What should I replace my 4850 with?

[NamelessMC]

I jumped the gun and bought an HD4850. For the performance it gives, it wasn't necessarily a bad choice.

 

However, now I'm at a chokepoint because it's not currently supported by OSX and I really want to use OSX on my desktop in conjunction with a Macbook I'm going to buy.

 

I can still return the HD4850 because it's in the return policy. (30 day return policy) I'd like to get something that performs really well at 1680x1050/1360x768(720p) and has great Mac support.

 

I know the HD3870 is supported, but it's very inferior in performance to the HD4850.

 

I know the 8800GT isn't as powerful, but for 1680x1050 do I really need an HD4850? Most of the reviews test it at 1920x1200 and I probably will not game at that resolution for another couple of years.

 

The upside is if I get an 8800GT, I can purchase another 1gb stick of ram and have 3gb or possibly just jump to 4gb and I know OSX loves memory.

[HeXeDOSOK]

My honest opinion is to not replace it. Well, depending on what you want to do. I recently upgraded my girlfriends pc and went with a 4850 as well. AMAZING card. Apple has specifically said that they will be supporting the 4850 and the 4870 (but not 4870x2) so you KNOW that you will get the support here in the near future. Even though QE and CI are not supported yet, I currently have my girlfriend's OSX86 running at 1900x1200, and the majority of stuff she does is work in Adobe Illustrator and photoshop CS3 which looks incredible on her 24" monitor.

 

She HAD the following in her previous build:

AMD 3500+ Single core

MSI NF4 K8N mobo

1Gig of ram

GeForce 6800GT PCI-e

etc..etc..

 

The GeForce 6800GT I could NOT get QE and CI working, so even though it "supported" my card, it was pretty much like it WASN'T supported.

 

Now she has:

Intel Core 2 Q6600 (quad core)

Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L

4G of Patriot ram LLK

ATI HD4850

etc..etc..

 

With the new setup, her "unsupported" 4850 looks even better, and with the added specs (specifically CPU) runs ALOT smoother than the AMD box did. She is perfectly fine with it, but once Apple releases support for the 4850, you will be a much happier camper. She also plays Call of Duty 4 and Oblivion on her 24" in Vista now, so the 4850 was an obvious choice. If you game in Vista, stay with the 4850 if you can.

 

 

...but here is where you may want to get the 3750. If you don't plan on gaming much, and need QE and CI support for MAC RIGHT NOW... then go for the 3750. If you game in mac, and can't wait to play what you have in OSX, then get the 3750. If you can wait, I would say wait.

[bobbobson]

If you really must get a replacement the only thing that comes close that is supported is the 9800GTX+ it's close but the HD4850 is still better

[Baji]

I am curious about this. I have a 4850 as well, and it is indeed great in windows. But in OSX, I am getting no option but 1024x768. And this is with two individual monitors (one at 24 in and one at 21) plugged in. What are you guys doing to at least boost the performance a bit? I just want more options, not so much to run games through osx.

[bobbobson]

You should at least be able to run the string "Graphics Mode"="1920x1080x32" or whatever res you want on boot. You won't get any hardware acceleration from your graphics card but you'll get a decent resolution to work with rather then a crummy 1024x768 display on a 24" monitor

 

That's about as good as it gets until Apple starts using a HD4000 series graphics cards in Macs which might either be a month or two, or next year.

[nickhe]

Keep it and update to 10.5.5 it's 100% compatible there with ci/we im using a 4870 now with there

[bobbobson]

Keep it and update to 10.5.5 it's 100% compatible there with ci/we im using a 4870 now with there

 

You've said this before and told no one how you did it... if you've got it working please inform us how because netkas certainly hasn't and quite a number of people here don'y believe you

[nickhe]

i downloaded the delta update from tpb and installed it on my pc and when you restart it works

[~anima]

Ouch dont go by the Windows performance if you want to buy a gfx card for mac. In general ATi cards are performing WAY better then NV cards. So a 3870 should pwn a 9800gtx with ease in osx. And the 4850 and 4870 for mac are just rumours, of course it would be nice but theres no ETA or any other information on that.

