ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition: Competition in the Mac Market
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2005 7:38 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Test
Measuring game performance on the Mac platform leaves us with many of the same issues we have on the PC side of things – there are a lot of games we’d like to test, but most of them lack built in benchmarking functionality.
On the PC side we’ve managed to get around the lack of benchmarks by resorting to using frame counters like Fraps, however we have yet to find a suitable low-overhead equivalent for OS X.
Unfortunately what this leaves us with is a very limited set of benchmarks with which to measure GPU performance under OS X, something that doesn’t make us very happy. The arrival of Doom 3 for OS X will add another useful title to our suite, but that is still at least another month away. World of Warcraft has proven to be an interesting test, but it lacks repeatable benchmark functionality (we will still be looking at its performance on the Mac after CES).
We will continue to push for and look at decent Mac GPU tests and are always up for suggestions, but until our suite is further developed we apologize that we can’t bring you the usual depth of our GPU coverage. Given that this is our first stab at a Mac GPU review, we can only promise that things will get better from here on out, especially now that we are in direct communication with the Mac teams at ATI and have also gotten NVIDIA to listen to our Mac queries.
We are now your conduit to the Mac teams at these two GPU manufacturers, so let us know what you’d like for them to hear and we will carry on the message much as we do in the PC world. After all, that was our goal with starting up the Mac section on AnandTech – to help the end user, regardless of what OS platform they are using.
With that said, let’s look at our test bed configuration for this review. The X800 XT Mac Edition is a G5-only add-in card, so our test bed is obviously a G5. We used a stock G5 2.0GHz from Apple, the only upgrade being memory. Our full configuration is as follows:
Dual G5 2.0GHz
1.5GB OCZ DDR400 G5 SDRAM
160GB SATA HDD
23” Cinema Display (1920 x 1200 desktop resolution)
Mac OS X 10.3.7
Halo 1.5.1 (Advanced Pixel & Vertex Shader Path, Extreme Lens Flare)
Unreal Tournament 2004 Patch 3339 (Maximum Quality Settings)
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (High Quality Settings)
We used Apple's ATI/NVIDIA drivers bundled with 10.3.7 simply because they are more up to date than the retail ATI/NVIDIA drivers.
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gizzard - Saturday, January 8, 2005 - link
Hey, that's me! =)Quite simply, the reason the ATI card is faster is because it has better drivers, (The higher core clock speed helps also.) You can really see it in the lower resolution Quake3 scores when even the 9600 XT and 9800 Pro beat out the 6800. Driver inefficiencies can sometimes be exposed by looking at low resolution performance, which is why I always publish them.
It is difficult to see the large performance deltas in Anand's review because he didn't perform many tests with FSAA and AF enabled — that is where the X800 XT shines. Also, his conclusion of the RtCW scores was not entirely accurate: "The story is pretty simple here, on older games, the 9800 is already CPU bound thus making the 6800 Ultra and X800 XT not too interesting to look at." RtCW is a heavily CPU bound game. Given the same CPU, you won't see a large delta unless you compare a Rage 128 to an X800 XT — and his results show that. I'm just not sure how he arrived at that conclusion . =)
I'm hoping that Anand will speak up in the comments section to clear things up. I'd be very interested in what he has to say. And as everyone said, what Anand is doing is A Good Thing.™
gankaku - Saturday, January 8, 2005 - link
I was interested to read Anand's take on the new ATi X800 XT for several reasons, including:1) his earlier fair, well-written article on a month with a Mac
2) his status in the PC World as an honest broker, and his rigorous testing procedures
3) the fact that his opinion does carry some weight, and may help improve hardware offerings in the Mac world. We've got it pretty good right now, but articles that spread light (and not just heat) are always appreciated.
But, after all that, his results surprised me. That's because I read an earlier review of the new ATi card at Inside Mac Games, with the results indicating that the ATi card is a much better buy.
I'm not enough of a geek to understand why ATi scored better at IMG, but I'm sure that some lively debate on this list will release both heat and light in the subsequent discussions here.
http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=...
karlreading - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
personally, i like macs about as much as i like bineg shot in my stomache and left to bleed to death. that said, all these people dissing anad for relesing a mac article are very silly. Its very refreshing to see a pc orientated site like anadtech give readers exposer to other computer circles, and whilst it exposes pc users to the mac side of things, it also may help bring some mac users to anandtech, and anything that brings more COMPUTER users together is welecomed IMHO.keep up the good work anand!!
a2daj - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
Forgot to add that 10.3.7 added some major shader performance improvements for Radeon 9600s and up, which in turn helped Halo performance.a2daj - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
As for Halo and FSAA:Mac Halo has always been able to do FSAA, but various driver bugs would effect different cards, essentially breaking the feature for some users. And yes, it looks great with FSAA ;) But most of those bugs have been worked out in various OS and Halo patches. Mac Halo 1.5 introduced hardware accelerated Lens Flares for users with OS 10.3.5 (presumably through the use of ARB Occlusion Query, which was finally implemented in Apple's OpenGL implementation with the release of 10.3.5). The previous combination of Halo Lens Flares (1.02-1.05.3) and FSAA could cause major performance hits, particularly in the last level during the escape. The older versions of Halo had to rely on glReadPixel to handle Lens Flares, which resulted in noticeable performance hits with Lens Flares set to High and Extreme. The Performance hit was made even worse when FSAA was enabled. Halo 1.5 fixed that.
a2daj - Friday, January 7, 2005 - link
For the G5 cards which need more power, the PRO in AGP Pro is supplying the extra power for the cards. That's the whole point of the PRO in AGP Pro slots. The ADC Power Nubin is just for ADC.aliasfox - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
Frame rates are lower than the PC scores for two reasons:- Most games outside of games based off of the Doom 3 and Quake III engines are DirectX, something that is nowhere on the Mac. So not only are all of these games ported over to a different processor architecture, but also over to OpenGL.
- The graphics cards were also tested on a 2.0 GHz G5- while still fast, is slower than a more modern 2.5 GHz machine. The 2.0 GHz was originally released in May 2003- roughly the same time as the FX-51 and 3.0 GHz P4. So yes, these scores are lower than those produced by top end PCs because it's older (though still not necessarily cheaper).
Chuckles - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
#23:A big chunk of the additional power for graphics cards comes from the 25-28V rail in G4's and G5's. This additional power is normally run though additional molexes in PC's, but in a Mac, the power goes through a seperate set of pins on the external end of the AGP (PRO) slot (the two-pin tab between the end of the DVI and AGP PRO connector).
Incidentally, on older Apple displays, the display itself was powered through the computer's 25V rail. This is no longer the case partially due to the 30" display's 150 W draw (6A @ 25V).
On another note. It's kind of annoying to see things CPU bound at high resolution.
mbhame - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
OriginalReaper - is that YOU???CindyRodriguez - Thursday, January 6, 2005 - link
Just finished...In my humble opinion, a much improved article to add to your Mac section.
Again, thanks for the Mac article done in a fair way. It's understandable difficult to bench video well on a Mac.
I'd be interesting to have seen a comparison of stock mac configs, like an apple branded 9600xt or the stock 5200 Ultra.
I'd also be interesting to see a comparison of a similar PC running an x800 with the same benchmarks... that is interesting from the perspective of how a competative market affects driver optimization efforts.
cheers,
cindy