Mac Pro Playing games with Bootcamp vs High End PC

[Chone]

People are making it sound like the Mac Pro is a mediocre gaming machine. That is complete crap. My Mac Pro 2.66 with an X1900 XT runs BF2, Far Cry, FEAR, all those intense games absolutely spectacularly.

When people criticize the Mac Pro as a gaming machine, it's not because it's somehow bad at it, but because you could get the same kind of performance for much less with a non-workstation gaming PC.

Also, people exaggerate the performance drop between the Xeon using FB-DIMM and the Core 2 Duo using normal DDR2 RAM. It's not like comparing an Apple II to a Cray at all.

Here's why: games these days are very much GPU-bound, meaning that there is increasing stress on the GPU and relatively less on the GPU. What this means is that any disadvantage the CPU and RAM may have to the non-Xeon counterparts is anulled by the fact that most new games coming out are bottlenecked by the GPU.

The bottom line is that all current games, such as Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2, run amazingly on the Mac Pro. Don't let anybody confuse you on this point. It really comes down to how much money you want to waste on power that won't be reflected in games as much as in professional creative/scientific work.

I never said and I don't think anyone did say that Mac Pro was a mediocre gaming machine... its just that for the money from a solely gaming perspective its too pricey, thats all.

Xeon is just a Conroe, in fact its better as it has a 1333mhz FSB and multi processor support so with 4 cores so no worries about the processor. As far as videocards go... you can use anything with Mac Pro, you can only not use SLI/Crossfire but thats hardly a disadvantage, there ARE single card multi GPU solutions and in any case, a single top of the line card will play any game at 2560x1600.

Then come FB-DIMMs, an obvious disadvantage is price, costing almost double of what regular DDR2 costs, Anand benchmarks shows up to a 30fps penalty... sounds bad but its necessary to consider the fact that it went 30 fps down from an already staggering 130fps AND they were running at 1024x768, resolutions that are CPU/RAM bound, at higher resolutions and settings that difference should close considerably. In any case, I don't think anybody is going to whine for losing a few FPS off such high performance.

So yes indeed, Mac Pro is a great gaming machine and an awesome deal for what you get but from a STRICTLY gaming perspective point of view... there are far better deals.

 

[waremaster]

I never said and I don't think anyone did say that Mac Pro was a mediocre gaming machine... its just that for the money from a solely gaming perspective its too pricey, thats all.

Xeon is just a Conroe, in fact its better as it has a 1333mhz FSB and multi processor support so with 4 cores so no worries about the processor. As far as videocards go... you can use anything with Mac Pro, you can only not use SLI/Crossfire but thats hardly a disadvantage, there ARE single card multi GPU solutions and in any case, a single top of the line card will play any game at 2560x1600.

Then come FB-DIMMs, an obvious disadvantage is price, costing almost double of what regular DDR2 costs, Anand benchmarks shows up to a 30fps penalty... sounds bad but its necessary to consider the fact that it went 30 fps down from an already staggering 130fps AND they were running at 1024x768, resolutions that are CPU/RAM bound, at higher resolutions and settings that difference should close considerably. In any case, I don't think anybody is going to whine for losing a few FPS off such high performance.

So yes indeed, Mac Pro is a great gaming machine and an awesome deal for what you get but from a STRICTLY gaming perspective point of view... there are far better deals.

Now this statement I completely agree with.

 

[paulinbognor]

I'm not a gamer and actually not yet a Mac owner (Making the switch in the next week or so)

I very rarely play games but every so often one comes out that grabs my interest. If I'm running a 3GHz Mac Pro with the ATIX1900 card and a 30" ACD display will 'most' new games run of at the default resolution of the 30" or will the resolution need to be dropped down in order for the games to run well?

Sorry for the newbie question

 

[MRU]

I'm not a gamer and actually not yet a Mac owner (Making the switch in the next week or so)

I very rarely play games but every so often one comes out that grabs my interest. If I'm running a 3GHz Mac Pro with the ATIX1900 card and a 30" ACD display will 'most' new games run of at the default resolution of the 30" or will the resolution need to be dropped down in order for the games to run well?

