[geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>
>Date: 2008/05/21 Wed PM 01:14:55 EDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

>On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 11:50:41AM -0400, Shannon Hendrix 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.
>
>Am I weird

Yes. ;^)

>that the onboard GMA950 graphics in the Mini are fine for
>everything *I* do?  It's most all "2D" (web, terminal windows, and so
>forth) though.  Anything requiring hardcore 3D is games, and I have a
>Windows box for that.

The GMA950, GMA3000, and GMA3100 and more recent integrated video adapters are actually very good, a big step forward from earlier integrated graphics in most cases. As an aside, you can get pretty decent "scores" on those adapters under Windows Vista, but only after you load the proper drivers - without the drivers you get a "score" of 1.0, after you load the drivers it jumps to 3.5 or so (from memory)...

IMHO Intel took a lot of crap for a long time about their integrated video offerings, and they decided to seriously address that problem when the GMA950 was released.

Lionel