ATI Radeon HD 4870 in an Early 2008 Mac Pro--How fast is it?

I delayed ordering my early 2008 Dual Quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro in order to ensure I got the CTO high end graphics card, an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT. Based on tests with the Windows version of this card, I expected a truly hot set up for 3D games. Unfortunately, I was disappointed because the 2.4GHz MacBook Pro that I had been using for games tested faster! That was using Mac OS X 10.5.2 and it took until 10.5.6 for the Nvidia drivers to improve enough for the Mac Pro to handily beat the Halo score of the MacBook Pro.

I'm always looking for improved graphics performance so I've lamented all along that the ATI Radeon HD 4870 was not available for the Mac Pro. While there are now faster ATI graphics cards available for Windows, Apple made the ATI Radeon 4870 available as a CTO option for the new Early 2009 Mac Pro. To my pleasant surprise, Apple also released it as a kit for the Early 2008 Mac Pro so I ordered one March 5th. It arrived April 29th without drivers which came included with Mac OS X 10.5.7 that was released Tuesday evening.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 is a wonderful beast. It's large and takes the width of two PCIe slots. Fortunately, Apple has offset the 16-lane PCIe 2.0 slot so it does not cover up the second x16 PCIe slot. Unfortunately, it also uses both motherboard electrical connections so I cannot simultaneously install both the Radeon HD 4870 and the GeForce 8800 GT, which requires only one electrical connection. The 4870 has 512MB of GDDR5 video memory, a single dual-link DVI port to run one 30" monitor and Apple's new Mini DisplayPort. It was not difficult to install. One card or the other will soon be on eBay.

So how fast is the ATI Radeon HD 4870?

To find out, I ran a graphics-related subset of my speed tests on my dual quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.7 using both graphics cards. Here are the results:

ATI Radeon HD 4870 vs Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT Speed Tests (Higher is faster)

Test	ATI Radeon HD 4870	Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version	10.5.7	10.5.7
Cinebench R10 Rendering (8x)	18740	18751
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	6328	5927
Xbench 1.3
- Quartz Graphics	241	244
- OpenGL Graphics	215	174
-User Interface Graphics	406	450
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	998	981
Halo 2.0.3 (frames/sec)	211	169

Red is faster by 10% or more.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 does not disappoint. It is 24-25% faster in Xbench's OpenGL test and the OpenGL-based game Halo respectively. It is also 7% faster at the OpenGL Hardware Lighting test of Cinebench R10 even though that might be in the range of random variation in the test.

The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT worked great with Windows XP SP3 on my Boot Camp partition after downloading the latest Windows drivers from Nvidia. The same is true for the ATI Radeon HD 4870, i.e. it works great with Windows after installing the latest ATI Catalyst software and driver. With ATI's Windows-only software one can also play around with the GPU's clock speed and other features of the card. Both cards work well with Windows XP running under Parallels 4.0 as well.

Now that I have the ATI Radeon HD 4870, I have read reports (e.g. see this one) that card maker EVGA recently let slip that Nvidia's newer GeForce GTX 285 will be out for the Mac next month. The GTX 285 is reputed to blow away the 4870 and to be nearly as fast as the Radeon HD 4870-X2, i.e. a 4870 with two GPUs. I can see another graphics card test in my immediate future! [Bill Fox]