Pci & Video Cards

[philrobberson]

Hi. Thanks for your help. I'm considering buying the forthcoming nVidia 7800 graphics card for my Dual 2G (last year's model) G5 (w/1.5G of RAM). The card specs list OS X compatibility, but the interface is listed as PCI x16. What does this mean? Will the card be compatible? (I now have an nVidia 6800 Ultra.)

One more thing: I'm a little frustrated with the performance of my 6800 Ultra, not only on Doom 3, but also on slightly older games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. Do people have a feel yet for whether a faster graphics card will help? Will the 7800 be better than the 6800? Or do you think the bottleneck is elsewhere in the system?

 

[Lt Major Burns]

the 6800 is supposed to be the shit.

as in, it's the best card they do, or one of them.

also, doom3 is written for nVidia cards, much like half-life 2 was written for ati cards. it should be the best thing around for doom. my guess would be a bottleneck elsewhere

 

[nixgeek]

Also consider that those games were PORTED over from the PC, so they might not have had the manpower (or the ability, if it was in DirectX originallly) to do an optimized port for the Mac.

As for the GeForce 7800GTX, make sure that it's Mac-compatible. The reason why has been discussed before in other threads. Just do a search here for "PC video card Mac" or something similar and you'll find the threads.

Besides, remember that right now that card is PCIe only. They don't have any plans for an AGP version according to HardOCP.com, let alone Mac support (although they've been good about that for some cards). However, they would supply an AGP version if the demand was there.