EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition: The Best for OS X?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 17, 2009 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Gaming Under Windows
To Apple’s credit, the Radeon HD 4870 is a respectable GPU option on the Mac Pro. My only complaints there are with regards to price and memory size. Apple charges $200 for the upgrade as a BTO option while configuring your Mac Pro, but $349 if you want to buy it later. To make matters worse, the card only has 512MB of memory which is better than the 128MB cards that Apple used to ship but still too small for an OS that makes good use of video memory.
While there are a few respectable gaming titles on the Mac, most gamers will want to boot into Windows for all gaming. You could keep a second (PC) video card in your Mac Pro and just swap monitor outputs when you want to game or snag one of these EVGA GTX 285s. As a gaming card under Windows, it’ll be the fastest you can get through official channels.
I ran our standard Crysis Warhead tests on the Mac Pro to show how the GTX 285 and Radeon HD 4870 stack up:
The performance advantage ranges from 17% at 1680 x 1050 to 35% at 2560 x 1600.
I was curious to see how my 2.93GHz Mac Pro stacked up to our 3.2GHz Core i7 GPU testbed so I compared the results:
| Crysis Warhead | 1680 x 1050 | 1900 x 1200 | 2560 x 1600 |
| Apple Mac Pro 2009 - 2 x 2.93GHz Xeon X5570 | 37.8 fps | 32.9 fps | 22.2 fps |
| AnandTech GPU Testbed - 1 x Core i7 965 (3.20GHz) | 38.5 fps | 32.8 fps | 22.4 fps |
It looks like the numbers are pretty comparable, so if you’d like to see a more detailed performance comparison between the Radeon HD 4870 and the GTX 285 feel free to read through any of our recent GPU articles. The numbers should apply to the Mac Pro just fine.
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SiliconDoc - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Yeah... boy a GTX285 seems pretty weak.(good lord!)
psonice - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Well, a radeon 2600 is very weak compared to a gf8800. Yet it kills it in core image tasks (probably bad nvidia drivers, seeing as core image is based on GLSL, and the 8800 is way faster for that).My advice for people running CI heavy apps has been "avoid nvidia" for the last year or two, I'd like to know if that should change :)
Lanska - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
On MacOSX there isn't too enough games, but World of Warcraft from Blizzard is availaible. So you can test GTX 285 as a game accelerator card for Mac. I think many Mac gamers want to buy it as a game card, but not to display more windows in Photoshop or similar. After all you can even compare perfomance of World of Warcraft in Mac and in Windows on the same MacPro system (in Windows for more competition truth you can also use OpenGL mode instead of DirectX, as Mac version is OpenGL only).Game have testing command /timetest to benchmark system.
World of Warcraft client for both systems can be freely downloaded from Blizzard, trial accounts are also availaible. So you willn't pay any charge for testing, but this review will be more interesting, without games game card review not so nice :)
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - link
You think WoW needs a GTX anything?ipay - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
It always sends me into fits of laughter when Anand acts surprised at the absurd price premiums on Apple products - as if Apple's strategy from their inception has been anything else than putting shit in a box and selling it as gold to gullible idiots with lots of money.I also got some kicks from reading the description of how to install the video card (something that any self-respecting PC owner can do in their sleep), as well as the fact that the Mac motherboard uses an Intel chipset of some sort.
Keep the lulz coming Anand, I really appreciate it!
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - link
Laughter?More like his credibility.
Stuff like he still hasn't done any more research into why a MacBook "Pro" has better battery life under OSX than Windows, or why we should spend $2k more on a Mac Pro just to add a video card that can work with a $100 motherboard. I'm sure the average Mac user spends $2400 minimum on a machine for OSX, only to have to dual boot anyhow Windows to play Crysis, adding another $100 to the price, minimum.
"The other change is firmware. In order to get your PC video card to work under OS X it needs firmware with a few EFI hooks in it. It’s not a huge change, but for whatever reason the PC specific cards don’t have it."
Yeah, might have something to do with the fact that EFI sucks and PCs are better off without that crap. And even if EFI becomes standard in "PCs", Apple will just change the way OSX works to again kill it from working on any hardware.
rpmurray - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - link
I can't help rolling on the floor when some dipwad blames Apple for the high prices of third-party add-ons. Especially when that same company sells it cheaper for the PC, which just goes to show you who's gouging whom.afkrotch - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Actually, it all boils down to being Apple's fault. They make a platform that they locked down a ridiculous amount. They then charge a premium for the trash and this causes elitist bitches to buy it, while no one else cares.Because there is such a small platform of users, companies have to charge a markup for having to make a product for a minimal amount of users.
Personally, Nvidia and AMD should just let Apple rot. Let S3 make their graphics cards.
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - link
If you are used to buying Macs with pointless markups you are used to buying Mac accessories with pointless markups.Dainas - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Anything that says apple on it is soo overpriced that there are many many forums dedicated to finding or making pc stuff that doesn't say apple on it work. The evga gtx 285 mac might actually sell boxed as they are only slightly insulting.