ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition: One Card for All
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 19, 2005 12:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Test
Despite the fact that the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition doesn't use the most desirable gaming GPU in the world, we have to evaluate its performance as one to see exactly where it falls in the grand scheme of things. PC users can look back at any of our Radeon 9600 articles to get an idea of the performance of the GPU in PC games, as this performance comparison will only focus on Mac platforms.For our test bed, we used a Power Mac G5 with dual G5 2.0GHz processors and 1GB of OCZ DDR400 memory. We used a Dell 2001FP with the desktop resolution set to 1600 x 1200. The system was running OS X 10.4.2 with all of the latest updates installed as of today. The only extra software installed was ATI's control panel, which ships with the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition (both the Mac and PC software is included in the box on two separate CDs).
ATI's Mac control panel lets you configure quite a bit, especially with regards to flat panel display options:
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Guspaz - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
In the list of stores, you have "The Future Shop".Future Shop, a Canadian retailer similar to Best Buy (actually bought out by Best Buy a while ago), has no "the" in the name. It is simply "Future Shop".
karioskasra - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
ATi's got to make the news headlines somehow. Now if cards were hot swappable then I could see a market for this, but currently if you use a PC and you buy this card, you might as well save the money for a session with your shrink.Why is this posted in the PC section again? Why would any PC user want this card?
phisrow - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
This sort of card isn't going to impress the gamers; but it is exactly the sort of thing that probably makes Matrox, and their ilk, really nervous. It looks like, in the next few years, pure 2d desktops won't really exist anymore, except among people who really don't care. So everyone will need a decent GPU. Also, except for hardcore cheapskates and/or the "LCDs are t37 suxx0r" crowd, a good chunk of the computer using population will being using big DVI connected panels within the next few years.This is pretty much the perfect card for such an application. Especially now that pretty much anything will do for all but gamers and specialized workstation tasks, the upgrade that people will want will be high resolution panels. Is this expensive by the standards of 9600s? Certainly. Is it quite cheap compared to the few other cards that can drive huge displays? Certainly.
a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Did any of you bother reading the article? How many ATI or NVIDIA consumer PC offerings out there can drive an Apple 30" cinema display at the native resolution? That display reguires a dual-link DVI connector. I don't know of any other consumer level PC video card which has one. That's the main PC target.Kazairl11 - Sunday, August 21, 2005 - link
"That display reguires a dual-link DVI connector. I don't know of any other consumer level PC video card which has one."Monarch Computer has the AGP XFX GeForce 6800 128 MB DDR/8x-AGP/TV-Out/Dual-DVI (Retail Box) for $163. That makes $200 for a 9600 Pro look pretty sick.
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant....">XFX GeForce 6800 at Monarch Computer
PrinceGaz - Sunday, August 21, 2005 - link
Dual-link DVI is different from the card having two DVI sockets.A dual-link DVI socket has double the bandwidth of a standard single-link DVI socket (330MHz vs 165MHz). That allows it to drive a display at a very high resolution with a normal refresh-rate.
That XFX card has two standard single-link DVI sockets and therefore cannot be used at such high resolutions with the DVI digital connection as the 9600Pro in this review.
MCSim - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
I bet that NVIDIA is releasing FX 5700 Ultra Mac/PC edition very soon. =)Avalon - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Should have done this with a newer GPU. No point in this thing being PC compatible for $200.ViRGE - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Humm, I find it interesting that ATI is finally releasing a cross-platform card so close to the Apple transition to x86. Considering OpenFirmware is being dropped, the Mac side of this card will have to be completely redone for the new x86 Macs, so a card like this wouldn't have much of a shelf life I would think.beorntheold - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Don't ATI have anything better to do I wonder? Like saving their PC market for example?