Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Radeon HD 3870 for Mac coming end of May
- Thread starter barefeats
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
And with the Nehalem Mac Pros we will get 4-series Radeon cards while PC users will have 5-series Radeon cards.
We should ask AMD to release new video cards for the Mac Pro every 6 months. Pretty much a six-month cycle. I think that's a good idea.
iPhones. Computers are, and will remain, on the backburner. No new ACD, Mini, Blu-ray, non-glossy iMac, card readers on laptops or video card updates. I picked a great time to switch.
Apple's been behind on the video card front since long before the iPhone. It's simply a much smaller market (obviously limited to only Mac Pros) and thus gets less attention from ATI and Nvidia. There are fewer technical barriers than during the PPC days, so the situation should slowly but surely get better.
I wouldn't hold my breath on Blu-Ray support in Mac OS X, by the way. Knowing Apple, they would be loath to implement the onerous, end-to-end DRM it requires for playback.
I thought it was coming out for $220? That's not twice the price.. at least not twice the introductory price. Did they drop it to $100? That can't be right...
You're not wrong though... but that's generally how it's done with Macs. Kinda always been that way. It's unfortunate, especially given how much faster the 4870's supposed to be.
On the bright side though, it can replace a lot of those 1900XTs, especially given how absurdly overpriced the 1900's were.
I guess they just don't have anywhere near the number of resources devoted to developing Mac drivers/BIOS versions for the card as they do the PC (which makes sense) so it takes them a lot longer to come out. Oh well.
It does seem like they could make it every-other product cycle instead of skipping like three generations, though...
You're not wrong though... but that's generally how it's done with Macs. Kinda always been that way. It's unfortunate, especially given how much faster the 4870's supposed to be.
On the bright side though, it can replace a lot of those 1900XTs, especially given how absurdly overpriced the 1900's were.
I guess they just don't have anywhere near the number of resources devoted to developing Mac drivers/BIOS versions for the card as they do the PC (which makes sense) so it takes them a lot longer to come out. Oh well.
It does seem like they could make it every-other product cycle instead of skipping like three generations, though...
I'm told that WoW will gobble up 1GB of VRAM, if you have it to spare, when you set the terrain detail/distance to max.
And with the Nehalem Mac Pros we will get 4-series Radeon cards while PC users will have 5-series Radeon cards.
We should ask AMD to release new video cards for the Mac Pro every 6 months. Pretty much a six-month cycle. I think that's a good idea.
The Nahalem Mac Pros may offer the Radeon 4xxx as a CTO, but you can bet that it will also be available for all models of Mac Pro, unlike what Apple did with the GeForce 8800 GT.
Damn !
It appears that they charged me BEFORE shipment
It may just be a CC ping but it looks like a full charge to me. If it goes away in the next few days, I will report.
Otherwise, assume you will pay the entire amount at the time of order.
I don't imagine that could be true, unless it's running uncompressed textures... but even if it were, at any resolution requiring 1 GB of RAM, the Radeon 3870 would already be choking to the point where you'd need a faster graphics card rather than a larger frame buffer.
Adding more memory chips to a card isn't the technological challenge, it's the large price rise that would result for (actually, in many cases a tiny performance <i>decrease</i>) the one or two instances out of hundreds where it might help.
ATI is trying to keep prices down because they can't compete at the moment with nVidia at higher price offerings... it wouldn't make any kind of sense, technical or fiscal.
That's almost libelous, especially considering how much those two sites have done for the Mac community. Quoted for posterity.
Would it be too much trouble to see if the layout of the top of the card matches the ATI 2600?
I'm curious if current aftermarket passive heatsinks will fit. I'm a quiet computing nerd.
I've a question: what happens if you leave 2x3870s with Crossfire jumper connected in the machine when you boot into OS X? Certainly you wouldn't get the benefit of Crossfire, but what does happen? Does it boot; do both cards behave normally? Worst case, do their fans run normally with video coming out of at least one?
It runs normally. Unless you have a display connected to the second card, it is virtually ignored. The same is true when I had two Radeon HD 2600 XTs jumped in Crossfire mode.
How do the noise levels and heat generation compare to the ATI HD 2600 in my early 2008 Mac Pro?
I started to wonder same thing after I saw their OpenGL test of the 2600 which scored about 300 points higher than 95% of website/forums/blogs I've read.
Something isn't completely right here.
Actually increasing transistor amount usually means reduced line width which usually means more speed.
But my point was that so far AFAIK 3870 doesn't give anything more to pro apps user than 1900 gave 2 years ago. So there must be (again) something really wrong with the drivers.
I'd like to do fullHD graphics with Motion, but 1900 is just too slow and has too little memory for that. I can't afford a gpu which costs as much as the whole other system, so I was hoping that 3870 would be optimal solution for greater power and cost effectiveness. Sadly it does not seem to be that... or maybe we just wait another half an year for better drivers...
For one thing. XLR8YourMac tested on a 2.66GHz "2006" 4-core Mac Pro (6GB of RAM) and a 2.8GHz "early 2008" 8-core Mac Pro (8GB of RAM).
BareFeats tested on a 3.0GHz "2007" 8-core Mac Pro (16GB of RAM) and a 3.2GHz "early 2008" 8-core Mac Pro (16GB of RAM).
Now I'm normally a barefeats fan, but what the heck is up with the older mac showing the same or slower results with the new card vs the 1900?
This is getting very annoying - I had to send my 8800 card back to apple because the performance on Battlefield 2142 was totally unplayable, and I've been hearing good things about this card, and now the benchmarks show it's no better than a 3-4 year old card??? how can that possibly be? that would be like a 2ghz Intel chip running the same stats as a new 3.2ghz chip.
This is getting very annoying - I had to send my 8800 card back to apple because the performance on Battlefield 2142 was totally unplayable, and I've been hearing good things about this card, and now the benchmarks show it's no better than a 3-4 year old card??? how can that possibly be? that would be like a 2ghz Intel chip running the same stats as a new 3.2ghz chip.
Does the 3870 PC&Mac edition support Crossfire in the Mac Pro?
Hello there - sorry if my question was already answered in this thread but as far as I understand the Mac&PC edition of the 3870 will support Crossfire on a "Crossfire-supporting mainboard" in Windows/Vista ... this does not necessarily mean that Crossfire is supported running Windows/Vista on a Mac Pro 2008, right? Does anybody have more info about this? For me a switch to the 3870 would only make sense if this would allow me to use two in Crossfire. Also, does anybody know if a 3870x2 will work with the EFI used in the coming 3870?
Thanks for any info & hints!
Hello there - sorry if my question was already answered in this thread but as far as I understand the Mac&PC edition of the 3870 will support Crossfire on a "Crossfire-supporting mainboard" in Windows/Vista ... this does not necessarily mean that Crossfire is supported running Windows/Vista on a Mac Pro 2008, right? Does anybody have more info about this? For me a switch to the 3870 would only make sense if this would allow me to use two in Crossfire. Also, does anybody know if a 3870x2 will work with the EFI used in the coming 3870?
Thanks for any info & hints!
No idea but I'm willing to try it on my 3870x2. There is a DDR4 v DDR3 RAM difference between the boards but I only need the EFI loader from it and the drivers should take over after the mac boots.
I'd say that 8800 is a gaming card since it's faster in games and slow with Motion & Color, but I hoped that 3870 would be better choise for Motion & Color than 2600. If you're just using FCS and no 3d modelling software, 3k$ quadro isn't very reasonable choise...