EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition: The Best for OS X?

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:

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.