ATI's 4870 HD and 4850 HD Graphics Cards Coming for Mac

Monday August 25, 2008 10:11 am PDT by Arnold Kim

Mac4ever (french) received word from ATI that while the Radeon HD 4870 X2 will not be coming for the Mac, ATI has confirmed that both the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4850 will be coming for the Mac "soon".

For those interested in benchmarks, AnandTech provides an extensive testing roundup of the two cards with benchmark comparisons to the ATI Radeon HD 3870 which was released for the Mac Pro in June.

BareFeats also provides more limited testing under Boot Camp between the Radeon 4870, Radeon 3870, GeForce 8800 GT, and (not available for Mac) nVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. While the GTX 280 beats the 4870 in most benchmarks, Barefeats still believes that the Radeon 4870 is the better choice for Apple:

Why? Because ATI has optimized their Mac Edition drivers and firmware for the Radeon 2600 XT and 3870 so that they run Core Image effects much faster than comparable nVidia cards including the GeForce 8800 GT and Quadro FX 5600.

In other words, if Apple is truly serious about optimizing their suite of Pro Apps (FCP, Motion, Aperture, etc.) for Core Image performance, then the Radeon HD 4870 should be the next CTO "shoe" they drop.

These cards are for use in the Mac Pro only, which allows the use of 3rd party graphics cards.

Related Roundup: Mac Pro

Buyer's Guide: Mac Pro (Caution)

Related Forum: Mac Pro

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