The NVidia GTX285 for Mac has been out for a while now, and Dave Girard takes one for a test drive. He shows the GTS285 on both Mac and Windows, and compares it against another popular high-end MAc graphics card, the Radeom 4870. He puts it through a variety of gaming tests on Windows, and on the Mac he shows it with Maya, Mudbox, Final Cut, and others. The results? Well, here’s what he has to say about the Mudbox tests:
The GTX 285 gets spanked badly here despite the 159GB/s bandwidth of the GTX 285 vs. the Radeon’s 115 GB/s. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by this though, since the Quadros have the same problem and it hampers sculpting in Mudbox on the Mac. For comparison, the GTX 285 gets 284 FPS in Windows Vista. I know that the more polished Windows Mudbox code is likely also a factor, but the Radeon 3870—a year-old card that costs half as much—gets 97 FPS. So it’s safe to say the GTX 285 drivers are at fault. Even the 256MB 8600M in my MacBook Pro squeezes out 30 FPS.
And it’s the same for almost all of them. The culprit? The NVidia OpenGL drivers on OSX simply aren’t up to par with the Windows versions.
