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
UI Performance
Mac OS X relies on a fully OpenGL accelerated GUI to, in a sense, make things look pretty (and enable features like Exposé). But despite what you may think, the majority of UI performance is still dependent upon the CPU. Until Apple enables Quartz Extreme 2D in Tiger, all UI elements are CPU rendered and, with the appropriate GPU, are simply treated as AGP textures and composed on the GPU itself. Although the majority of the work is still done on the CPU, there is an element of GPU interaction that can impact performance.In order to measure the GPU's impact on overall UI responsiveness, we turn to XBench, a synthetic test that can give us a slight idea of UI performance. The three tests that we focus on are XBench's Quartz, OpenGL and UI tests. The latter is possibly the most important to UI performance, but all are interesting.
The Quartz test focuses on Quartz rendering performance and is mostly CPU bound, but as we mentioned earlier, there is a slight impact of graphics performance. More than anything, we're looking at driver maturity here, since the test uses almost 100% of the CPU (it is only a single threaded test).
The OpenGL performance test is more of a primitive 3D test than anything else. It doesn't really impact UI performance at all - it's more of a basic texturing test as it makes no use of complex shaders.
The most interesting test is the UI test, which basically tests multiple UI elements and scrolling performance under OS X.
The rest of the ATI solutions perform basically identical to one another, with the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition falling to the bottom of the list.
With the synthetic benchmarks out of the way, let's look at some games...
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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?