All this talk of price/performance ratios can get a little wearing, so lets focus more on the latter part. You cannot get better benchmarks than this for under £160, and in some circumstances it's faster than the £200+ GTX 280. The only advantage the more expensive card has is its four extra ROPs, which help with high image quality settings.
Not content with that, this 'XXX' edition is also factory overclocked, albeit by a fairly minor 37MHz. It does mean that realistically, if you want to go beyond this level you're into the realms of CrossFire and SLI multi-chip set-ups and all the driver issues that brings with it. Like the GTX 260 it's big, but quiet, and based on the 55nm revision of the G200 core that all the top end GeForce cards share.
Xfx Gtx 280 Driver For Mac Os
Unlike the GTX 260, this has the full complement of 240 stream shaders and 80 texture mapping units enabled, and higher clockspeeds too. It may not have the same potential gigaflop output as the top Radeon graphics card, but when it comes to real-world gaming performance, it flies. Also read: It is hard to recommend as a value for money buy, though, since the Radeon HD4870 is so cheap in comparison. But if you've got a spare £160 to spend, this is the card to get and be proud of.
Geforce Gtx 280
In the most demanding tests we ran it through, it was over 10 per cent quicker than its nearest competitor, the HD4890, yet cost just £4 more. That's the difference between a playable and non-playable game on a large monitor, with a good deal of future-proofing thrown in to boot. It may well cost twice the amount of an HD4850, but in some high definition benchmarks the results aren't a long way off a 100 per cent improvement. Follow TechRadar Reviews on Twitter.
Been reading and the consensus is ATi drivers are better than nVidia drivers for Mac OS X. The 285 has 1Gb memory but it's DDR3 v. 512Mb of DDR5. I don't know the bus bit size, but taking everything in consideration, I read that the bottom line is bandwidth not that DDR5 is better than DDR3. Which card has the bigger bandwidth?
Since I don't have the MP yet, it's $450 for the nVidia 285 card or $180 to upgrade to the 4870. 450-180=270 but then I would also have the GT120 to sell. Perhaps I could get $70 for it, then it's a $200 difference between the GTX 285 versus the HD 4870. GTX 285 worth $200 more than HD 4870? Given nVidia track record, will they in short time improve their drivers to get the most out of the 285? Last question: EVGA makes/produces the GTX 285 Mac Edition not nVidia, they just pay nVidia for the design specs? Been reading that nVidia manufacturing quality has been sloppy in the past, is EVGA better at quality control?
Click to expand.It's a way better card than the Apple one, it has faster clock speeds, more memory, and is overall a way better card. Click to expand.The 285 won't be as good in OS X for some things, and is it really worth the extra 300+ bucks? And if you're worried about using it under Windows, just buy 2 of the 4870s, and crossfire them and they will outperform the 285 under Windows and still be cheaper than buying one of the 285s. Nothing will go wrong, you're not risking anything. And Cindori mentioned a 4890, that requires installing extra things that aren't natively supported in OS X, and you only get one DVI port, so that was a definite no-go for me. But if you want to spend the almost $500 on the 285, that's on you, your money!