kaleph Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 People, I need some advice. I'm upgrading from my old 8800gs and having a hard time choosing between the gtx 460 or the hd 6850. Where I live they are pretty much evenly priced and from what I've read in benchmarks their performance is very close. Now I'm torn between getting a gtx 460, with cuda and physx support, but apparently pain in the ass to get working 100% in osx or the hd 6850, with no cuda nor physx, but very easy to get running. What do you guys/gals think? Does cuda and physx support actually make a difference in games (win and osx) ? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/261574-in-doubt-between-gtx-460-or-hd-6850/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 I don't know anything about ATI cards, but the GTX 460 is definitely not "a pain in the ass" to get to work. A few conditions must be met. In order to have full hardware acceleration you must be running minimum 10.6.5 and install the Quadro 4000 drivers from nvidia - the nvidia drivers that ship with OS X don't support Fermi cards. You must boot anything below 10.6.5 (your install DVD for example) and any version that doesn't have the nvidia Quadro drivers installed with GraphicsEnabler=n. IOW any graphics injection method must be disabled until the drivers are installed, otherwise you won't be able to boot. There's a freeze/kernel panic issue with this card in Snow Leopard that is most commonly "fixed" by running VLC hidden in the background, looping a video. Once you do that the card works fine. Several attempts have been made to find a real fix for this issue but nobody has been successful yet. Some people say their GTX 460 doesn't need this fix in Lion, but then again others have been running it on Snow Leopard for as long as 12 hours until the freeze occurred, so it's hard to say for sure if it really works perfectly in Lion. As for the other stuff it depends on what your priorities are and what you like to do with your PC. PhysX is a Windows thing and on OS X CUDA is only used in pro apps. On Windows it depends on which games you like. PhysX is not required but it's nice to have if you like to play Batman Arkham Asylum or Cryostasis for example. Many popular titles (for example Valve's Source Engine games such as Portal 2) do not use PhysX. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/261574-in-doubt-between-gtx-460-or-hd-6850/#findComment-1709200 Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaleph Posted July 6, 2011 Author Share Posted July 6, 2011 Ah, a fellow brazillian Well, the install process is easier than expected. I read a lot of posts of people having issues getting the driver to work, but they probably not lucky migrating from an injector to the official drivers. And having to keep a VLC running on loop would be kinda of annoying, but not a deal breaker. Well, I think I'll just wait a couple of more weeks and see if Lion will really fix it. Thanks for the help. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/261574-in-doubt-between-gtx-460-or-hd-6850/#findComment-1709469 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 No, I just happen to live in Brazil. Not a Brazilian yet but things are moving in the right direction. You're welcome, wise choice I think. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/261574-in-doubt-between-gtx-460-or-hd-6850/#findComment-1709512 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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