XFX Radeon HD 6870 Vs. Galaxy/PNY Geforce GTX 550ti

[mizino]

Ok so I have a stable hackintosh build. Took a bit of work to get everything running but it finally does. Problem is I took a machine I had already laying around that needed a clean and got that working since most of its hardware I knew already worked. Thing is it had a Radeon HD 6870 2 gig card in it. Not a bad card by any means, but its not one with drivers for mac OS X. Now OS X does support it, but ATI doesn't support it with full drivers. So while I get graphics acceleration and such I can't help but wonder if I would get more out of a card that was actually supported to run under OS X by the manufacturer. Now I happen to have 2 old (well I say old, but they are about the same age as the 6870) GTX 550 ti's each with a gig of gddr 5 ram. My question to the community is this: Will I see any difference (gaming or other wise) from switching over to the GTX 550's? According to CPU boss the two cards (nvidia, and ATI) are pretty close in specs as such if there might be a performance benefit out of running one with specialized drivers it might be worth it. Anyway I'm rambling now, so if anyone has the answer I'll be paying attention.

 

[Fl0r!an]

Do you experience any issues with your 6870? Usually it should be supported pretty well. Not sure if a "2GB" model behaves differently though...

The 550Ti might need Web Drivers, not sure if it's included in Apples kexts. Performance-wise I'd also assume that they're pretty close...

 

[mizino]

Well, there is cuda core concerns in that eventually I would like to run photoshop and a few others on here, and the fact that I didn't get physx things at all when I ran arkham asylum a little while ago, but those are fundamentally not a problem persay. That being said I don't see any graphical glitches, though the card is pretty dated. I'm not sure if its being utilized in the most optimal way either, but it doesn't behave badly. Sadly I have two 550ti's which would definitely, in SLI mode, be much better than the single Radeon, but the SLi isn't supported in os x. Anyway the essential question is does the dedicated drivers, written specifically to take advantage of the 550ti warrant switching or is the general ATI driver built into OS X good enough?

 

[Fl0r!an]

The driver for the HD 6870 isn't bad IMO, but feel free to benchmark it against your 550Ti.

 

[mizino]

Problem is I'm afraid to shut it off...I was booting with cpus=1 to get past a kernal panic cycle, then I lost track of it during a reboot and it cycled a bit then came up....I don't want to shut it down cause its both stable and has all the CPU cores functioning lol.

 

[mizino]

so I sorted the booting, and changed out the graphics cards. I saw a small increase in frame rates from the radeon to the 2 geforce cards. Cinebench increased from mid 40's to 59 FPS, I was able to jump from mid settings to high settings on everything in tomb raider (no tress effects or physx options to speak of btw...) The frame rates in game play in asylum stayed mostly the same, and I ran the bench marks in Arkham city and got 30 to 40 fps. So all in all I think the 2 GeForce cards work better than the Radeon. When I get the chance I'll shut her down and see if I get anything different from a single graphics card and redo the benchmarks on the radeon to get exact differences.