Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Real benefit from HD 4870?

H

HHarm

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 4, 2009
138
2
What is it really? Games obviously and 3D apps but what else?

Seems like many people have the view that it'll benefit almost everything. Does it really? I have an old P4 PC with a 30 inch screen and a crappy GF 7600 GS. I've seen alot of slowness with the 6 year old workhorse but nothing that I could with certainty point out as being graphics card related. I'm looking for a Mac Pro for non professional Photoshop, Lightroom and HDV editing..... I guess they are the usual heavy 2D graphics apps that people use. Is there a real benefit from a 4870 compared to a GT 120?
 
the 4870 is a beast, not the fastest card in the world, but it slaughters the 120 hands down, but they will both work fine but if you plan on playing games and doing heavy 3d rendering your either looking at 4 120's or the 4870

thats my opinion tho
 
eelmac said:
the 4870 is a beast, not the fastest card in the world, but it slaughters the 120 hands down, but they will both work fine but if you plan on playing games and doing heavy 3d rendering you are looking for the 4870

thats my opinion tho
Click to expand...

Corrected that part for you :p

Really no benefit in having four Geforce 120 graphic cards in the Mac Pro, other than being able to drive more monitors.
 
Pressure said:
Corrected that part for you :p

Really no benefit in having four Geforce 120 graphic cards in the Mac Pro, other than being able to drive more monitors.
Click to expand...

Not so. Some applications use the GPUs much like OpenCL is planning on doing. Nvidia has been distributing code to developers to do just that - CES was showing off some developers running multiple GPUs to do video rendering that used to be handled by DSP cards.
 
Frozengeek said:
Not so. Some applications use the GPUs much like OpenCL is planning on doing. Nvidia has been distributing code to developers to do just that - CES was showing off some developers running multiple GPUs to do video rendering that used to be handled by DSP cards.
Click to expand...

No pun intended but that is for Windows until we get Snow Leopard.

OpenCL is, of course, going to change that. Still, the Radeon HD 4870 will be vastly faster than the Geforce 120, even if there were four of them.
 
I've never experienced Quad SLI but normal SLI is not worth it from my point of few, costs a lot for a tiny performance increase, which is lost as soon as you add more monitors, so the 4870 sounds like a smarter choice than the 120, unless you don't have the money for it
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back