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
Return to Castle Wolfenstein Performance
We didn’t want to use Quake III and Doom 3 isn’t quite ready yet for the Mac platform (although the 10.3.7 update improved Doom 3 performance by a decent amount…so we’re told), so we resorted to Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
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.
35 Comments
View All Comments
a2daj - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
I forgot to add that I enjoyed the depth of the article, particularly the information about dual-link DVI. Hopefully, that will clear up some common misconceptions regarding DL DVI.aliasfox - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
I applaud the Mac benchmarking- handled in a fair and objective manner, with the professionalism I've come to expect from AnandTech. If you can get your hands on Motion, that is apparently a non-game graphics card intensive program.As I read through the article, I missed one important fact: what setting is the processor set on the G5? All G5 desktops offer the option of running the processor always at highest (in this case, 2.0 GHz), or at a lower speed, the "Reduced" setting. Reduced cranks up processor performance on demand, but the performance difference between that and Highest is still noticeable under the type of scrutiny that AnandTech does.
Now, before any PC user wonders why there are power settings on a desktop machine, let me offer an answer: when you don't need the processor (when you're typing in Word, for example), it throttles down, allowing the entire computer to run cooler, and therefore quieter, as the fans can then run at lower speeds.
a2daj - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
Battlefield 1942 and Jedi Outcast as well as Jedi Academy are both available for Mac OS. Same with Call of Duty. I'm surprised he ended up resorting to RtCW. Call of Duty would have been a more interesting test. Splinter Cell is also available. Anand, if you'd like any info on what to test for Mac gaming I'd be happy to provide some suggestions, particularly when it comes to some of the Mac specific settings in various games.Xbench... ugh. The OpenGL test in Xbench is useless. It's shown scores which allude to a Rage 128 being faster than a Radeon 9800 Pro.
skunkbuster - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
that 6800 Ultra DDL is freakin HUGE!shabby - Wednesday, January 5, 2005 - link
How aboot some doom3/farcry/hl2/sw:bf/sims2/battlefield/jedi/ benchmarks? Oh wait... n/m ;)