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how much better than the 4870 is this card?

is it likely to be about the same price? should i regret my 4870 purchase?
 
No Mac Pro supports SLI.

Doing some reading in other threads, some have had sucess running sli on the 2008 mac pro. the 5400 chipset supports sli. though no concrete evidence.

still keen to know a definite answer.

edit: as noted before it will not work as nforce chips are required which the mac pro logic board does not have. the 5400 chipset itself does NOT support SLI.
 
Being a fan boy of the 24" LED ACD (with the @#$% mini-display port), this is not an option for me... although it's great to see more choice!

Here's some benchmarks showing how it compares in common Windows games with the 4870 (albeit a 1GB version but still a good reference)...

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Full Review: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_4890_nvidia_geforce_gtx_275/
 
Here's some benchmarks showing how it compares in common Windows games with the 4870 (albeit a 1GB version but still a good reference)...

The problem with the big name PC games is they are almost all either DX9 or DX10.
If they were to use an OpenGL game like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, 2560 x 1600, 4x AA, 16x AF, for their benchmarks, the results would go pretty much like this:

1. NV GTX 295 - 97 fps
2. ATI 4870 x2 - 92 fps
3. ATI 4850 x2 - 77 fps
4. NV GTX 285 - 71 fps
5. NV GTX 280 - 66 fps
6. NV GTX 275 - 64 fps
7. NV 9800 GX2 - 62 fps
8. (tie) ATI HD 4890 - 60 fps
8. (tie) NV GTX 260 C216 - 60 fps
10. ATI HD 4870 1GB - 56 fps
11. ATI HD 4870 - 53 fps

But it is all pretty much a moot point since NVIDIA can't seem to provide Apple with good drivers.
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Weren't they right? EFI32, and all?

From Barefeats:

"Apple is officially supporting only 2009 and 2008 Mac Pros with the Radeon HD 4870 kit. And it requires either the build of OS X 10.5.6 with the February 2009 ATI drivers -- or OS X 10.5.7 (not yet golden).

As with the Radeon HD 3870 and HD 2600, ATI included both a 32-bit and 64-bit EFI driver in the ROM, so it should work in all models of Mac Pro with the latest drivers. We installed in the Clovertown first generation 8-core Mac Pro (as you can see from the graphs above) and a close colleague installed it in a 2.66GHz Woodcrest 4-core first generation Mac Pro. As long as you have two power feeds for the card in your first generation Mac Pro and have the correct drivers properly installed, it should work fine."
 
better late than never, right?

I guess. I hope Apple has plans to start supporting GPUs quicker than they have in the past. There's a lot of interest in offloading things like rendering, decoding and encoding to GPUs. If that ends up happening in a significant way, I'm sure a lot of people with Apple machines will be a little pissed to see their Windows brethren doing the same tasks several times faster with their fancy new GPUs and all.

I mean, it's nice that a GT200 chip is headed to Macs, until you realize that the GT300 chips are right around the corner.
 
I was going to get upgrade my 8800GT to the ATi 4870 but i'm glad that I hold off, i'm definitely getting this for my 2008 Mac Pro can't wait until June
 
drivers?

will nvidia supply drivers for this card or will that have to come from apple? are we going to wait through the same delays as we did for the 4870 drivers to be released before the GTX is fully functional on the Mac Pro?
 
If there's that kind of offering for the Mac Pro in 3 years, I can totally say that this is confirmed, I'm getting an Mac Pro :D
 
I guess. I hope Apple has plans to start supporting GPUs quicker than they have in the past.

How is this up to Apple? I don't understand. Can't the graphics card companies supply Mac users with any card and supporting drivers they want whenever they want? They don't need Apple's blessing, do they?

I'm assuming the reason for the traditionally poor selection has been the market size is just not attractive enough to warrant much investment. Until the Mac Pro market increases, I can't really see how anything will change dramatically (eg. more choice in graphics cards) although I'd say it already seems to have improved significantly from where things were previously.
 
The problem with the big name PC games is they are almost all either DX9 or DX10.
If they were to use an OpenGL game like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, 2560 x 1600, 4x AA, 16x AF, for their benchmarks, the results would go pretty much like this:

1. NV GTX 295 - 97 fps
2. ATI 4870 x2 - 92 fps
3. ATI 4850 x2 - 77 fps
4. NV GTX 285 - 71 fps
5. NV GTX 280 - 66 fps
6. NV GTX 275 - 64 fps
7. NV 9800 GX2 - 62 fps
8. (tie) ATI HD 4890 - 60 fps
8. (tie) NV GTX 260 C216 - 60 fps
10. ATI HD 4870 1GB - 56 fps
11. ATI HD 4870 - 53 fps

But it is all pretty much a moot point since NVIDIA can't seem to provide Apple with good drivers.
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Well so far drivers for 8800GT turned out to be the best drivers available. 4870 drivers are very poor right now, 4870 doesn't even play all games faster than 8800gt and 2D acceleration is better with 8800gt.
 
And I just installed a GTX 275!

Oh well, my performance is only slightly down on the GTX 280, but I do have to swap monitors and power cables around.
 
:D:D:D Fab news. At least I know not to waste any more time trying to hack my system with nvthis, nvthat, flashing roms and editing EFI strings to try to get my Palit PC 285 up under OS X 10.x.y I have seen about 300 kernel panics in the last week....

EVGA are doing 2G PC versions now - hope we get that option as well.
 
GDDR3 vs GDDR5

The GTX 285 has 1GB of GDDR3 and the Radeon 4870 has 512MB of GDDR5. How much of a difference does the type of RAM make in performance? A naive point of view would think that GDDR5 is better since it's newer.
 
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