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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Fulie - Saturday, December 10, 2005 - link
I just stumbled on to this write up and trying to get information on blending systems has been a major pain. I have a pc that is used for viewing images at high res. and an unused 23" older mac lcd (clear surround with a seperate power source and ADC TO DVI connector) display that I would like to use with this pc. I don't need game speeds but use dvd video on occasion. From the specs. It sounds like it will work, any ideas?sprockkets - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
the pinout of the card looks agp 2x and not 4x/8xPrinceGaz - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Just a minor amendment. On page 2 you mention that "The actual GPU isn't any different than what we've had on the Mac and PC side for a while; it still runs at 400MHz like the OEM Radeon 9600XT and 9650".The GPU of a 9600XT is clocked at 500MHz, not 400MHz. It is the 9600Pro which has a GPU clocked at 400MHz. Which is what you would expect as the card you reviewed is a 9600Pro.
a2daj - Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - link
The Apple OEM Radeon 9600 XTs were clocked at the same speed most PC manufacturers clocked their retail Radeon 9600 Pros. The OEM 9600 Pros were clocked even slower when they were first introduced.tooki - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
1. This is not the first cross-platform card. Most 3Dfx cards were cross-platform.2. The Power Mac G5 does not use a SATA optical drive, it's standard parallel ATA.
3. ADC's high power requirements are because of ADC's ability to drive a 17" CRT display, not because of large LCDs.
stratusgd - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
Actually, all G5 systems that Apple sells come with SATA drives, not PATA. Go look at Apple's website.SDA - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
The poster you are replying to is referring to optical drives, not hard drives. Optical drives are drives that read or write optical media such as CDs and DVDs.a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
"1. This is not the first cross-platform card. Most 3Dfx cards were cross-platform."A Mac specific firmware had to be on the 3dfx cards starting with the Voodoo3s. The Voodoo3s were unsupported but you can flash them to run in a Mac. You had to reflash them to run in a PC. The Voodoo 4s and 5s had Mac specific firmware. They had to be flashed to run in PCs. You couldn't take a PC version and put it in a Mac and get it to run without flashing it.
The Voodoo1s and 2s were just pass through cards which only did 3D so they didn't need Mac firmware to handle the 2D 16 bit Mac OS issues (5551 (Mac) vs 565 (PC))
lancediamond - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Not entirely clear if you could do that unless I missed it - if so, that'd be sort of cool maybe?a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Yes. That's the target PC audience.