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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a2daj - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
I forgot to add that I enjoyed the depth of the article, particularly the information about dual-link DVI. Hopefully, that will clear up some common misconceptions regarding DL DVI.aliasfox - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
I applaud the Mac benchmarking- handled in a fair and objective manner, with the professionalism I've come to expect from AnandTech. If you can get your hands on Motion, that is apparently a non-game graphics card intensive program.As I read through the article, I missed one important fact: what setting is the processor set on the G5? All G5 desktops offer the option of running the processor always at highest (in this case, 2.0 GHz), or at a lower speed, the "Reduced" setting. Reduced cranks up processor performance on demand, but the performance difference between that and Highest is still noticeable under the type of scrutiny that AnandTech does.
Now, before any PC user wonders why there are power settings on a desktop machine, let me offer an answer: when you don't need the processor (when you're typing in Word, for example), it throttles down, allowing the entire computer to run cooler, and therefore quieter, as the fans can then run at lower speeds.
a2daj - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
Battlefield 1942 and Jedi Outcast as well as Jedi Academy are both available for Mac OS. Same with Call of Duty. I'm surprised he ended up resorting to RtCW. Call of Duty would have been a more interesting test. Splinter Cell is also available. Anand, if you'd like any info on what to test for Mac gaming I'd be happy to provide some suggestions, particularly when it comes to some of the Mac specific settings in various games.Xbench... ugh. The OpenGL test in Xbench is useless. It's shown scores which allude to a Rage 128 being faster than a Radeon 9800 Pro.
skunkbuster - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
that 6800 Ultra DDL is freakin HUGE!shabby - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
How aboot some doom3/farcry/hl2/sw:bf/sims2/battlefield/jedi/ benchmarks? Oh wait... n/m ;)