New Power Mac's KICK BUTT

Holly cow, the new Power Mac G5 Dual Cores are insane.

The top one is a quad core (aka Dual Dual-Core) 2.5. They all have PCI express. You can even put the incredibly powerful Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 512MB in it! (for a painful 16XX more). The 4 PCI express slots allow you to put 4 Graphics cards in and run 8 30" displays (keep dreaming you had the $). And to top it all of they support up to an incredible 16 GB of Ram. Oh and did I mention Dual Gigabyte ethernet Jeff

 

I think you owe me one of those as a birthday present, oc :roll:

 

Jeff's sending all the forums regulars one, right, Jeff? I only need a 23" monitor btw. Thanks.

 

I'm getting the middle model (sadly only two processors) and I am no expert on video cards. Apple lists the options as GeForce 6600 LE, GeForce 6600, GeForce 7800 GT, and Quadro FX 4500 on the graphics page. However the actual order page lists the options as the GeForce 6600 and Quadro FX 4500 only. But there are lots of charts and graphs trying to convince me to get the 7800, which is conspicuously absent from the order page. The Quadro one seems like it is meant for a more scientific approach. What do you guys think?

 

The Quadro series has allways been Nvidia's flagship when dealing with 3d for production needs. This is one of the now-gone arguments from pc users not willing to convert to mac, and is standard in most cgi workstations.. It has been the 3d pro's nr.1 wanted feature to apple and now it seems they are finally giving what the people wants, the best grafic card for working with 3d ever!

So If you got the cash and is interested in making 3d content and games you should absolutely invest in it, or I would certainly do so If I had a chance!

 

Yah I'm sending all the form regulars a quad core, Unity Pro, 2 30" monitors, and of corse maxed HD and RAM Just a little something to remember my by Jeff

 

If you are all about making content and got the cash, go for the Quadro... But if you want to make games, I would get the card that the gamers have, and that is 6800 or 7800, depending on the money too.

The people who has these cards, must take care to renember fallbacks and LODs for smaller configurations though, unless your product is not supposed to be on the marked for another 2-3 years.

- Peter

 

Ok so I was thinking about replacing my G5 with one of the quad cores. But I can't figure out where the heck the option to put a 7800 in it is. What the heck is up with that. Its not in the graphics card drop down option, and its not aywhere in the online store as an acessory ether. Man come on Apple get on the ball. Jeff

 

I think they said that it is not available until mid next month.

 

Anyone know the advantages of the 7800 over the 6600?

 

At the rate apple adopts new features in OpenGL (if you can call it a rate), I would say that the main difference will be in performance....

 

The memory bandwidth, Vertices per second, and fill rate are a whole lot better. Jeff

 

......What's a texel?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texel_(graphics)

 

Over in the C4D forums I read I get the impression the 4500 would be a complete waste of money because (as they keep saying) Apple's GL implementation is rubbish. I don't know why, I presume the drivers are not as good and/or AGL supports less GL plugins??
I'm not convinced this is totally true anyway because Modo's GL implementation is apparently fantastanstic on the mac, whereas according to Maxon, the reason C4D GL runs worse on mac than PC is down to Apple's slow uptake of necessary features. Sounds odd that a cmpany whose flagship operating system totally relies on OpenGL would have such a rubbish version of it. I might not understand if someone explained it to me, but what's the truth I wonder?
Boxy