Mac Pro :: Dual Graphics Card - Better Performance When Playing Games?
Feb 27, 2009
I have a 2 x 2GHz Dual Core Intel Mac Pro, with 9GB of DDR2 RAM and 2 Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphic cards each running a Samsung 24 inch screen. I recently bought Call of Duty 4 and found that the game runs terribly on anything higher then around medium sort of settings. I know the 7300 Graphic cards aren't the best for gaming, but they have done the job for me perfectly until now. I'm a photographer so I calibrate my screens with a Spyder and run a separate colour profile through each video card per screen, and its always calibrated perfectly.
I'm just curious if there is any actual performance advantage of having 2 video cards other then running a separate colour profile through each card? So for example, If I'm playing call of duty and only 1 screen is displaying information, does the other card just sit there, or does it jump on board and process information for the game being played? Because I would have thought having 2 7300's would somewhat give better performance during gaming then just the one?
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Dec 8, 2008
I have a dual monitor setup and just wondering how to get my secondary monitor to play gta iv and games in general from the get-go.
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Mar 23, 2009
I had the current (at the time) entry level MacBook Pro, it could handle Gears of War & BioShock through Boot Camp with no hassle.
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May 19, 2012
What games can i play on my white 2006 Macbook it has a intel GMA 950 graphics card in it
Info:
Magic Mouse, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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May 16, 2010
Just want to hear some User Experiences with it so far Kinda more interested in the new graphics card performance...like what around what year of games can it play on the highest settings with great framerate? (speaking about the 13inch specifically)
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Aug 1, 2009
What I have: MBP Penryn 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB, 200 HD, Matte. What I'm looking at: Unibody 15" MBP 2.53 Ghz, 4 GB, 250 HD, Glossy. Love the new trackpads on the MBP, not sure how I'll like the glossy screen. Would be doing some video work down the road (Canon HV40). Please tell me the difference between the performance of these graphics cards and lastly which one you would opt for.
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Mar 25, 2012
I run Rhino (64 bit) with windows 7 through bootcamp. The software mfg's recommended graphics card is the AMD FirePro v7900 or v5900, and user group recos the nvidea quadro 4000. I am currently using an Nvidea gtx285 and driving two displays from it. Looking to upgrade both memory and video card for optimal performance.
Info:
Mac Pro, Windows 7, osx 10.7 , 16g ram nvidea 285gtx
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Jun 2, 2009
Further to my other thread here I would specifically like to ask what would be the best graphics card for my ailing PMG5 Dual 1.8?
I believe my ATI X800XT has died and I may need to get a new card but finding one that will work in my aging machine is proving difficult. There is a slim possibility its the monitor that s the problem (I will be testing that tonight).
Ideas, links to and any information regarding GPUs for a PMG5 would be appreciated. I believe it would need to be AGP (Not PCI-E), is that correct?
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Jan 28, 2010
Preliminaries:
1) I am in the possession of a June 2004 PowerMac G5 DP 1.8.
2) It's the AGP+PCI variety (not PCI-X, not PCIe).
3) It's running Leopard 10.5.8
4) I've got an Ultra 6800 DDL installed.
Main Question:
What is the best way to add another (3rd) monitor?
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Apr 16, 2008
All this talk of 8800GT's on the Mac Pros is putting me in the mood for upgrading the 64mb ATI 9600 in my stock PM g5 dual 2 GHz.I have an old Formac Oxygen ADC monitor (used as one screen of my dual head system) but the ADC connector on the graphics card seems to be dead, and everytime I plug the monitor in to the port, the Mac just keeps 'tripping' out and won't power up - almost like something is shorting out.As a result, I'm stuck to using just the DVI port (1 screen is so limiting after being used to 2!!), connected to an ancient VGA monitor. I really miss having a dual screen set-up, and this is another reason why I would like to upgrade the card. would be good to still be able to use my ADC monitor, but I guess only the older, low spec cards had these, and I'm probably gonna have to ditch the monitor and get a couple of DVI screens.
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Apr 7, 2012
I have a Dual 1.8ghz G5 with 6 gig of Ram and wish to upgrade the Graphics Card. Can anyone tell me a decent card that would improve my system and that would be compatible with the machine. I currently have a 64mb card installed.
Info:
PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
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Oct 5, 2008
After reading through several pages of post's on here I am still at a stand still on upgrading my original macpro 2.66ghz quad core. The reason I am upgrading the stock card is I cant handle the grainy look on my photos after using my same moniter with my new macbook pro. Also I am going to be using my bootcamp vista side to play bluray and hd dvds. I recently purchased the new buffalo dual external drive but the images are blury and after a hd video test my graphics card failed misserably. Can someone point me in the right direction. I want to spend around 275-300 shipped. My lcd display supports hdmi and all recent standards.
