ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition: Competition in the Mac Market
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2005 7:38 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Test
Measuring game performance on the Mac platform leaves us with many of the same issues we have on the PC side of things – there are a lot of games we’d like to test, but most of them lack built in benchmarking functionality.
On the PC side we’ve managed to get around the lack of benchmarks by resorting to using frame counters like Fraps, however we have yet to find a suitable low-overhead equivalent for OS X.
Unfortunately what this leaves us with is a very limited set of benchmarks with which to measure GPU performance under OS X, something that doesn’t make us very happy. The arrival of Doom 3 for OS X will add another useful title to our suite, but that is still at least another month away. World of Warcraft has proven to be an interesting test, but it lacks repeatable benchmark functionality (we will still be looking at its performance on the Mac after CES).
We will continue to push for and look at decent Mac GPU tests and are always up for suggestions, but until our suite is further developed we apologize that we can’t bring you the usual depth of our GPU coverage. Given that this is our first stab at a Mac GPU review, we can only promise that things will get better from here on out, especially now that we are in direct communication with the Mac teams at ATI and have also gotten NVIDIA to listen to our Mac queries.
We are now your conduit to the Mac teams at these two GPU manufacturers, so let us know what you’d like for them to hear and we will carry on the message much as we do in the PC world. After all, that was our goal with starting up the Mac section on AnandTech – to help the end user, regardless of what OS platform they are using.
With that said, let’s look at our test bed configuration for this review. The X800 XT Mac Edition is a G5-only add-in card, so our test bed is obviously a G5. We used a stock G5 2.0GHz from Apple, the only upgrade being memory. Our full configuration is as follows:
Dual G5 2.0GHz
1.5GB OCZ DDR400 G5 SDRAM
160GB SATA HDD
23” Cinema Display (1920 x 1200 desktop resolution)
Mac OS X 10.3.7
Halo 1.5.1 (Advanced Pixel & Vertex Shader Path, Extreme Lens Flare)
Unreal Tournament 2004 Patch 3339 (Maximum Quality Settings)
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (High Quality Settings)
We used Apple's ATI/NVIDIA drivers bundled with 10.3.7 simply because they are more up to date than the retail ATI/NVIDIA drivers.
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Dennis Travis - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
Very well done Anand. Thanks so much.I am told Doom III should be out sometime late January or early Feburary. Battlefield and Call of Duty have been out for a long time as well as The Sims and other games.
aliasfox - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
#12You may be able to flash the X800XT's firmware with PC firmware to get it to work, though as the cards are slightly different, I wouldn't guarantee it working. $500 is a lot to just try this out (and find out it doesn't work).
KirinRiotCrash - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
ProviaFan is right. The Mac versions of the ATI cards use a different BIOS so that they work with Macs. I would guess if you were to hook this up on a PC, you'd need to reflash it with your trusty set of BIOS hacking tools in order to make it work on the PC. I do know that in the Mac side, in order for a PC ATI card (and some nVidias, too)to work properly, it needs to be re-flashed first.ProviaFan - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
Aside from the ADC connector, I would suppose that these cards use different BIOSes from their PC counterparts - something that would make them incompatible even if everything else were identical.Poser - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
I'd also like to know what #9 asked - what would happen if you plugged one of these in a PC? What're the hardware diffences that make graphics cards incompatible?Poser - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
Speaking as someone who dislikes Apple, I still find these articles interesting. It's peering into niches which I'd otherwise never bother to look at, much like the reviews of high end workstations. In both cases, I can't see myself ever buying the products discussed, but there's always little tidbits that flesh out my understanding of computing in general - stuff like the paragraph on the TMDS links.Thanks for yet another well written article, Anand.
jeremyk44 - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
What about a consumer PC card that can run the 30 inch display? What would happen if you plugged the ATI card into a PCGooger - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
#2 It's standard size for some Workstation Cards, and is within PCI Spec. You are just used to seeing 1/4 sized PCI cardsKirinRiotCrash - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
As both a PC and a Mac user, I really do appreciate this kind of article posted on a PC-centric site. It doesn't look biased and it's rather professional. (Whether hardcore PC users appreciate these kind of Mac-based articles is another story).Although, I would agree that you should also include Motion benches there, too. Motion, I heard, is rather hard on the graphics card. Last I checked, a minimum of a Radeon 9500 is required.
OriginalReaper - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
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