The ATi 9200 (PCI), is it any good?

[usurp]

I posted in another thread about things I could do to upgrade my Mac. I already upgraded the CPU and now am interested in upgrading VGA card.

I have a Digital Audio PowerMac (with AGP 4x)
a Dual 1.6ghz processor
1GB of RAM
Geforce 2MX vga card

I want the option to be able to have dual screen support, and I want games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 run nicely on my mac. (Quake currently runs very nicely, unreal kinda choppy at the highest quality on outdoor levels).

Will the ATI 9200 be good enough? It selling for $114 which is ok by me. It also seems like I dont have any other option. Will this card be faster then my current one?

thanks

[staph]

OWC will sell you a modded Radeon 9600 AGP for $119. It has dual head support, but no support for power through ADC.

It would be a huge upgrade from a Geforce 2 — and give you CoreVideo support!

[usurp]

is this the one you are talking about?
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Apple/630ATI96G4/

what is corevideo support and does the fact it have only 64MB of Vram as opposed to the 9200's 128mb vram a disadvantage?

i checked ati and apple store and stuff, the only card they have in stock that would work on my mac is the 9200. but this 9600 looks interesting if its better then the 9200.

[Gargoyle]

If you have an AGP slot, don't buy a PCI card. I am sure if you hunt a little deeper you'll find a AGP card that fits your needs and will give you better performance than a PCI one!

[usurp]

well at the moment the ATI card staph pointed me to looks pretty good and they can even ship right to Kuwait. I am ready to place an order just want to know if 9600 is better then 9200.

[staph]

well at the moment the ATI card staph pointed me to looks pretty good and they can even ship right to Kuwait. I am ready to place an order just want to know if 9600 is better then 9200.

It's a trade off, but my gut feeling is that the 9600 is still the superior card.

Luca could probably give you a better idea, he seems to take a particular interest in this kind of thing.

That was the card, btw.

CoreVideo == CoreImage (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/) == hardware accelerated routines for graphics and video rendering, ala Motion. It also gets you support for full Quartz hardware acceleration, when Apple decide to turn it on.

Basically, it comes down to the cool ripples on Dashboard. You know you want them.

[Luca]

It's much better. As Gargoyle said, if you have an AGP slot you need an AGP card. Technically you can use a PCI card but that's kind of silly. Oh and 128 MB vs. 64 MB of VRAM makes almost no difference.

Also, the 9600 supports CoreImage while the 9200 does not. Hell, if you use the PCI card, you won't even have Quartz Extreme support because QE requires an AGP video card.

Absolutely do NOT get the 9200 no matter what you do; it will not be an improvement at all because the main benefit to upgrading your video card (Quartz Extreme support) won't even work with it. The only people who should be getting PCI 9200s are people who need more than two monitors and people with PCI-only PowerMacs (Yikes! PowerMac G4s and earlier).

[usurp]

I want ripples!!! Thanks guys, I will be getting the 9600.

[Mugge]

Absolutely do NOT get the 9200 no matter what you do; it will not be an improvement at all because the main benefit to upgrading your video card (Quartz Extreme support) won't even work with it. The only people who should be getting PCI 9200s are people who need more than two monitors and people with PCI-only PowerMacs (Yikes! PowerMac G4s and earlier).

Whoa :eek: Didn't the PowerMac G4 have AGP?! I didn't think it was *that* old.

:confused:

[DMBand0026]

The original model (http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=g4pci&performa=off&sort=family&order=ASC) didn't.

[Mugge]

Thanks for the link DMBand0026!

Ok. the first model from 1999 didn't, now it makes more sense.

[Luca]

Actually, what happened is that Apple reused the old Blue G3 motherboard for the lowest-end PowerMac G4 at introduction. It was a notorious move... basically, they took the old motherboard, dropped a G4 processor into the socket, and removed the legacy ADB port. At the same time they issued a "firmware update" to the Blue G3s that made them incompatible with the G4 processor that came with the "Yikes!" PowerMac.

Pretty sneaky. Putting an older, crippled motherboard in a "new" machine and relegating it to the low end price point is not new to Apple, and it still continues today (with the low-end G5s having half the RAM slots and PCI instead of PCI-X). People even refer to the practice as "Yikes!-ing" or "pulling a Yikes!" sometimes.

Of course, in the case of the PowerMac G4s, they were MAJORLY crippled compared to the higher end "Sawtooth" machines. Sawtooths had AGP, could take up to 512 MB in each RAM slot (the Yikes! was limited to 256 MB per slot), used a faster ATA/66 bus for the main hard drive, and had more reliable Firewire. They used completely different processor interfaces, so the Yikes! now takes the same upgrades that are available for Blue and Beige G3s, while the Sawtooth uses the same processor upgrades that are used for all later PowerMacs through the Quicksilvers.

[usurp]

oh great, now the fcuking vga card is not available anymore on OWC. Should have ordered it yesterday fcuking A!

[staph]

They occasionally run out of stock — just wait and see if it comes back in.

There's also been rumblings about ATI releasing a dual firmware (Mac/PC) Radeon 9600 on xlr8yourmac — you might want to hang out and see what price point that debuts at.