gpuimac
Just for my curiosity and knowledge, from a software and hardware standpoint, in reference to the iMac 27" graphic processor brand, what are the difference between:
The NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M with 1GB and the AMD Radeon R9 M290 with 2GB, in terms of speed, performance and responsiveness? And why does the iMac 27" Retina model have the AMD GPU and not the NVIDIA GPU?
Your question is somewhat difficult to answer, because not all is based upon “raw” performance.
I’d say that it would be better if you consider the following differences:
RAM
HARD DRIVES
Video
RAM Speed, Bus Speed, etc
All these things don’t really change your day to day workflow, yes, some Front Side Buses are faster than others, but in the end, the difference is probably not a decision factor. (given similar specs of course).
Connectivity
So which one do I chose?
The answer is, there’s no answer. You have to evaluate your priorities. I wouldn’t change my Mac Pro (early 2008) for a new iMac, because I already have two 27’’ screens, already have 4 drives in there (with some RAID going on) + an SSD for the OS and I have replaced the stock video card (NVIDIA) with an ATI (because my nVidia Failed and the ATI costed the same as the out of warranty nVIdia). My Mac Pro is going to turn 3 years soon and it works fantastically.
The iMac on the other hand, is a beautiful looking machine that if you use paired with a lot of BlueTooth stuff, makes your desk look very pristine. Sadly, I need storage, redundancy and multi-core for some of the things I do for a living, so the 8 cores of my Mac Pro are needed in my case.
I notice that the MultiCore is godsend sometimes, you see processes hanging there at 100% and the rest of the CPUs and cores take care. But of course, a normal World of Warcraft user wouldn’t even use 5% of all that.
I suggest you visit Anandtech’s Mac section if you want some benchmarks and reviews. It’s usually filled with good impressions and comments and sometimes comparisons. I don’t know if you’ll find an exact comparison between those two models, but you might come up with something similar.
My Personal Opinion
Get the Mac Pro if you’re going to develop and already have screens (or the budget to buy them), because in the future, when you want your time machine, your drive cloned, more space, etc., the Mac Pro is going to be much more helpful than stacking fragile external Firewire/USB drives.
UPDATE ON VIDEO
According to the experts (tegeril), the “ATI 2600 Pro is a substantially superior card to the Nvidia 7300GT”. You’ll have to find some benchmarking for that and of course evaluate if you’re going to need the extra power or the expandability is better.
Unfortunately, there is not a cheap good or ideal way to do this.
The graphics card is a key integrated part of the logic board on the MacBook Pro, there really is no separation of it from it to do an upgrade, short of replacing the entire motherboard, and even then you would be limited to what was available at the time for that generation of MacBook Pro.
See that orange highlighted square, thats the NVidia GeForce pictured below:
Honestly, the Matrox route is probably the most affordable workable solution to this problem.
This MacBook Pro also lacks an ExpressCard/34 slot or Thunderbolt so you really can't go the route of an external graphics card. And even if you could you would be talking over $500 USD just to get the external PCI express chassis, for example Magma's ExpressBox 1 starts at $829 for just one external PCI Express slot, you would still need to spend another ~ $200 to buy a mac compatible graphics card.
Your last option is to maybe reevaluate if this MacBook Pro is the right machine for your needs. Would a newer model MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt solve this problem, maybe maybe not. If you don't have two Thunderbolt Displays, you are kind of still out of luck hooking up dual displays to even a Thunderbolt MacBook Pro, with out the need for expensive external adapters.
Would an iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro better suit your computing needs, complimented with a basic MacBook Air or iPad of some kind for your mobility needs.
Best Answer
I always use this site to give me an idea of relative speeds of graphics cards - http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php [click the G3D header twice to sort by speed]
It's not necessarily any absolute indicator of the suitability of any given card for a specific purpose, but it's enough to give them some kind of recognisable hierarchy.
From it, you'll see that the M290 is considerably faster than the 755M, though neither is exactly stellar in performance.
As to why, only Apple can know that. They periodically switch between AMD/ATI & NVidia & have done for many years.