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
Halo Performance
We list Halo as our most important game benchmark because it is the only test here to make reasonable use of pixel shaders, which again matters more for future games as well as OS X Tiger. Granted the shaders used here are not indicative of those that will be used in other games, but it’s important to look at shader tests whenever possible.
As you can expect, the X800 XT Mac Edition is significantly faster than the older 9800 Pro. With twice as many pixel pipes and more memory bandwidth, high resolution performance is improved significantly. The 6800 Ultra DDL ends up being 5% faster at 1600 x 1200 thanks to more memory bandwidth, but at lower resolutions the two are basically tied.
Enabling Anti-Aliasing is possible on the Mac version of Halo and thus we use it as our AA test as well:
At 1024 x 768 with 4X AA enabled it’s clear that the X800 and 6800 are in a totally different class of performance than the 9800, thus we excluded the 9800 from all higher resolution tests.
Interestingly enough while the 6800 Ultra was faster at high resolution tests, with AA enabled the advantage is clearly given to the X800 XT. The X800 XT’s higher fill rate appears to be more useful here than the 6800 Ultra’s memory bandwidth advantage, giving the AA performance nod to ATI over NVIDIA.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
35 Comments
View All Comments
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
.01% of your readers thank you for this article