Video card options for Mac Pro workstations

Hi all

I've been having a bit of drama with my Mac. Just over two weeks ago, my old dual 2.5Ghz G5 Power Mac starting acting strange and went away under warranty. It has since been diagnosed with a faulty overheating processor - said item is now unavailable and I will be getting a new dual 2.66Ghz Intel dual core Mac Pro as a replacement, which certainly makes me a happy bunny (Dual booting here I come !)

However, my old Mac was configured with the at-the-time-top-spec Nvidia 6800 Ultra graphics card which I later replaced with an equivalent ATI X800 XT, both of these being 256Mb cards and as good as it gets for the AGP G5 Power Macs.

Now, to get finally towards the point, Apple are trying to fob me off with a basic spec (albeit PCI-Express) Nvidia 7300GT 256Mb graphics card. All the reviews and technical comparisons I have seen show this card as being considerably inferior to the 6800 Ultra/X800 XT cards I originally had...so I'm gunning doggedly for the ATI X1900 XT 512Mb which better seems to fit the supposed policy of being "closest while at least as good as" the original system, when looking at bandwidth, fill rate, vertices/sec, benchmark FPS etc all that good stuff !

Sooooooo...do any Mac Pro owners out there in SL have experience of the 7300GT or X1900XT, particularly game-wise in Second Life and WoW ? I'm hoping for the X1900 XT and am trying hard to convince the people I'm talking to at Apple that it is more appropriate, but if I do get lumbered with the old Nvidia 7300GT, is it a lemon or still halfway decent ?

Any comments, suggestions, benchmark numbers or anecdotal experiences gladly welcomed

I'm a graphic designer and got into SL to do textures for a client. I got a Mac Pro 8-core 3.0 GHz with 8 GB RAM and the Radeon X1900 512 MB. I run SL at 2650x1600 on a 30" Cinema Display. So I got a lot of pixels on screen. =^.^=

First, SL only uses the first 2 GB RAM it can get its hands on...it reports 2 GB in About Second Life and doesn't seem to grab any more. Also, SL isn't multicore aware, so it can't use 100% of all 8 cores...it only uses about 12.5% across all 8 cores totalling 100% CPU out of a possible 800% CPU (if that makes sense).

Now for the experience...again 2650x1600 Fullscreen at 8:5 with draw distance 64, all quality sliders at 100%, OpenGL on, Anisotropic off, land quality high, local lights on, and all the nifty goodies on like ripple water turned on I *usually* get around 20 FPS wandering around populated sims. On my home residential sim I can keep those settings and bump the draw up to 512 and get 35 FPS with everything maxed.

But go to a busy place like Bare Rose or Midian City or even Samurai Edo when there's 15 people sparring in small groups and FPS tumbles down to 5 FPS with the above maxed quality settings at 64 draw distance.

For CI combat I turn quality sliders to zero, turn off local lights, and low ground quality with a draw distance of 64 and I get anywhere from 45 FPS to 90 FPS during combat. Sure it doesn't look quite as pretty but I'm damn fast. LOL A happy medium on the quality sliders renders 30 or so FPS but I take speed over pretty any day. ^^

So I know my monster is way bigger than what's on yer plate but just keep that in mind...the X1900 is outstanding for Photoshop and Lightroom, and I have Mail, Safari, Firefox, Lightroom, and Photoshop open at the same time while I'm running SL with no slowdown, but I would have expected my machine to run SL *much* faster.

I'm not disappointed at all...it's just disheartening when an $8000 imaging powerhouse chokes when more than 20 avies are standing around and you gotta turn down the quality sliders. ^^

The X1900XT on the Mac Pro makes for a great Second Life machine. I'm happy with mine, but there are some caveats:

- Areas with a lot of avatars WILL slow down your FPS just as they will on any other machine. There is no way around this. SL becomes CPU bound when there are a lot of avatars, and since there's only one thread doing the rendering, it will only utilize one of the available cores.

- Vertex Buffer Objects: This can increase your FPS when you're in an area and your camera position isn't moving, but it can make moving your camera very chunky. I find having VBO off makes exploration much smoother, and having it on makes it faster when just hanging out with an unmoving camera in an area with lots of avatars. I wish they'd fix this.

- You won't get better performance than a dedicated gaming PC. I hate saying this, but it's true. The Mac Pro's strength comes in parallelism. You can be building a project an Xcode, using Photoshop, have SL running and a video encoding in Quicktime and the machine will get mind blowing throughput. But when it comes to individual games like SL, it compares only a bit favorably to high end wintel gaming rigs.

So, go for it. It's a great machine. But don't expect miracles.

Oh, and the 7300GT is junk. Avoid it at all costs if you want to run Second Life.

fight them, go over their heads... tell them if they have to replace your whole machine it must be equal or better, not worse.

a Geforce 7300 GT is not as good of a card as your two previous cards you've had. Don't let them do that to you... whoever is doing this and making the decision probably has no idea that your old cards were better, too many people (even Apple Techs) seem to think newer means better. They think they are doing you a favor by giving you a newer intel mac so they can skimp on some other parts... they cannot do that. It is not your fault they dont have a G5 replacement available, they must live up to their warranty. Ask them if they are gonna skimp that bad and try to pass off inferior things to you, why arent they just starting lower and trying to give you a Mac mini...

they must give you one better or equal to what they were covering under warranty, which i'm guessing is the geforce 6800. A geforce 7300 might be a bigger number, but it is NOT a better card, it is an entry level $50ish card. The Radeon X1900XT is a better card than the 6800 was, but its the only other option they have, as the 7300 is much MUCH less performance than a 6800 was.

I'm in the same boat as Dee. My Powermac G5 was finally declared unrepairable after nearly 6 weeks (!!) in the shop waiting for parts and Apple is sending me a 2.66 Ghz Mac Pro.

However I bought my G5 with the stock graphics card at the time (ATI, I think), so I have no hope of getting an upgraded video card in the bargain. In fact it took me a half hour of arguing to get them to agree to put airport/bluetooth in the new computer...something I *had* in my G5 .

So, my question is, how will this Mac handle SL with the Nvidia 7300 card? Given the problems I've been hearing about Macbook Pros with the Nvidia card, I'm a little worried. Should I save up to buy an ATI card? Thanks!