My meetings today with ATI went very well, we had some extremely good discussions about performance impacts of GPUs on OS X Panther as well as Tiger. I will be rolling a lot of that discussion into a future article.
I wanted to chime in with an update on the X800 XL availability that I got from the meetings today. While ATI will be getting me a more firm date shortly, I was told that the X800 XL would be shipping in volume at the beginning of January, meaning availability sometime in January. ATI seemed quite insistent that there would be large availability of X800 XL boards (although not in brick and mortar stores as few are interested in carrying PCIe cards) in January. I will let you all know as soon as there is more concrete information available.
I'd also like to announce that I encountered no traffic on my trip to and from Marlborough, MA today...ah how refreshing :) Too bad it was still 122 miles each way of boring highway driving...
I wanted to chime in with an update on the X800 XL availability that I got from the meetings today. While ATI will be getting me a more firm date shortly, I was told that the X800 XL would be shipping in volume at the beginning of January, meaning availability sometime in January. ATI seemed quite insistent that there would be large availability of X800 XL boards (although not in brick and mortar stores as few are interested in carrying PCIe cards) in January. I will let you all know as soon as there is more concrete information available.
I'd also like to announce that I encountered no traffic on my trip to and from Marlborough, MA today...ah how refreshing :) Too bad it was still 122 miles each way of boring highway driving...
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anomymous - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
sexAquila76 - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
How did you get to Marlborough without any traffic? Were you driving at 4:00am? I'm in Lowell and have to go there sometimes for my company. I don't sit stopped in traffic, but I'm usually in 'good company' on the way down 495.Live - Sunday, December 19, 2004 - link
9# This is a blog. Go to the forum with questions like that. Much bigger change of getting an answer there. http://forums.anandtech.com/Anonymous - Sunday, December 19, 2004 - link
From what #8 says, if they fixed up the drivers, then graphics would prolly kick butt on the mac.The_Necromancer - Saturday, December 18, 2004 - link
Hey, anyone whats the best gpu under $185Jim - Saturday, December 18, 2004 - link
Before you write your Mac GPU article, read this:http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&am...
I did some testing on my G5 and PCs and others did as well for me. There is a major driver issue with OpenGL 'display list' performance. This is the technique used in most professional opengl applications and is the technique used in SPECViewPerf - which I also ran (Version 8). At high triangle counts, OS X on a G5 is 1/3 the speed or less then a high end PC with the same graphics card. Some of this shows up in the latest games and will really impact Doom 3. I 'Shark'ed the nvidia driver and it was full of stalls and even unknown assembly calls. When running OpenMark, 95% of the time was spend in Apple driver code and kernel. This is the one area where Apple is still WAY behind.
Jon - Saturday, December 18, 2004 - link
It's about time you got around to another Mac article. An entire section, with just one article.help_me_spock - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
There's an old saying, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear." That seems particularly true of video cards this year.The_Necromancer - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Naw, they where having an sales stunt 200 gig-hard dive for like $35 or something outrageous like that.The_Necromancer
Raven_Nights - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
WEll the best ati agp card my local best buy has is a 9800 pro :( but they do carry the pcie x700 pro so they should (meaning it be nice) carry the x800 xl if it is in volume. But best buy sucks anyways.