The amount of ram has absolutely no effect on gaming performance unless the game requires more than 512 MB's of ram. There are a few games available which do, none of them available for Mac OS X.
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 confirmed for June release
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The amount of ram has absolutely no effect on gaming performance unless the game requires more than 512 MB's of ram. There are a few games available which do, none of them available for Mac OS X.
Maybe so - I dunno as I do not play games - but having a lot of RAM is nice for us Cuda fans who want to program these cards. More memory would also widen scope of OpenCL as well.
Yeah, the 7600 GT... that's it. Pretty darn worthless, and it can't be done with the GT 120.
Will it be possible to run both the 4870 and this card at the same time in a MacPro? Or does only one or the other fit/work?
so is the GTX 285 primarily targeting people that are into gaming and heavy duty rendering? (ie, it's overkill for someone running aperture & FCE)
Yes. You will use all of your PCIe slots and an ODD bay. You cannot run Windows Vista, but XP and Seven will work.
Thank you
Why won't it run in Vista?
Vista can't mix manufacturers. XP and Seven do it fine, but Vista screams at you/might not boot.
I don't know if the 2D performance of 285 is much higher than 8800. We need to wait and see. But when it comes to Open CL, and it should speed up FCE, more processing cores means better performance. So 285 will speed up Open CL based tasks more than 8800.
I run X-Plane.
One person claims that X-Plane will use the video card's vram for anti-aliasing.
He says that at 16x anti-aliasing, his card uses as much as 940 MB of vram.
His card is a 9800 GTX+ with 1GB.
You might also need to fiddle with power. I have Apple 8800 and Palit 285 in an 08 Mac Pro right now. My 285 needs two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors and the 8800 just one. The 285 is being fed of the connectors on the motherboard and the 8800 has power routed from the optical drive bay via a 4-pin molex to PCI 6 pin adaptor. We can assume that the Mac 285 will also need two and hope that it will ship with the needed power cables. I think the 4870 needs 2 PCI power cables? - I am guessing at least one. If it all adds up to more than 3, or you do not want to get into rerouting power (or possibly splitting supplies??) you will probably need an external PSU, which is not actually a problem - I had one sitting on my case for a while before I read on this forums about grabbing the optical molex for juice. As for the Windows side it is easier even under XP to have all one mnfr - both my cards are driven by same NVIDIA drivers and work together as multi-GPU under CUDA.
Yes, ATi cards work on Mac Pros 1.1, despite apple indicating they need a Mac Pro with PCIe 2. However, are you sure that the Nvidia GT120 works on 2006 Mac Pros as well? I am pretty sure that the GT120 is EFI 64 only.
That is absolutely incorrect.
1. Almost any game released in the past 3 years can use more that 512mb of RAM.
2. The higher the resolution, the more RAM usage.
3. The more AA and AF, the higher the RAM usage.
I wouldn't even buy a 512mb card if I was intending to game. 18 months ago? Sure. But not now.
Please don't laugh but, how do you guys think a MacPro w/ GTX 285 and 4GB RAM would run WoW?
Highest settings without freezing or heat related issues would you venture to guess (not on boot-camp, on regular OSX which WoW supports and patches constantly).
Thanks in advance.
Highest settings without freezing or heat related issues would you venture to guess (not on boot-camp, on regular OSX which WoW supports and patches constantly).
Thanks in advance.
WoW on Mac Pro & 285
Well, a new MacBook can run WoW, but it certainly can't run it smoothly with all settings maxed. Dalaran is still a slideshow, as are 25 man raids once spell FX start going off. Expect to see your framerates drop to the teens in those situations.
Original Mac Pro (2.66 quad) with GeForce 8800 will dip into the low 30s under the same circumstances.
Get more RAM unless you're rebooting the machine just to play WoW.
Well, a new MacBook can run WoW, but it certainly can't run it smoothly with all settings maxed. Dalaran is still a slideshow, as are 25 man raids once spell FX start going off. Expect to see your framerates drop to the teens in those situations.
Original Mac Pro (2.66 quad) with GeForce 8800 will dip into the low 30s under the same circumstances.
Get more RAM unless you're rebooting the machine just to play WoW.
with a macbook you can't even run it with mid gfx settings unless you want to watch a slow sideshow
with my '09 octo w/ 4870, it only does < 60fps in northrend with maxed settings... so much for a five year old game
with my '09 octo w/ 4870, it only does < 60fps in northrend with maxed settings... so much for a five year old game
Try it under boot camp with the same settings if you can, I'd love to know how much it suffers just because it's under MacOS.
i did a rough check just now under xp, i think about the same, < 60fps in my favourite spot just outside dalaran... didn't do a more scientific test, too lazy to put in all my add-ons
but struck me though, with the same settings, it looked a lil more refined/gorgeous under xp... hmmm
Interesting. Granted, Blizzard is one of the few companies that actually puts decent effort into coding for the MacOS (so basically pretend I'm not including them in this generalization), but it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of games available for Mac and PC tend to run significantly better under Windows. I'm not qualified to say if this is due to better drivers, better OS support (e.g., DirectX), more experience with the OS, or any combination of these and/or others… but I sure hope it gets better. I'd love to see more top-tier Mac titles, but the current situation that ends in later release dates and higher prices for Mac titles with lesser performance… I just can't bring myself to support them just because they're coding for Mac.
Catch 22, I guess: "They" don't do better Mac versions because the sales numbers blow, but the sales numbers blow because the Mac versions of a lot of games suck.