ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition: Competition in the Mac Market

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.