Sorry for the newbie question

If the game supports the high res of the 30" screen you should be alright.
You dont need Anti Aliasing at that high resolution so you can take that off to boost peformance.

 

[paulinbognor]

Thanks for the reply

Three follow up questions:

1) Do most games support such a huge resolution Halo/Doom etc?
2) How would a game perform at a lower resolution such as 1920 by 1200?
3) How would the game look on the 30" at the lower resolution, would it be blurry because the screen would not be at its native resolution?

many thanks

 

[Chone]

Thanks for the reply

Three follow up questions:

1) Do most games support such a huge resolution Halo/Doom etc?
2) How would a game perform at a lower resolution such as 1920 by 1200?
3) How would the game look on the 30" at the lower resolution, would it be blurry because the screen would not be at its native resolution?

many thanks

1) All games support high resolutions, some may do so natively but others may need a little tweaking, for example widescreengaming is a great site that details how you can get widescreen res (2560x1600 is 16:10 right?) on every game which includes Doom3 and Halo, I wouldn't worry about it though.

2) Pretty good actually but it really depends on the game.

3) Depends on the scaling of your monitor but obviously, a low resolution like 1440x900 will look horrible on the 30", 1920x1200 will be ok, it will look good, anything lower than that and you'll probably get a fuzzy image.

 

[dusanv]

3) How would the game look on the 30" at the lower resolution, would it be blurry because the screen would not be at its native resolution?

I have the 30'' Dell and games look perfect @1280x800 because that's a pixel doubled resolution (it's exactly half of 2560x1600). If you turn on AA and AF there, it's even better. Other resolutions look good but you'll notice some blurring. It's far from a show stopper as far as I'm concerned. You should be OK with the x1900XT even if you have to turn down AA in some games - you won't notice the difference @2560x1600.

 

[daveIT]

Great thread

Post some screen shots of Battlefield & Half Life, pretty please!

 

[dusanv]

Post some screen shots of Battlefield & Half Life, pretty please!

Full res? That's going to be big. Where can I host these?

 

[m3henn04]

Spend a little bit more?

why not spend a little bit more for a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB?

The quadro is way more expensive and really not worth it...I think can install multiple ati x1900xt card but don't quote me on that. Most games dont even use anywhere close to 512mb of vid ram. The most vid card intensive games may use as much as 256mb but they are optimized for usage under lower hardware capabilities.

I have a mac pro with ati x1900xt and play games under boot camp. While its not the best for gaming I can still play with all settings maxed out. I also recently added a second gig of ram to the stock one gig and it greatly increased performance under OSX and Win XP Pro since now it utilizes the full 256bit data path

 

[Chone]

The quadro is way more expensive and really not worth it...I think can install multiple ati x1900xt card but don't quote me on that. Most games dont even use anywhere close to 512mb of vid ram. The most vid card intensive games may use as much as 256mb but they are optimized for usage under lower hardware capabilities.

I have a mac pro with ati x1900xt and play games under boot camp. While its not the best for gaming I can still play with all settings maxed out. I also recently added a second gig of ram to the stock one gig and it greatly increased performance under OSX and Win XP Pro since now it utilizes the full 256bit data path

The Quadro is only recommended for workstation users who need high rendering power (in GPU accelerated renderer ) and stereoscopic visualization... its gaming performance is below the X1900XT and for the price, only a pro who needs it for his work could justify the purchase. 512MB IS indeed used by some games, particularly some newer more demanding ones like Oblivion or FEAR, in fact there is a considerable performance difference between the X1900XT 256MB and X1900XT 512MB so right now 512MB on the top end cards is actually a good thing to have and not just another big number to advertise (though the 8800GTX's 768MB (what an odd number) might be a little overkill).

The X1900XT is a great card and yeah, 2GB over the stock 1GB configuration is a HUGE jump and should let the X1900XT really flex its muscles.

 

[Neonguy]

Should I use Omega Catalyst Driver or Catalyst 6.9 Driver? Which one have better result for Gaming and which one is better to use?

Thanks