If you've got a Mac Pro tower and you're thinking of upgrading to Leopard, know that Leopard apparently pushes graphics cards in ways Tiger did not. Unfortunately, as a result, certain viddy cards that were marginal on Tiger suddenly become problematic on Leopard.
It's bad enough that Apple offer few video card options in its high-end towers, and what it does offer is often weak and lagging behind the PC world. This, from a company making hardware and software to support content producers!
Anyway, when I got my Mac Pro tower, it wasn't long until I wasn't satisfied with the stock nVidia card that came with it. So after a few months I got the ATI Radeon 1900 upgrade. A 512 meg card. Good card, greatly improved performance in Aperture and then later Lightroom when I made the switch. It was expensive, though. Ouch.
Flash forward about one year. Do I still think it's a good card? Not so much. I upgraded to Leopard, and now the card is showing its weaknesses. Based on discussions over at the Apple forums, I'm not alone. Leopard apparently pushes the card harder, and it can't take it and suffers from overheating issues. The on-screen symptoms are thin vertical lines that appear within and stay with windows, at random times, and occasional tearing. Of course, now that I'm writing about and want a screen capture to show you, it's not doing it!
In Boot Camp, the card is all but worthless. Playing a PC game, I can expect maybe 15 minutes tops before the card overheats and locks up the entire system. When it does work, horrible artifacts pop up all the time - like a long black spike right out of the top of my airborn soldier's helmet. Kinda hard to move around underground Nazi bunkers with one of those sticking outta your noggin.
Those that reverted from Leopard back to Tiger saw the problem go away. And if you bought one of these cards recently, apparently you will NOT experience the problem as it's in the third revision. I had a first revision. I guess the figured out the issues.
(By the way, if you want to find out how hot or cool your Mac Pro, Macbook, or Macbook Pro is running - and control its fan speed - check out smcFanControl (the 2.x version). Pretty neat. If I know I'll be pushing the video card, I can bump up the fan speed to help keep the temperature down.)
The good news is that Apple is sending me a replacement card, free of charge, even though I'm past the one year warranty date. I think they realize it's a defective card by now - if all the complaints in the forum are any indication.
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