 
slackpacker said:
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
:apple:
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If your happy with 1GB then more power to ya,but some of us could quite easily use 2GB,thats not to say I will probably not buy one myself,but a lot of high end 3d sculpting apps like Mudbox for instance would use 1GB and more no problem.
 
MacsRgr8 said:
Gr8 card!... but...

But, no mini Display Port.

I have a Mac Pro '08, currently with the 8800 GT. This card is perfect except in X-Plane 9.
And, TBO.... I expected the GTX 285 would by far outperform the ATi 4870.
According to Barefeats the difference between the two in X-Plane is not that much (see attached pic)... other games a bit more, but those perform well enough anyway (even on the 8800 GT, let alone the 4870)

As I would love the Apple 24" LED display, and X-Plane is the game which needs the horespower most, and seeing the price difference.. AND I saw on the Apple US Store reviews this:



That is very annoying.... :mad:

Snow Leopard will end that, but that's 3 months away....

I think I will go for the Radeon 4870 with 24" LED Display. :)
Click to expand...

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that X-Plane is badly written. When I got the Mac Pro Octo 8 GIGs RAM and GT 8800 it was the top of the line and X-Plane ran terribly. The messages about having too many options came up even with the standard set up! I gave up on it out of frustration after upgrading to v9 and it things got even worse.
 
RemarkabLee said:
Not true, according to BareFeats tests on release of the 2009 Mac Pro with the 4870, they are quite close. Previous to this, the ATi had the edge over Nvidia for pro apps, but not as far as your suggesting.
Click to expand...

Really? When I look at the benches here:

http://www.barefeats.com/nehal11.html

Halo, Prey and ET:QW run almost twice as fast, CoD becomes playable at full res, and the worst case scenario is XPlane, which is still >5% faster. It's pretty clear this card crushes the 4870 for gaming.

Maury
 
mbene12 said:
Really? is that using all 8 cores? I havent seen anything over an hour personally.
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Nor me, I generally encode at 2x realtime. Something is wrong with this user's settings. Manual poking about in the high-profile settings perhaps?

Maury
 
Sehnsucht said:
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.
Click to expand...

That is why the buy them.

I challenge you to test this: what are the statistics on how many Mac owners even know what the name of their OS is?

Maury
 
EVGA already posted an update to the driver. At least they seem interested in supporting the card!

From xlr8yourmac.com:

EVGA posts Mac GTX 285 Driver Update (F16) - EVGA has posted a 18.5.2f16 (FTP download) driver update for the GTX 285 for Mac Pros. I consider this a very good sign to have driver updates released so quickly (rather than having to wait for an OS X version update).
I've updated my earlier review of the GTX 285 (page 2 and page 3) to include some re-tests with the F16 driver. (I'd previously added GLview OpenGL 2.0 results vs the GL 2.1 tests.)
The F16 driver update did improve performance in some tests (like Prey and COD4). COD4 (v1.7.1) performance was up about 10% or so, but at the 1920x1200 limits of my display the ATI 4870 still delivered higher FPS with this dual 2.66 system. (ATI just seems better optimized for that game currently - at least more efficient at other than extreme resolutions (2560x1600) where the 512MB vram/lesser GPUs run out of breath.)
Click to expand...


FTP Download

ftp://ftp.evga.com/Driver/MAC285_2F16.dmg
 
Digitalclips said:
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that X-Plane is badly written. When I got the Mac Pro Octo 8 GIGs RAM and GT 8800 it was the top of the line and X-Plane ran terribly. The messages about having too many options came up even with the standard set up! I gave up on it out of frustration after upgrading to v9 and it things got even worse.
Click to expand...

I have the same Mac, and share the frustrations.. it's just I want to be able to play it nicely... :(
One thing I read somewhere, is that X-Plane uses just one core. It's loading the textures that can be multi-cored IIRC, but that doesn't really help the FPS during heavy scenery at the airport.

I really had hoped that the 1 GB of VRAM on the GTX 285 would help X-Plane A LOT... but, sadly, according to Barefeats, it doesn't.
As I had said, the performance difference between the 4870 and the GTX 285 running X-Plane 9 is too small to justify me to buy a card without Mini DisplayPort, and giving me headaches if I want to reinstall Mac OS X Leopard... :mad:

So, IMHO the 4870 is the better bang for your buck overall, and in 2010 I will be buying a new Mac Pro anyway, so we'll see which 1 GB (or more) VRAM grfx card is best by then. ;)
 
Maury said:
That is why they buy them.

I challenge you to test this: what are the statistics on how many Mac owners even know what the name of their OS is?

Maury
Click to expand...

We say "Mac oh-es-ten."

My PC friends call it "Mac oh-es-ex."

'Nuff said. ;)
 
slackpacker said:
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.
Click to expand...

It's a hassle. And what happens if your hard drive dies and you have to reinstall or restore from backups. You'll need another card to do that because GTX 285 doesn't boot without drivers. Hassle. BTW, ATI isn't using the same old driver, it's the 4870 itself (it'll boot without a driver, VESA mode I believe).
 
The biggest news here is that we have a quality third-party vendor selling an upper mid-end GPU for the Mac Pro. That is very good news. The price markup issue is still there, and it remains to be seen how often EVGA will update its product "lineup" (if one card can be called a lineup). Hopefully we won't be stuck with the same card for one and a half to two years at a stretch as with ATI's retail offerings...

...but I don't want to sound pessimistic. Hopefully this is the beginning of a growing trend. As long as Apple's market share keeps increasing more vendors will show interest in this.
 
Lord Blackadder said:
The biggest news here is that we have a quality third-party vendor selling an upper mid-end GPU for the Mac Pro. That is very good news. The price markup issue is still there, and it remains to be seen how often EVGA will update its product "lineup" (if one card can be called a lineup). Hopefully we won't be stuck with the same card for one and a half to two years at a stretch as with ATI's retail offerings...

...but I don't want to sound pessimistic. Hopefully this is the beginning of a growing trend. As long as Apple's market share keeps increasing more vendors will show interest in this.
Click to expand...

EVGA has been "serving" the gaming community for a while now, going out of their way to design graphics with waterblocks, special PCBs to increase performance (or in the case of the GTX 295, put both cores on one PCB), and design solid motherboards. With only a couple of exceptions, they have had solid bios/driver support for both graphics and motherboards. If the mac community makes it worth their time, EVGA will go out of their way to bring the best support they can.
 
xVeinx said:
If the mac community makes it worth their time, EVGA will go out of their way to bring the best support they can.
Click to expand...

Yes, EVGA has a high reputation - hopefully both they and Apple will be able to work together to give us more powerful, regularly updated and reasonably priced video cards in the future. We all know how Apple likes to have strict control over the hardware that goes into its machines, but I think this is one area where Apple can benefit by relying on the third party manufacturers to produce the goods.

I probably would not hesitate to buy this card if I was in the market for a Mac Pro (and I hopefully will be in the next year). The price is still a little high and I've been more of an ATI user, but I want to support this move by EVGA.
 
Did you know that you could just move your GT120 to another slot and not use it. If you have to reinstall the software all you have to do is just move the monitor cable! :D
 
mbene12 said:
Lol, how are people getting their cards already? I ordered it the second I saw this article and they are projecting a June 26th ship date. Has it been on stealth sale for 2 weeks or more? I swear I checked about 10 days back.
Click to expand...

I ordered mine at about 1am on Friday and as of 930am today, its already loaded into the fedex truck near the destination.

I had a projected delivery date of July 1st, but I expect it'll be at the door on monday if its already listed as "out for delivery" on FedEx's site.
 
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