ATI Radeon HD 3870 Mac Edition
On June 12, 2008 AMD announced they would be releasing the Mac edition of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. The card promises performance enhancements on not just professional applications, but also gaming too, which has been the achilles heel of the HD 2600.
Before the introduction of the HD 3870, Mac Pro owners had to choose between gaming or professional application performance, now they can have the best of both worlds. According to Barefeats benchmarks the HD 3870 clearly surpasses HD 2600 and 8800GT in all Core Image benchmarks by a substantial margin.
On the gaming front things aren’t as clear cut, for the most part HD 3870 has closed the performance gap the 8800GT has enjoyed, except for a few titles powered by id Tech, where the 8800GT out performed the HD 3870 by 30% on average.
For those energy conscious Mac Pro owners, another key area of improvement is the performance per watt metric. The HD 3870 has doubled it’s performance per watt in comparison to the previous generation HD graphics card, 2900 XT.
In the PC industry where 800 watt power supplies aren’t out of the norm for gaming rigs, it’s nice to see more power efficient graphics cards making way to the desktop, when traditionally those power management technologies were mainly confined to laptops.
In terms of performance per cost, ATI’s latest Mac Pro graphics card offering can’t be beat, delivering unrivaled Core Image performance for professional applications and comparable gaming performance to the 8800GT.
ATI Radeon HD 3870 Mac Edition is compatible with the previous generation of Mac Pro systems, and will be available later this month at the price of $219.
Benchmark Roundup
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