G5 graphics card madness! :'(

P

phatcactus

The Ugly Organist
So I'm going to be buying a 2.5 G5 come January, and I'm pickin' out the pieces now. The only thing that gets me is the different graphics cards. What are the differences? I've decided to get one with 256 MB of RAM.

The Apple site says that the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 DDL cards are the "fastest and most advanced." What makes one better than the other? They are the most expensive, but will they work with my ViewSonic monitor? Or am I stuck with the ATI Radeon 9800 XT? Am I any worse off?

This graphics card business is confusing me like nothing else, and the Apple site doesn't help a bit. I want the best I can get (I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it), but I don't want something that won't work with my monitor.

Could y'all throw me a bone?
 
Ok. The NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL is the best video card available for Macs currently.

The GeForce 6800 GT DDL is a very simmilar card, but it is a bit cheaper, and obviously will give slightly lower performance.

If you are seriously into gaming, I suggest one of these cards (or wait to see if an X800 is available in January)

Otherwise, an ATI Radeon 9800 should be fine. None of the current Apple supplied graphics cards have an onboard VGA connector. The 6800 cards have two DVI connectors, the rest all have a DVI and an ADC. The machine will come with a DVI-VGA adapter no matter what card you get with it.
 
As someone who has previously bought a "low end" Mac (g4 in sig) i suggest you get the best video card you can afford. it will dramatically affect your performance in certain things, and will maintain the ability to use cool stuff like expose in future versions of the OS.
 
expose doesnt require that hefty of a video card, anything "modern" handles it well, the rage 128's that shipped with the early G4s are old out dated cards.

You really should consider what your needs are now and in the future. The radeon 9800 is a nice card, it is already a generation old now that the X series is out, but it still performs well. The major benifit of going with the 6800 DDL is that it can handle the 30 inch displays, while none other can at this point. If you don't need the best of the best, either you don't game much or don't use any apps that require a beefy video card I would get either the 9800 XT, 9600XT or the 6800 GT DDL if you need the 30 inch display. I have a 9600XT right now, and it is more than enough for my purposes. Every game I have run runs awesome on it and it has support for dual monitors if I so desire.

As far as your current monitor goes, does it have VGA or DVI, vga is the smaller blue plug and DVI is larger white. Either way, the 6800 has dual DVI ports, and I would assume that it ships with a DVI > VGA converter so older monitors can be used with it.

If you are really concerned with performance I would look at some benchmarks to see how they stack up. If you can't find any Mac benchmarks find some PC ones, the cards are essentialy the same. www.anandtech.com is a fairly good source.
 
expose doesnt require that hefty of a video card, anything "modern" handles it well, the rage 128's that shipped with the early G4s are old out dated cards.
Click to expand...

You didn't read what i wrote.

maintain the ability to use cool stuff like expose in future versions of the OS
Click to expand...
 
I wouldnt worry about expose as much as stuff like CoreImage and CoreVideo. Expose is all 2d motion, this shouldn't require much of a graphics card at all.
 
HateEternal said:
I wouldnt worry about expose as much as stuff like CoreImage and CoreVideo. Expose is all 2d motion, this shouldn't require much of a graphics card at all.
Click to expand...

No, it isn't just 2D motion. It's dynamically scaling a 2D image (of your windows) and drawing that onto a plane. It makes use of 3D features on your card.
 
As (apple.com?) suggests. Open iTunes. play music with the visualizer in window mode. now open a quicktime movie. now play a DVD in DVD Player. Now hit the button to get all windows on screen. you can't tell me THAT doesn't need some sort of grunt. Mac OS X is VERY eye candy heavy. everyone knows this. It is not a failing, but it does require a good video card. Yes, anything available, will work with the CURRENT release. but in 6 months time it might be that Tiger will rule out all the low-end cards for some stuff (simulating an image of your brain and the electrical activity therein via a bluetooth headset? :D)

You don't HAVE to buy anything i say. I am simply giving my suggestion based on my previous experiences.
 
My iBook doesn't have a problem with that.

The next OS upgrade is not going to render a 9800 or 9600 obsolete. The one after that, perhaps, but think if you don't need the power now why buy something beefy now? You can always upgrade to another mid level card once it becomes nessesary to upgrade. The 9600XT costs 50 dollars more than the GF5200, well worth it. In a few years when it is nessesary to upgrade you can prolly find another mid level card for about 150-200 bucks. Which at that time would be better than the GeForce 6800. Id say unless you need the power now, you could spare your self the 500 dollars, get something mid level and be set for a few years and upgrade when nessesary.

The only problem I forsee is if people will still be making AGP cards in a few years. I would assume everything is shifting over to PCI-Express.
 
I would have assumed everything would have shifted to USB/Firewire by now. But we still see PC Desktops and Laptops with Serial ports. Parallel ports. Ugh. People use VGA when DVI is so easy. Hell. IBM ship their LCDs with only VGA in. So you have a digital image, converted to VGA analoge by the video card, and then back to digital to render an image on the LCD. how rediculous.

This industry ALWAYS provides compatibility, one way or another. AGP8x cards will be around for a while.
 
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