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Luca
ಠ_ರೃ
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-06-27, 15:41

Quote:
Originally Posted by rotor
I recently upgraded my PM G4 Gigabit Ethernet with a 9000 PRO AGP card, and found out that my machine performed better with the Old Ati Rage 128 Pro. Especially when it came to Open GL performance.

When upgrading to OS X 10.4 the differences got bigger!

I was pretty surprised, though I´am able to understand that benchmarking does not tell all the tales about a cards performance.
You've answered your own question. Obviously you've run XBench on both and got a slightly higher score with the Rage 128. Such is life. XBench doesn't really give you a good indication of anything... the OpenGL tests are more indicative of processor performance than GPU performance. The only semi-consistent tests (that mean anything) are the CPU and Disk tests.

Ignore XBench entirely. It's almost worthless. Does OS X feel any faster with the Radeon 9000? Because it should. In fact, the difference should be tremendous when using things like Exposé and Dashboard.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rotor
Anyway, I find it strange that a relatively new card does´nt support new core technology in a OS upgrade.
Naw, the Radeon 9000 isn't new at all. It came out in July 2002, and is essentially the same as the Radeon 8500, a card that came out a year earlier. So this video card is going on four years old. At the time, the Radeon 8500 was the fastest, most advanced video card on the market, and was the first ATI card to use the R200 core.

The Radeon 9000, on the other hand, was released as an affordable, midrange card, and that was three years ago. At the same time, ATI also had the Radeon 9700 out, which was the very earliest video card compatible with Pixel Shader 2.0 (and thus, the earliest card that now supports Core Image). The Radeon 9700 cost something like $400 at the time too... and nVidia didn't even have a single card (not even an expensive one) with Pixel Shader 2.0.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rotor
And since I got a machine with 2xAGP, I am fu**ed?
Not really, unless you wanted to get a Radeon 9600 Pro. Anything above a Radeon 9000 is probably going to be overkill for your machine, but if you want you can still upgrade to a retail Radeon 9800 (compatible with AGP 2x/4x) or a GeForce 4 Titanium.

Last edited by Luca : 2005-06-27 at 15:43.
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