Macintosh GPU Performance

We all know the drill from the PC side of things - get an Nvidia card as its OpenGL driver allows vastly superior SL performance relative to comparable offerings from ATI. But Macs are different; the OS itself is OpenGL based and thus both manufacturers' offerings sport custom OS X drivers optimised for OpenGL performance.

So does Nvidia's de facto SL superiority hold true on the Macintosh platform?

More specifically, in my own instance, I'm running a G5 with its OEM GeForce FX 5200, arguably a GPU near-ready to be put to pasture against the modern field of accellerated games and higher resolutions. While there are a host of aftermarket ATI solutions on-tap, the only Nvidia cards historically available have been those produced directly by Apple, which in my case is all of two cards depending upon whether one counts minor variants. Considering that AGP Nvidia cards will likely soon disappear from the retail channel in the wake of Apple's move to PCI express, this holiday season may well be my last opportunity to pick up a 6800, the only faster Nvidia card ever produced for an AGP G5.

I know a lot of folks are running SL on powerbooks/ibooks/imacs/minis with integrated ATI video, and from what I read with little performance lost relative to my beleaguered GeForce 5200. If ATI cards can run Second Life reasonably close to comparable Nvidia performance under OS X, I'll have plenty of future opportunity to upgrade at my leisure, but if not I need to move fast while the 6800 Ultras are still out there.

What's the collective wisdom on ATI cards running the Macintosh SL client, presently and in the future?

Here are my comments from a similar thread...

"ATI vs. nVidia
Been running both nVidia and ATI cards for a long time. SL runs great on my big Mac Dual G5 with the ATI 9800 Pro Edition (256 VRAM). Also runs good on the Windows based laptop, with Pentium 4 (3.4Ghz) and the nVidia GForce FX card and 1Ghz RAM.

It is all about the overall configuration and combined resources of your system, up to and including the speed of your broadband connection.

More is always better when it comes to the resource hog, Second Life."

Also, the new ATI PCI Express cards for Mac appears to be a signfiicant advance. But, as always, you have to have the rest of the package to take full advantage of the new ATI cards... i.e., top of the line current Dual G5 desktop, or one of the just released monster Dual Quad Mac's.

I think you answered your own question

On OS X, ATI vs NV doesn't matter as far as SL is concerned.

SL really doesn't take advantage of anything outside the basic OpenGL spec so both manufacturers provide all the required functionality.

But do I think the choice of card would possibly be an issue if you were planning to play more graphically advanced games that benefit from some of the NV extensions for example.

...elror and lauk, thank you both so much for the quick response!..you've saved me from an impulse buy before today's sale ends of a two-slot-hogging five-hundred-horsepower-vacuum-cleaner nvidia card which i'd rather pass on in favor of something smaller, cooler, and most importantly *quieter* which i'm sure will be coming down the pipeline from ATI in the future...

...i've long suspected that the SL-nvidia mantra mightn't be applicable to the mac client, but it's nice to read other users' consensus on that assessment...