[geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

[Mark]

On 21 May 2008, at 16:50, 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.
>
> It's a very quiet card obviously, and probably cheap for an OEM to  
> buy and integrate.

Once the GeForce 8800 GT settles down it's inaudible above the  
resonance from the 4 hard drives in my 'Pro.

As an interesting aside, when I boot Vista, which is all installed on  
one 80GB drive (which would you believe was a quarter full after  
installing just the OS, that's bloated, man!), the other 3 (which have  
no readable Windows partitions) are shut off by the OS's power  
savings. The silence is blissful. It's about the only good thing  
Vista's done for me so far ;).

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

Yup, Core Image is erkingly slow on a GeForce 7300 GT. It was my 'Mac- 
side' excuse for getting the card, it's made Aperture 2.0 really jump  
up and beg like it never used to.

> 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.

The more advance shader model (which is used to do a lot of the  
shadows and transparency) and better OpenGL performance, and greater  
VRAM means more stuff is loaded to the GPU. Stuff loaded to the GPU  
isn't clogging the main bus. Stuff that has no GPU usage thus goes a  
little bit faster.

That's the thing I love about Aqua/Quartz/Core Graphics, there is a  
rational and tangible benefit to having the better graphics card from  
the ground up. It's not just eye-candy, it genuinely does speed up the  
entire computer because of the load sharing.

> 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... :)

My Windies box just reached that critical tipping point where it's not  
worth upgrading it. It need rebuilding, it's hung around a AGP S775  
board (Core 2 Duo or P4/Celery) with DDR RAM and only 2 SATA ports. It  
needs a refit with a lot of kit that'd cost me the kings mint. It  
seems stupid to do that when I only play games occasionally, one of my  
regular haunts (EVE Online) runs fine in OS X now, and I have a  
thrumming 4-core PCI-e/Xeon/DDR2 based machine sat here.

I don't do 'work' on my Pro so it's really not an issue rebooting into  
Vista for a little light entertainment (and after I've stopped  
laughing at the OS, I also lay a game or two :P) :)

> 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.

Are you talking about 10.5.2 (out) or 10.5.3 (seeding to developers)?  
I'm running 10.5.2, and all updates are installed (I just checked 10  
mins ago). I have to say since I did a big update splurge at the  
weekend I haven't (knock on wood) had the issue crop up again.

I figured it was a bug in the OS, not the card. I had a different but  
similar issue with 10.5.0-1 on my G4 iMac.

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

I was offering conjecture, but if they are a bit behind with the  
NVIDIA code base I look forward to any improvements. I know NVIDIA  
have just pushed the Windows release driver up to 172.x. It's been  
rolled into the 2.1 Bootcamp driver package (which wasn't out when I  
first got my 8800GT so I had to use a beta - yuch).

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

Probably at every major revision, I'd be unsurprised if 10.5.3 has  
some improvements in for NVIDIA graphics, as I suspect the 172.x code  
will be rolled in with that.

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

Not directly, I suspect.

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

The 10.5.2 update had some, and also the Leopard Graphics Update had a  
load in (obviously) as well as the initial drivers for the GeForce  
8800GT chipset.

> 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.

Yeh, the valid reason was money ;)

Actually, I suspect that NVIDIA only coded the ROM for EFI64 bit and  
had to code a 32 version for the earlier machines then exhaustively  
test it and certify it with Apple, then get Apple had to get the  
hardware built and shipped. All that takes time, and they obviously  
didn't anticipate the backlash from users. So only set the ball  
rolling in the days after the Mac Pro 2.0 shipped.

I can't see why they didn't see it coming, surely they know by now the  
loud minority of their users are all zealoted, angry dunderheads! ;)

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."