ATI Radeon HD 5770 vs Nvidia 570 GTX on Mac, part 2
Gamers primarily install higher performance cards such as the Nvidia 570 GTX in a Mac Pro so that games run better under Boot Camp. But is there also an improvement over the stock ATI Radeon HD 5770 when running games under Mac OS?
We continue our tests to find out (part 1 can be found here).
Test: Rage
Rage is about as state-of-the-art as it gets for pushing GPUs on the Mac. We ran through a couple of minutes gameplay on the ATI then swapped it for the NVIDIA.
Hardware:
- 2010 Mac Pro (5,1)
- 10 GB RAM
- 7200 RPM disk drive
- OS 10.7.5
- Stock video driver for ATI
- Stock video driver for Nvidia (7.28.1.295.10.15f03, CUDA 4.2.10)
Rage video settings:
- Resolution: 1920×1080
- Antialiasing: None
- Vsync: On
- Texture cache: Large
- Texture detail: On
- Anisotropic filter: High
- GPU transcode: disabled
- FOV: 92
Results
The ATI frame rate peaks at around 39 fps, but is typically at 30 fps. It actually seems as if there might be a frame rate limiter active because it stays constantly at 30.
The Nvidia peaks at around 70 fps, but is typically at 38 fps.
Test: LuxMark 2.0
LuxMark is a popular way to test OpenCL on the Mac, and we ran the default “Sala” (medium complexity) scene (GPU only) on both cards.
Results
The ATI card achieved a score of 375, whilst the Nvidia reached 1191, over 3 times faster.