Have a Mid 2010 with a GTX 670 2gb running 3x 27" 2560x1440 displays + Oculus Rift. I really like the Mac support Nvidia has had with their web drivers, and have historically not had the best experiences with ATI based cards (mostly in PCs, but it's built up a personal preference).
With the new GTX 960 which just sips power (single 6 pin) and retailing for ~$200 its making me think about an upgrade
I do design and development work mostly on the mac side but compatibility testing and gaming mostly through bootcamp so performance is a factor on both sides.
Q1. It would appear that (please correct me if this is missinformation) with a non-EFI card bootcamp will only run the PCI bus at 1x instead of the 2x that the mac side will see (thanks to the drivers I believe?). Does this have any real world impact that really matters? i.e. is going beyond some card will just net you a faster GPU but it will be so throttled by bus bandwidth that it's just not worth the extra money? Does this have any positive connotations, such as since the 960 is 128bit instead of 256bit memory the bus throttling essentially has no effect?
Q2. What's your opinion on the current best bang/buck card for a MP?
Q3. Is over 2gb of VRAM worth while yet? Back when I got the 670 anything more than 2gb (outside of special use cases) was really the peak of what made sense. I've seen a few upcoming games listing >2gb VRAM as optimal but it seems VERY few and far between, and again, with the 1x bus speed issue in bootcamp, does that factor in (maybe you can store more in VRAM and therefore need to transfer less to the card so more VRAM makes the bus issue less prevelant?)
With the new GTX 960 which just sips power (single 6 pin) and retailing for ~$200 its making me think about an upgrade
I do design and development work mostly on the mac side but compatibility testing and gaming mostly through bootcamp so performance is a factor on both sides.
Q1. It would appear that (please correct me if this is missinformation) with a non-EFI card bootcamp will only run the PCI bus at 1x instead of the 2x that the mac side will see (thanks to the drivers I believe?). Does this have any real world impact that really matters? i.e. is going beyond some card will just net you a faster GPU but it will be so throttled by bus bandwidth that it's just not worth the extra money? Does this have any positive connotations, such as since the 960 is 128bit instead of 256bit memory the bus throttling essentially has no effect?
Q2. What's your opinion on the current best bang/buck card for a MP?
Q3. Is over 2gb of VRAM worth while yet? Back when I got the 670 anything more than 2gb (outside of special use cases) was really the peak of what made sense. I've seen a few upcoming games listing >2gb VRAM as optimal but it seems VERY few and far between, and again, with the 1x bus speed issue in bootcamp, does that factor in (maybe you can store more in VRAM and therefore need to transfer less to the card so more VRAM makes the bus issue less prevelant?)