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
UT2004 Performance
The next two games are much less important as they are older titles, but finding good Mac games to test with repeatable benchmarks is still tough at this point (especially lacking any Fraps-like frame counter utilities).
Our UT2004 test is a Flyby of DM-Antalus, the same test that was used under UT2003. We avoided using Botmatch tests as we have yet to confirm how deterministic the Botmatch tests are on the Mac platform; in the PC version of UT there were some patches where the bots would not always do the same thing, causing various Botmatch runs to produce different numbers, so until we confirm that the same isn’t happening under the Mac tests we’ll stick to Flyby performance.
Flyby performance ends up giving a better look at pure GPU performance as it removes all of the physics and AI calculations that the CPU would normally be performing, so while you get higher frame rates, you still end up finding out which cards are the fastest.
The 6800 Ultra continues to be slightly faster than the X800 XT, but not by a noticeable margin. Both the 6800 Ultra and the X800 XT are CPU bound at all resolutions here, the slight performance advantage of the 6800 Ultra indicates more mature drivers at least with respect to UT2004.
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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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