Owners of the 2006 Mac Pro have been waiting for Apple to release NVIDIA’s 8800GT for them to install in their Macs. The 8800GT shows significant performance increases on the 2008 Mac Pro over other video cards but this is not the case with the earlier Mac Pro. In fact, the 8800GT in Apple’s own Leopard operating system benchmarks below ATI’s X1900XT and the standard NVIDIA 7300GT in some tests.

Below I’ve created a table comparing the NVIDIA 7300GT (standard in the 2006 Mac Pro), the ATI X1900XT (an upgrade still available for 2006 Mac Pro owners) and the NVIDIA 8800GT for 2006 Mac Pro (just released with high expectations).

The higher the number, the faster the test result. All these tests were performed using the same 2007 Mac Pro (MacPro1,1) with results averaged from three consecutive tests, all tests were ran after restarting the computer. Computer specifications: 2007 Mac Pro with dual 2.66Ghz dual-core Xeon processors, 4Gb of RAM, two 10,000RPM SATA hard drives in RAID 0 on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 using Xbench 1.3.

Below is a chart comparing the information from the table above. Taller bars equal a faster result (taller = better).

Conclusion: Since Apple and NVIDIA have just released the 8800GT for the older Mac Pro it is safe to assume that Apple has not yet written drivers that fully utilize the 8800GT’s full potential. I expect to see a software update in a few days or weeks to address the performance issues in OS X. This is the problem with Vista and Apple’s 8800GT for 2006 Mac Pros under Bootcamp, Vista (x64) recognizes the 8800GT as a standard VGA video card and does not allow any 3D applications to run, Vista uses a standard video driver and NVIDIA’s driver utility don’t recognize the card either (but thats another post at a later time).

A graphic showing the chart, table and test information can be found here.