[NJRonbo]

I am a PC owner looking to buy my first Mac.

My PC has a X-FI card inside which is regarded as one
of the most revolutionary sound cards available.

There is never really a mention as to what kind of sound
card is nestled inside the Mac Pro.

Is their sound card comparable to the best cards out there?

Thanks in advance

[Big Mac]

revolutionary? Macs have built-in sound capabilities; they always have. Most everyone is satisfied with built-in sound, but some do get cards. What features do you need?

[NJRonbo]

I'll post a description from the Creative site:

# X-Fi 24-bit Crystalizer™ enhances MP3s and movies to sound better than they do on their original CD or DVD.

Utilizing the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor your music and movie audio is sent through a two-step quality enhancement process. First the processor converts the audio into 24-bit/96kHz quality using its virtually transparent SRC (Sample Rate Converter) engine. Then it remasters and selectively enhances the audio by analyzing and identifying which parts of the audio stream have been restricted/damaged during the compression stages to 16-bit and then to MP3.

Just basically looking to see if Mac sound cards are comparable
to the new sound card technologies for the PC.

Will the creative card work on a Mac? Please excuse my ignorance
as I am totally new to Macintosh and its hardware.

[Big Mac]

There aren't as many dedicated sound card options for the Mac, but there are some. I'm not an audio expert, or else I'd give you more advice.

[mduell]

Creative X-fi (and the rest of their products) is all about hype and bullshit. They've been doing the same crap for years, trying to sell $150 sound cards when a $5 chipset/$20 card is just as good.
It's not going to make a lossy compressed MP3 sound better than the CD source material. You can't do that. Upsampling a 16bit/44.1kHz source to 24bit/96kHz doesn't get you anything; you can't recreate the information that was lost (however small) when they sampled the audio at 16bit/44.1kHz.

As far as I know, the Mac Pro uses Intel's audio chipset: Intel High Definition Audio
I think you'll be happy with it, but if you need more/better input/output options, look at M-audio's internal and external sound cards.