[biciolino]

i downloaded the delta update from tpb and installed it on my pc and when you restart it works

 

I would like to believe you but even if the 10.5.5 delta update had full support for 48xx, the drivers wouldn't work in an hackintosh just out of the box, they still would need an injector like Natit or Atyinject, adapted for aty_megalodon; and afaik noone made such an injector, yet. Therefore i keep not believing that statement of yours but, as i said in a previous post (which you ignored), i would really like to be proven wrong. Would you, please, post a screenshot of the graphics section of your system info, so we all can see your 4870 is really supported in native resolution and QE/CI are properly hardware accelerated?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Baji]

thanks for the advice bobbobson, i will try that out. Any suggestions for how to make osx recognize that there are two different monitors running and to treat them as such? In windows you can extend your desktop to another monitor, basically this is what i am looking to do in osx. I have heard spaces can manage such a task, but it seems as though osx is recognizing both monitors as one unit. =/

[bobbobson]

I haven't tried it, it may not even be possible with the VESA drivers to recognise two monitors. The way it's coming up now is probably the equivelant of mirroring in windows, you'd normally be able to adjust this in you system preferences but given that there's no video card drivers i'm not sure that you can

 

Ouch dont go by the Windows performance if you want to buy a gfx card for mac. In general ATi cards are performing WAY better then NV cards. So a 3870 should pwn a 9800gtx with ease in osx. And the 4850 and 4870 for mac are just rumours, of course it would be nice but theres no ETA or any other information on that.

 

There's an incomplete driver in 10.5.5 that actually does something more then the reference to HD4850's in the current drivers from 10.5.2 being used for the HD3870 netkas has proven this. Given that it's still a beta there may be a working driver by the time the official 10.5.5 comes out or 10.5.6. There's talk about working drivers already for GTX260's/280's in 10.6 of course none of it's official I didn't say it was.

 

As to Windows/Mac comparisons it's hard to compare obviously you're not going to buy a high end graphics card to game on a Mac because there isn't all that many games that would actually require anything much more then an 8800GT/HD3870 but if you're going to be booting into windows then there's plenty of games that are going to push both of those cards.

 

From experience you're right though in the fact that ATi does do Open GL a little better then Nvidia but until you bench both cards and get back to me I have my doubts that the difference in results is really going to be all that noticeable

[~anima]

We seen this a plenty of times now in beta builds. There were references to new GFX cards and even Prototype chipsets, wich just dissapeared in later builds. Nothin special on that also.

 

From my experience NV drivers are kinda messie, if you do benchmark with xbench you wont get any proper result. OpenGL Profiler is a way better gfx benchmark. I can't remember the exact score of my x1900xtx but it was way higher then the score of a mates 8800gtx. I mean it was defeinatly a noticable difference between the scores and the performance in games like Quake4.

[bobbobson]

We seen this a plenty of times now in beta builds. There were references to new GFX cards and even Prototype chipsets, wich just dissapeared in later builds. Nothin special on that also.

 

From my experience NV drivers are kinda messie, if you do benchmark with xbench you wont get any proper result. OpenGL Profiler is a way better gfx benchmark. I can't remember the exact score of my x1900xtx but it was way higher then the score of a mates 8800gtx. I mean it was defeinatly a noticable difference between the scores and the performance in games like Quake4.

 

The reference to the HD4xxx series is stil present in the current 10.5.4 build however and has been since 10.5.2 whether or not that means anything considering the new ATi drivers in 10.5.5 is another matter entirely As I said ATi tend to do GL better then nvidia from personal experience and being a long time Linux and thus Open GL user so that's nothing entirely shocking although you would think that an 8800GTX would do a lot better then an X1900xt

 

The other issue is that Macs don't really have a good synthetic benchmark the way PC's do 3DMark is coded to a standard and all PC's running it use that standard otherwise the tests become invalid like with the recent introduction of phsyx from nvidia (yes I know this doesn't work on Macs) . I guess you could use something like quake wars to really test out the differences but you can't really say there's standardised benchmarks like there are on PC's for Macs and even if ATI is better for Open GL I some what doubt that a card that's 2 years old then said 8800GTX will outperform it in real world scenarios