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Gaming in an upgraded Mac Pro 1.1 - Is the CPU my bottleneck?
- Thread starter Guigue
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you should feed my thread with bench to find the best gaming card for 1,1 !https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1685478/
Mavericks.
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Thats a good thread. I will add some data when I get my imac back. I exchanged for the 780m version.
SOLVED: Works fine on Windows 7
So I think I finally got the answer to my question today.
I managed to install Windows 7 on my Mac Pro 1.1 (not easy...), and thanks to the greatness of Steam, I was able to install the game and even load my save file.
Turn out the game plays great at full resolution/settings (PhysX at low though) on the Windows side. It starts to have a hard time when I set PhyX at High, but it's still better than on the mac side.
I do not know what is the problem on Os X though... It could be that the game doesn't make a good use of the processors and it is indeed the bottleneck. Or it could just be bad graphic drivers from Apple. One thing's for sure, it's software related because now I know that the hardware is most definitely capable of playing games on high settings.
So Windows it is for gaming then!
So I think I finally got the answer to my question today.
I managed to install Windows 7 on my Mac Pro 1.1 (not easy...), and thanks to the greatness of Steam, I was able to install the game and even load my save file.
Turn out the game plays great at full resolution/settings (PhysX at low though) on the Windows side. It starts to have a hard time when I set PhyX at High, but it's still better than on the mac side.
I do not know what is the problem on Os X though... It could be that the game doesn't make a good use of the processors and it is indeed the bottleneck. Or it could just be bad graphic drivers from Apple. One thing's for sure, it's software related because now I know that the hardware is most definitely capable of playing games on high settings.
So Windows it is for gaming then!
As someone who has a 2008 Mac Pro (8 cores total at 2.66ghz), there definitely is a bottleneck from the CPUs. I had a GTX 660 giving me around 40-50FPS in Battlefield 4 at 1920x1200 resolution, high settings and 2X MSAA, often times dipping below 30fps. I thought upgrading it to a GTX 960 would improve things dramatically and I still had lousy frame rates. I got fed up with Apple's walled garden crap and went out and built a PC rig and turned it into hackintosh. Using a 4790K processor, I'm able to set my game to max settings (still 2XMSAA) and hover between 70-90FPS, rarely going below 60FPS. Bootcamp or not on the Mac Pro, it's performance is definitely gimped.
I totally agree with this. There's no point trying to figure out the bottleneck on a mac game, most of the time the cause is a badly optimized port and the use of an OS that's not suited for gaming. Performance analysis under Windows allows to determine a hardware bottleneck with properly optimized code.
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I just tried moving my current main GPU – a GTX 970 – that I'm having in a MacPro5,1 into one of those MacPro1,1 (2.66 GHz version running Windows 10) and I'm surprised that this twelve year old computer seems to benefit quite a lot from such a powerful GPU (I had tested the Radeon HD 5970 in it before) – the old CPUs seems to chug a long quite nicely, at least when it comes to gaming.
I tried Overwatch at 1920 x 1200 pixels and was able to run close to the highest setting (Epic, but some settings required a game restart to be enabled, which I didn't do) and it never seemed to get under 80 frames per second. This was on the Practice Range so I in a real game with a lot of action the frame rate would probably go down, but still. Also Starcraft 2 seems to run a lot better than with the Radeon HD 5870 and Fortnite was also better than I thought. I also hear Fortnite currently uses only two processor cores, so there's room for improvement there too.
TL;DR: There seems to be a lot to gain when it comes to gaming, getting a more powerful graphics card for the old MacPro1,1 – even if the processors are slow by today's standard.
I tried Overwatch at 1920 x 1200 pixels and was able to run close to the highest setting (Epic, but some settings required a game restart to be enabled, which I didn't do) and it never seemed to get under 80 frames per second. This was on the Practice Range so I in a real game with a lot of action the frame rate would probably go down, but still. Also Starcraft 2 seems to run a lot better than with the Radeon HD 5870 and Fortnite was also better than I thought. I also hear Fortnite currently uses only two processor cores, so there's room for improvement there too.
TL;DR: There seems to be a lot to gain when it comes to gaming, getting a more powerful graphics card for the old MacPro1,1 – even if the processors are slow by today's standard.