February 28, 2008 6:00 AMMacworld has posted the results of recent tests of the two graphics cards options Apple has made available to Mac Pro owners. The tests measure the performance of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT when used in a 2.8GHz Mac Pro.In terms of 3-D game frame rates, the Nvidia’s performance was impressive in our lower-resolution game tests, especially the more taxing applications like Doom 3 and Quake. Running at a resolution of 1,024-by-768, the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT was 41-percent faster than the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. In Quake 4 testing at that same resolution, the Nvidia was nearly 9 percent faster than the ATI. Not a bad performance gain, but we were much more impressed by how well the Nvidia performed at even higher resolutions, barely slowing down even after we cranked up the resolution to 1,600-by-1,200. The ATI’s high-resolution performance, on the other hand, dropped dramatically at the higher settings—pushing through 49-percent fewer frames per second in both Quake and Doom tests when run at 1,600-by-1,200 versus 1,024-by-768. Our legacy gaming test, Unreal Tournament 2004 (included in Speedmark 5 because of its extensive compatibility with older Mac systems as well as the latest models), showed the ATI with a surprising advantage at the lower resolution setting. But that advantage was erased when resolution settings were bumped up to 1,600-by-1,200.Head over to the link below to read the rest of the results.Macworld: Testing The Mac Pro Graphics Card OptionsApple

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