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
Final Words
As a card, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is an excellent offering. If possible to do without significantly driving costs up, we'd like to see Mac & PC compatible offerings of all of ATI's GPUs, ideally even doing away with discrete Mac and PC products and replacing them with a line of cards that just work regardless of platform.What ATI has done with the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is bring forth a 256MB card that offers a silent solution for those users wanting to move to a 30" Cinema Display. The actual OS X UI performance of the card is just as good as ATI's top-of-the-line X800 XT. So, unless you are playing any games or running any applications that make extensive use of pixel shaders, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is a very functional card to pair with a 30" display. The biggest draw in our opinion is the card's passive cooling; combine that with its 256MB frame buffer and you have a pretty decent solution for OS X users.
Unfortunately, once you fire up a game or applications like Motion or iMaginator that actually depend on good pixel shader performance, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition starts showing the age of its GPU. Honestly, for $200, we'd expect something closer to the entry level X800s or even the X700 Pro in terms of performance, not a two-year-old Radeon 9600 Pro. While ATI is making great efforts to bring equality between Mac and PC platforms by releasing a universal card like this one, by doing so on such a old and, by today's standards, underperforming GPU platform doesn't really help all that much.
So, while the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is useful, it is not the product that we're dreaming of. It is a fine solution for those users who are still running non-GPU accelerated applications, but not too useful beyond that.
Alongside the release of the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition, ATI is also changing around their retail Mac product line, as you can see from the slide below:
Then, of course, there's the 9600 Pro announced today at $199, which should be available shortly.
What's important to note here is that other than the entry level Radeon 9200, all of ATI's Mac Retail products will feature 256MB of memory. And the mid-range cards will have completely done away with ADC connectors in favor of dual DVI or DVI + VGA. While ATI has not announced any plans to bring any of their 512MB cards to the Mac market, we'd expect them to do so sometime next year.
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Guspaz - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
In the list of stores, you have "The Future Shop".Future Shop, a Canadian retailer similar to Best Buy (actually bought out by Best Buy a while ago), has no "the" in the name. It is simply "Future Shop".
karioskasra - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
ATi's got to make the news headlines somehow. Now if cards were hot swappable then I could see a market for this, but currently if you use a PC and you buy this card, you might as well save the money for a session with your shrink.Why is this posted in the PC section again? Why would any PC user want this card?
phisrow - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
This sort of card isn't going to impress the gamers; but it is exactly the sort of thing that probably makes Matrox, and their ilk, really nervous. It looks like, in the next few years, pure 2d desktops won't really exist anymore, except among people who really don't care. So everyone will need a decent GPU. Also, except for hardcore cheapskates and/or the "LCDs are t37 suxx0r" crowd, a good chunk of the computer using population will being using big DVI connected panels within the next few years.This is pretty much the perfect card for such an application. Especially now that pretty much anything will do for all but gamers and specialized workstation tasks, the upgrade that people will want will be high resolution panels. Is this expensive by the standards of 9600s? Certainly. Is it quite cheap compared to the few other cards that can drive huge displays? Certainly.
a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Did any of you bother reading the article? How many ATI or NVIDIA consumer PC offerings out there can drive an Apple 30" cinema display at the native resolution? That display reguires a dual-link DVI connector. I don't know of any other consumer level PC video card which has one. That's the main PC target.Kazairl11 - Sunday, August 21, 2005 - link
"That display reguires a dual-link DVI connector. I don't know of any other consumer level PC video card which has one."Monarch Computer has the AGP XFX GeForce 6800 128 MB DDR/8x-AGP/TV-Out/Dual-DVI (Retail Box) for $163. That makes $200 for a 9600 Pro look pretty sick.
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant....">XFX GeForce 6800 at Monarch Computer
PrinceGaz - Sunday, August 21, 2005 - link
Dual-link DVI is different from the card having two DVI sockets.A dual-link DVI socket has double the bandwidth of a standard single-link DVI socket (330MHz vs 165MHz). That allows it to drive a display at a very high resolution with a normal refresh-rate.
That XFX card has two standard single-link DVI sockets and therefore cannot be used at such high resolutions with the DVI digital connection as the 9600Pro in this review.
MCSim - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
I bet that NVIDIA is releasing FX 5700 Ultra Mac/PC edition very soon. =)Avalon - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Should have done this with a newer GPU. No point in this thing being PC compatible for $200.ViRGE - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Humm, I find it interesting that ATI is finally releasing a cross-platform card so close to the Apple transition to x86. Considering OpenFirmware is being dropped, the Mac side of this card will have to be completely redone for the new x86 Macs, so a card like this wouldn't have much of a shelf life I would think.beorntheold - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Don't ATI have anything better to do I wonder? Like saving their PC market for example?