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Dec 7, 2008
Searched and only found info on using a single external monitor, is it possible to run two off of a macbook (not pro) with some sort of external graphics card? It would be outputting to two 1680x1050 monitors. Currently have it with the single one and don't wanna just let my other monitor go to waste (use it for 360 so its off most of the time).
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Oct 21, 2009
Firstly sorry if this has been answered before
I have a 2 x 2.8 Mac Pro and want to have dual monitors for Photoshop and Dreamweaver development
The monitors I have are 2408WFP Dell displays
The MP has a ATi HD 2600XT fitted
What is the best solution for dual monitor support.
ATI 4870 or ATi X1900 or GTX285?
Does the ATI 4870 support 2 DVI monitors with adaptors?
Can I use the 4870 with the 2600??
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Mar 16, 2010
i cant play pc games on it? is there a way to achieve this?
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Sep 16, 2008
I bought the vanilla octo-2.8 early 08 Mac Pro back in January. (I've since added in the nVidia 8800GT and a couple 500GB harddrives). As many of you know it's a beautiful machine and I've had very few problems with it. I play World of Warcraft and have recently delved into the world of dual-boxing to take advantage of a triple XP bonus currently available. Running two instances of WoW from separate install locations worked fine. But I found that I was hitting a limit. I couldn't really use iTunes while playing without taking a noticeable hit to the games' performance. So I did the logical thing in this situation: I bought more RAM. Specifically a 2GB kit (KTA-MP800K2/2G) from Kingston.
At first I had them in the wrong configuration. Since the default location for the 2GB that come with the Mac Pro are in slot 1 of each riser, I put the new sticks in slot 2 on each riser. I saw ECC errors and a very odd framerate issue in-game. After about 15 minutes, one instance of WoW would run at 60fps (v-sync is enabled) and the other instance on the secondary monitor would drop to 2-5fps. They would stay like this for about a minute then the framerates would swap: the primary monitor would tank to about 2fps and the secondary would fly up to 60fps. I stopped playing, read up on the RAM placement and found out that the pairs need to be on each riser together. I put the Apple RAM on riser 1 in slots 1 and 2, the Kingston on riser 2, slots 1 and 2. Same story. ECC errors and alternating horrible performance. I then tried swapping the RAM locations and put the Kingston on riser 1, Apple on riser two. I also reset the PRAM as I read that might clear any ECC error issues when installing new RAM. In this setup I had no ECC errors. The framerate issues were still happening though.
At first I thought it was bad RAM. But when placing them on riser 1 I see no errors. My other thoughts are a bad riser board or overheating. Although I've never had heat problems and the RAM seems to work fine if the Kingston in on riser 1.
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Dec 1, 2008
I have lost my disc to my favorite game diablo 2 and I am wondering if there is still a way that I can play the game without the disc? I heard that u can use disc utilities to make an image but can I do it without the disc first?
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Oct 10, 2009
Bassicly all is well with bootcamp, i downloaded it a few days back and its running good. The only problem is it is hopeless with windows games. I done research before i installed it that all these games would run fine on my specs and as soon as i play them its just very laggy. all settings are down completely low. The games i have problems with are COD 4, CSS, And Aion. My specs should be able to run them. Is it possible the ram is split or something between the 2 systems maybe?
On the windows side i have 80gb hard drive with 45gb free space remaining.
I have Windows XP Home edition, and the latest nvidia drivers installed.
Intel core 2 duo 2.00ghz. 1.99ghz *thats just what is ses* and 2.72gb of ram.
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Nov 26, 2009
is it possible to connect a macbook pro to a tv when playing pc games via bootcamp so that the gameplay will show on the tv instead of the macbook pro screen (or on both). My mbp's screen feels small when i play games and makes it harder to see so I was wondering if it was possible to output the gameplay to a tv screen. EDIT: i have this tv here, what cables/adapters would i need to connect my macbook pro(june 2009 model) to it. [URL]
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Jan 4, 2010
Well anyway, I got this MBP about 3 or 4 weeks ago. It runs great so far, but when I play a game, it will run fine, then about 10 to 15 minutes after I start, the performance will drop below 50% of what it was, then 10 minutes later, it seems to speed up again.
I've also noticed it seems to kick up performance again once the fan comes on.
So is this normal or some odd coincidence. Also, is there anyway I could prevent this period of low performance from happening.
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Jan 7, 2011
I was trying for a long time now to play old games like: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and even newer ones like POP:Sands of Time, Hitman: Codename 47 and so on, on my iMac using Radeon HD 2600 Pro video card. All of these games aren't working well, I've tried everything, spent a lot of time trying to get appropriate drivers and make it work. I'm sure there are some of you that have/had the same issues like me, ofcourse using the same video card.
