I love my Mac Pro. It is beautiful, quiet, sinfully quick, and the Mac OS just works to help me do what I want to do. But as a gaming machine it sucks.
Of course Macs are not designed for gaming. If you want to work with media, they are perfection; but the graphics cards are not up to the job for modern gaming, and the Mac OS does not attract many games.
I could pander to my gaming needs by running a separate PC, complete with noisy fans and all the attendant grief that comes with PC hardware. Instead, I have XP installed on one of my four Mac Pro disks, and today an appropriate gaming card was delivered.
Being Apple, they charged at least 50% more for the card than I would pay in the shops for a PC version, and fitted it with two graphics adapters, one of which will only work with an Apple monitor of a certain type of which only one model has been released. Sometimes they are annoying bastards.
But the new card is deliciously red:
And it is substantially larger than the feeble offering it replaces:
A quick test with the X-Plane flight simulator on the Mac and Empire Total War in XP shows that it performs as well as it looks; I can run games on the highest settings without a problem. Joy.
So now I have something to do while she who must be obeyed spends her evenings losing chips at the Facebook poker tables. Sadly, I now have nothing left to pine for in respect of computing. I have my perfect machine, at least for a year or so.
Comments 🔗
2009-05-18| todd saysI gave up on ATI a while ago, I still use AMD but ati i felt started lagging behind nvidia.
my current setup is a quad core amd, 8gb ram, dual sli nvidia cards (2 video cards linked together) and raid 0 for double hdd speed.
give fallout 3 a try if you can get your hands on it.
2009-05-18| Spike saysI have Fallout 3 on the Xbox, put more than 60 hours into it so far, must get the expansion pack.
Upgrades for my perfect machine (there is always something you can do…) would be an SSD as a boot drive and Raid 0 drives both internally and externally. But for now it feels plenty fast enough.
Nvidia drivers on the Mac are generally not as well supported as ATI, although the newly announced 285 for the Mac looks like a beast.
2009-05-25| todd sayshaha i just finished it yesterday :D
yeah I was looking at SSD’s last week, PQI drives are the cheapest I’ve found. 128gb under $500 AUD, 64gb under $250 AUD.
still pricey for me though…
2009-05-25| todd saysmy pc speed is ok for the moment, I want to upgrade my monitors next, i am running 4x 19" widescreens at the moment, would like to pick up 4x 24" widescreens. table space is becoming an issue…
2009-05-25| Spike saysNumerical monitor envy, but why do you need four? I need two but would happily need more if someone gave me a reason.