IMAC Nvidia vs. Ati : Longterm support/stability vs performance?

Hi All,

I'm looking at the new imac and am waffling between the nvidia gt130 and the radeon 4850. I have read the threads on the two cards , which have been very helpful. It is clear that the ATI is the faster card. I am confused about something else.

My confusion stems from a friend adamantly telling me based on his experience: "Go for Nvidia. I would place my values more on robustness and longterm stability than simply getting the fastest thing out there. Its better supported by pro apps anyways."

I plan to use this mac for Photoshop, MAYA, Final Cut, and the occasional game.

Is my friends advice correct or is his experience simply an anomaly?

I have been unable to verify or discredit these ideas, and am hesitant to run out and buy either before i do one or the other.

Thankyou for any insight.

your friend has got a point there, but Nvidia and ATI do not put a lot towards their mac drivers. more like apple themselves do more work on the drivers if u ask me. from what i have heard the GT130 is actually is a rename from the older generation 9000 series(which is a total load of bull, same card different name). and there is the 4850 which is part of the recent ATI generation video cards (probably one of the best selling one out there). now 4850 will out perform in both pro apps and definitely gaming. now the reason why you friend preaches Nvidia is because in the PC universe, Nvidia has the best stability out there (and they have been king for a while until recently).

ROGV3: Thanks for your post. You are spot on that his experiences have been on PC. At the end of your post is the idea that ATI recently has become either as or more stable than NVIDIA. I take it this is for Mac. If so, it is very strange for apple to put Nvidia in 3/4 of the new imacs. Moreover if apple is doing most of the driver work then it should be pretty solid, or at least I'll be covered if it's not.

In that case I would clearly go with the radeon. Am I correct in saying my friends advice was true for PC, but now quite the opposite for Mac?

the reason why Nvidia is on most of the macs now is because it has the license to manufacture the chipset for intel, the Nvidia 9400 occurs most often on the apple sku's is because its cheap, and its integrated with the chipset which is another money saver. ATI can't do integrated graphics and chipset licensing because their parenting company (AMD) directly competes with intel in the processor market. now for the GT130 and 4850 are completely different from the 9400 on price and performance (their not integrated).

Driver wise, i own a imac 17" with ATI X1600 graphics and there has been no problems thus far. and if there is any graphics problem apple will have it fixed in no time (usually software update to remove any bugs)

over the recent years Nvidia has been kicking ATI all over the place, now ATI had turned the table on Nvidia recently on performance in the PC market. it is quite similar in the mac market, but there has been a restricted juggle between ATI and Nvidia. Apple usually tends to be one sided in the low end (Nvidia) and high end (ATI). ATI is par on stability with Nvidia with macs, performance wise ATI is best out there

Personally, your friend just sounds like a NVidia fanboy. While I use to be an ATI fanboy, if you want the best performance between those two cards the ATI is the way to go.

The whole stability issue had nothing at all to do with short or long term hardware stability, but with driver issues ATI had in the late 90's and early 00's. While ATI was kicking NVidia's rear all over the place for many years in the speed crown category during that time frame, ATI had plenty of driver issues. It primarily was in dealing with getting them installed / uninstalled / reinstalled and working properly. It was not always an easy task. This will be a non-issue in OS X. (And both companies are making some great hardware today.)

R0GV3, bobtomay:

Thanks for your posts. I now have a better understanding of the relationships between the manufacturers as well as why my friends experience does not apply in this case. The ATI card is now clearly the way to go. Thankyou

I would go with the radeon in this case. Both will be just as stable as one another. The ATI card will just be more powerful in this case. On the PC however, I stick with my nVidia cards, gotta love PhysX!

Prophecies said:

I would go with the radeon in this case. Both will be just as stable as one another. The ATI card will just be more powerful in this case. On the PC however, I stick with my nVidia cards, gotta love PhysX!

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ati just released their version of physyx called havok and opencl

Does anyone know how the new entry level NVIDIA GeForce 9400M iMacs compare with the older ATI2600 models?

From everything I've read, the 2600 pro will outperform the 9400m.

R0GV3 said:

ati just released their version of physyx called havok and opencl

Click to expand...

The only problem is that software titles tend to be written for one or the other, physx has a much stronger game base then Havok does so it's going to be a challenge - especially to convince game makers to support Havok vs PhysX or support them both - it'll be interesting to see what happens since NVidia cards had hardware support for physx before ATI had any extra support for physics engines AFAIK.

Unless there comes a generic front end handler - it'll probably be a battle of platforms. And when I say a generic front end handler, I'm talking like a OpenGL or DirectX library to handle physics that will tie into the PhysX or Havok engine where a developer can write one code and have it apply to either depending on whichever is available. Although the battle hasn't been big yet (physX been available in 8 series nvidia cards, which are old now), I'm sure it will explode as more and more people want those really cool effects and with offloading of physics to the graphics card from the CPU would allow for more to take place, improving the visuals. As a simple example - look at Sacred 2, came out with some cool effects and such, and then later came out with their 2.4 patch which supports PhysX which really enhances the FX of the game (movement and such of leaves, shadows, rocks, etc.)

I'll be curious to see what happens, especially considering PhysX from what I read is integrated (or being integrated with) nvidia's cuda framework (see: PhysX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) so we might see physx on the Mac using hardware the the nvidia at some point, possibly sooner then the ATI Havok (from what I read while searching about physx and osx there was a game written a while back for OSX that used physx, but it was before nvidia bought agea (sp?) so I doubt it supports the hardware acceleration on the nvidia cards).

A lingering concern of mine is which card would run MAYA better or similar professional 3D applications (CAD, 3D studiomax.)

From what I understand the measure of this is Open GL compatibility. I have heard that Nvidia leads in this case. or again is this only for the PC and on the Mac ATI's Open GL support is just as good if not better? I basically want to avoid not being able to run MAYA for getting the ATI card.

Which card do you guys think will run quiter/cooler? I've heard contradicting information. One of which is that the ATI card will use twice the voltage. The other of which is that its built by a smaller manufacturing process and will therefore generate less heat... It's all hearsay from other threads but that's the gist of it.

Lastly if any enlightened soul has an extra minute what is Open CL and it's (if any) relationship to Open GL ? Just curious

Nethfel said:

From everything I've read, the 2600 pro will outperform the 9400m.

Click to expand...

mmm not much of an "upgrade" then is it, and the price has gone through the roof in the UK