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Jan 12, 2011
I'm not a big gamer, just a couple hours a week, perhaps. This particular problem occurs while playing Left 4 Dead 2 and Half Life 2. Basically, the computer just goes to sleep while playing the game. It doesn't seem to hurt anything. Hitting they keys a few times brings the computer back and the game back into play without a hitch. Except the audio sometimes needs to catch up. But it sure is annoying. I haven't actually timed it. But it doesn't seem entirely random. It seems to be at somewhat predictable intervals. Maybe 15-25 minutes. I looked all through my settings (especially Energy Saver), and keyboard shortcuts and it doesn't seem that any of them would cause the computer to sleep. The computer is plugged into the wall.
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Sep 16, 2008
Runs well under bootcamp in my 1.8/SSD. I would even say it runs at 60fps But you need to download the beta X3100 drivers from intel that solve the crashing problem when you play the game with the normal drivers. And download the game from direct2drive or EA so you wont need the DVD Why does Mac OS suck so much ass when you play games? Under bootcamp I can run anything and the games wont run slow.
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Dec 22, 2008
this rev B i got is much better than the rev A i used to owned. the youtube and movie lagging is gone. but it's still not powerful enough for a game. i played eschalon book:1 which is not quite heavy and demanding like the new games out there. let alone playing half life 2. it's overheating and locking down the cpu to 800mhz just like my old air. see the screenshot. after playing for 20 minutes, it's becoming very laggy and unplayable. i guess this thin mba is not ok unless playing simple games like gamehouse's card and board games.
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Mar 29, 2009
I have a MacBook and want to find a good mouse for playing games.
1. What do you use?
- Pros?
- Cons?
2. Does anyone know if the Logitech mice will work on a mac, even if they say they are only for windows?
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Jan 5, 2010
My top-of-the-line Macbook Pro 15" locks up after about an hour (or less) of use when playing what is usually a Source Engine based game running in Windows on Bootcamp (booting into Windows). The screen goes black and the audio gets stuck in a loop and the game crashes. My only option is to hold down the power button.It seems of course to be caused by the GPU overheating.I can play a little longer when I have the laptop sitting on a packet of frozen spinach, sometimes peas or even chicken fillets.. but I don't need to say that this is unacceptable, especially when you're 3/4 a way through a L4D2 campaign.
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Jun 8, 2010
As I play some games, the CPU's temperature gets around 70 Celsius (160 or 170 in Fahrenheit). Fans are around 6k RPM (playing The Sims 3 on Windows 7 Professional, using Everest Ultimate Edition for monitoring). I just wonder if it's ok or not to be like that. BTW, should I put on the hard case while playing? And can someone give some advice for playing games on the MBP?
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Mar 31, 2012
I know the heating up issue has been raised several times all over the internet. But none of the discussions has satisfied my the concerns I have with my system. So I am going to put my case a new, although I believe the answers are going to be the same as on other similar discussions.
I recently bought MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2.2 GHz, late 2011, OS X Lion). The system usually runs perfectly. I just have two issues:
i. Occassionally it freezes up when more then one apps are running. I have noticed this is usually when Firefox is running in the background. Also happened with Safari a couple of times.
But my main concern and query is the point no. ii (below)
ii. During the normal usuage the fans don't make a noise (even with multiple apps that are not burden on the RAM). The systems heat up is as normal as that of a PC while running on its normal situation. However, when I play games (like BioShock, Sims etc) Mac just heats up immensly and fans kick in. I have never seen/felt a computer get this hot before.
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Oct 19, 2009
I am planning to buy a new 13" MBP but I am kind of concerned on the battery performance.
Specs:
a) 2.26 GHz CPU
b) Upgrade RAM to 4GB
c) Upgrade HD to 500GB 5400 WD
d) Brightness at 70% / with keyboard backlight / Bluetooth OFF
Questions: (Can you give me an estimate on the following)
1) How long will the battery last if I play Facebook games nonstop (poker / mafia wars / cafe world / etc.)
2) How long will the battery last if I play Sims3 nonstop?
3) How long will the battery last if I watch a DVD movie nonstop? (from the drive)
4) How long will the battery last if I type documents nonstop?
BTW, can this MBP 13" play sims3 in the default normal settings?
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Oct 18, 2010
My idea is this; buy the nvidia 3D vision, install windows 7 (since the nvidia 3D vision is windows only) and buy a 3D capable monitor, and I should be able to play games, view content in 3D. After doing research, I found that the nvidia Geforce 9600 GT is supported, however I found no indication that the nvidia Geforce 9600M GT is supported. My question is this, technically speaking should my plan work, or is the difference between the Geforce 9600 GT and 9600M GT significant enough to alter my idea.
My macbook pro is running the following:
Snow leopard
2.66GHz Intel core 2 duo processor
4gb memory
nvidia Geforce 9600M GT
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