Mac Pro/NVidia 8800 GT: poor performance, graphics glitches

[Thursday, February 28th]

Users are reporting that the NVidia 8800GT, a $200 graphics card option for the Mac Pro, suffers from poor performance under Mac OS X relative to Windows, graphic glitches and other issues.

Poor performance As noted in a posting by Bare Feats, the Mac Pro's stock Radeon HD 2600 XT beats the GeForce 8800 GT in a number of pro appliction benchmarks. The publishers say: "We're puzzled by this when you consider it has twice the VRAM and a faster core. Could the Radeon's architecture be more optimized for Core Image effects?"

And as described by one MacFixIt reader:

"I don't understand why the Cinebench scores are almost exactly the same on both the ATI 2600XT video card and 8800 GT, even though the 8800 GT is supposed to be so much faster. If you look at the history of the Mac video cards, the upgrade-option card always had better Cinebench scores (Nvidia 7800, etc). I don't believe the statements that have been floating around that Cinebench doesn't tax the card at 1024x768. It looks more like bad/incomplete drivers to me."

Graphic glitches Users are also reporting graphic glitches and other oddities. MacFixIt reader Graham Wilson writes:

"I bought two new Mac Pros. They are both the 2x4 core 2.8ghz machines. One has the ATI 2600XT video card, and the other was a custom build with the Nvidia 8800 GT card. I'm actually (so far) disappointed with the 8800 GT card. It shows all sorts of redraw slowdowns and errors, and leaves bits of the windows behind. Looks like a refresh problem as well as a video corruption problem."

Application crashes, kernel panics Users are also reporting kernel panics and application crashes when using the NVidia card. A poster to Apple's Discussion boards writes:

"I just installed World of Warcraft on my new Mac Pro 2.8 with the 8800, and I'm getting a lot of kernel panics with the black overlay of death. All settings cranked to the max. I don't have the last error log available but I remember reading it and it mentioned the 8800 in the stacks report part. I think it might be a driver issue, who knows, because when I play WoW on the same machine via Boot Camp, it's fantastic. "

This user's comment certainly points to a Mac OS X driver issue, as problems are non-existent on the same hardware using Windows drivers under Boot Camp.

If you are experiencing similar issues, please let us know.

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