so which is the best mac pro card/s for gaming

Well the GeForce series or the Radeon series would be the best for gaming. The Quadros are built for work stations and work horse type machines, and ATIs its like called fireGL or something for their work station card.

The Geforce 8800 GTS I think is the best current card on the market for gaming. I haven't looked at the mac pro install options yet.

I agree, i heard someone on a podcast who had some nvidea 7800 who upgraded to the 8800 for bioshock who said "it was night and day difference"

The 8800 would go in the mac pro, but would it fit? and does it have enough power connectors. Actually since the Mac pro has 4 slots, maybe 2 8800's could fit in with sli?

SLI is a technology that requires a motherboard that supports it, I do not think apple supports SLI. Plus SLI is not really that great of a technology it is marketed as a huge boosts but real world would be minimal, I mean who can tell the difference between 90fps and 115fps ? No one could tell the difference between the two. I see multi-core GPU video cards being the next wave of the future, SLI is a marketing ploy to get you to buy two video cards. Parallel processing has its own caveats and that is what SLI is in a nutshell. It is two video cards set in parallel processing mode.

Really a single 8800 GTS will perform along the same lines of two of them in SLI mode. ATI has their own version of SLI caleld xfire (cross fire).

It looks like the best video card for the Mac Pro at the moment would be the ATI x1900, which is a DX9 card.

Yeah, the Mac Pro is, for some reason, lacking on the graphics end (as far as games go). The MBP has the better card, though as was pointed out, It still needs some work.

I'm still not a fan of being able to exchange in and out a bunch of cards, it just sounds like a developers nightmare. But...I'm going to have to agree that Apple needs to find a better solution for hardware when it comes to games. Maybe they should just be going with whatever is top of the line every 3 to 6 months or so? Again, not completely cutting edge, but it should still be manageable.

But honestly, I don't know what I'm talking about. I really want to ask an Apple engineer how hard it would be to just add a new graphics card to the list of supported hardware every 3 months or so.

what about external graphics cards, do they support macs, do they actually work well? and are they really expenisve

I don't think they make external video cards, and I am pretty sure you would have tons of bottle neck issues if they did.

Here's an article to get all of you thinking again. It's Gabe from Valve talking about the frustrations of working with Apple. For those who don't know, Valve makes Half-Life 2, and is pretty much the biggest name in the PC industry. So, what Gabe has to say matters...

Start at the second paragraph.

Yup that sounds actually just like Apple, remember they are making products that they think you should use and you should use them how they design them. One downfall of Apple. Where as Microsoft actually takes user feed back and adds in features. That is where fast user switching came from, users requested it so MS gave it to them.


I think it is obvious that the Mac users want games, and it is something that is holding them back in the consumer market. Video games make lots of money, and HL2 and valve are very big contendors.

lets see what core animation does, for games like gears and UT 3, and if ea fix their crappy emulator, im sure valve will follow because HL is the halo for pc if you see what i mean.

Speaking of Halo, did anyone else here hear that Bungie left Microsoft today? They originally started as a Mac only game company, do you think they'll come back?

Also @ kel101-- It's interesting, but the recently announced Tek 5 from iD (the other big player in the gaming industry it seems) apparently should actually have an effect. Apparently the IDE is designed so all you have to do is hit a button and it will compile to Mac (or PC, PS3, Wii and Xbox). I wonder if Tek 5 relies on Core Animation...there's a question I'd like an answer to.

yeah i think them leaving microsoft is great news, but in the statment on cnet, they say there going to make more halo games, i thought they just made a huge point saying that the story was done? And hopefully, Halo 3 will be released at the same time for macs and pc.... but this also begs the question, with all these games coming to 10.5, when are apple going to upgrade all the grapics cards in macs

Halo.
Needs.
To die.

Halo 1 was an awesome game for the time. Now it's just an overhyped piece of trash, IMO.

*Giggle*

Yeah, Halo needs to die pretty much. I'm told though that the new Halo game is an RTS. Honestly, I think that's why they broke off with Microsoft, because now they can release the game for PC (or maybe even Mac) first. And thats traditionally where RTS's sell really well.

As for the Halo storyline being over...if any of you have seen the ending of Halo 3...well, I won't spoil it. But let's just say I have a hard time believing that it's actually over.

@kel101 - As for the Graphics card question, I think we just had this discussion. I will have to agree though that they need to put real gaming cards in their computers. They seem to be headed in that general correction with the 8600 in the 15"MBP, but we'll see.

I YouTube'd it and I'll agree fully. Microsoft will find a way to beat Halo 4 out of Bungie or another dev.

Halo Wars I predict will not wow anyone except for the diehard Halo fan. Starcraft 2 will kick Halo Wars back and forth, methinks.

Also, for another take on the Halo junk, try this: http://jorm.livejournal.com/31252.html Warning, it has some bad language in it, but it sums up what I feel about Halo 3.

This just keeps getting more and more interesting...

Royalties for HL 2.

Apparently big titles don't like the idea of having to be patient for the revenue, eh?