[geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

[Shannon Hendrix]

On May 21, 2008, at 03:07 , Mark wrote:

> To be utterly honest I found the GeForce 7300 GT to be fairly  
> adequate for most stuff in OS X,

It was OK except for a few things.  I found it got bogged down with a  
lot of windows and a lot of system load, while the 8800 doesn't even  
notice.

It's a very quiet card obviously, and probably cheap for an OEM to buy  
and integrate.

The reason I started wanting something else was a combination of minor  
quirks, and some show stoppers:

Spaces, Expose, and other desktop features would get choppy on the  
7300 when the load went up.  Granted, I do embedded development and  
other heavy work on a Mac Pro, so I probably have more stuff open at  
the same time than some.

Some apps that used the GPU were sluggish, like Pixelmator.

Heavy apps seemed sluggish.  I wasn't actually sure the GPU would make  
a difference since most do not directly use the GPU, but as it turns  
out even some mundane improvements are apparent.

After getting the 8800, I've noticed that some apps load faster, there  
is nowhere near the sluggishness with tons of windows open, and even  
my terminal program runs faster.

I would not get one for standard business uses, but if you really run  
a lot of apps at once (everything on a Mac is a 2D plane in a 3D  
world), or you use GPU heavy apps, it's definitely a good upgrade.

I don't play games on my Mac, but it's nice to know I could get  
something now if I wanted.

That's what my FrankenWintendo is for... :)

It also has an 8800GT, a superclocked one from eVGA.

> and it did better than I expected for Windows games (because if the  
> 512MB of VRAM).

The 7300 is only 256MB.  I am pretty sure that a large Mac display  
needs more memory than that if you have a lot of apps open.  The last  
time I read much about it, Quartz eats almost 128MB just showing a  
basic 1280x1024 desktop.

Modern Xorg with OpenGL also eats a ton of memory just for a basic  
setup, so that's not surprising.

PCI Express has helped a lot when the cards run out of memory because  
it is so fast, but even full speed PCI Express is only 4GByte/sec,  
while internally the GPU runs at tens of gigabytes/sec.

> although 2 times I have had the machine lock up coming out of sleep,  
> and also the fan spins flat-out on the card when it turns on/comes  
> out of sleep until the video signal kicks in, which annoys me a bit  
> but only slightly.

Are you running Leopard?  If so, the lockups are not the GPU, but bugs  
in Leopard they still have not fixed.  I read a long thread about it  
and the GPU can aggravate the problem, but is only a part of it.

The new Leopard release is listing stability fixes among the other  
200+ changes.

> Overall, having seen what games look like on the 8800 GT, it was a  
> worthy investment. I definitely noticed more general graphical speed  
> in OS X, and if that's not optimised, I can't wait for the  
> performance when it is :).

Do you mean the nVidia driver code is not yet optimized?

Does anyone know how often Apple gets new universal driver code from  
nVidia?

Is there an easy way to tell which driver version you have?

Even in the last month, there have been critical bug fixes for the  
8800 GPUs.

I don't really want to run the experimental dodge-ball drivers the  
Windows geeks play with, but getting the latest bug fixes for MacOS  
would be nice.

Aside:

Apple said that the reason they could not ship the first 8800GT card  
to 1st generation Mac Pro owners was because the PCI Express bus was  
different on the new Mac Pro machines.

That's not even remotely true.  A PCI Express 2.0 card works perfectly  
in a 1.5 slot, and no currently shipping card can max out PCI Express  
1.5 speeds anyway, not even the 9 series from nVidia.

Even the EFI 32/64 bit issue is easy to handle with a single ROM.

I'm sure they had a valid reason, but it's obvious their stated reason  
is not it.

Just something to ponder.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com