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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Fulie - Saturday, December 10, 2005 - link
I just stumbled on to this write up and trying to get information on blending systems has been a major pain. I have a pc that is used for viewing images at high res. and an unused 23" older mac lcd (clear surround with a seperate power source and ADC TO DVI connector) display that I would like to use with this pc. I don't need game speeds but use dvd video on occasion. From the specs. It sounds like it will work, any ideas?sprockkets - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
the pinout of the card looks agp 2x and not 4x/8xPrinceGaz - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Just a minor amendment. On page 2 you mention that "The actual GPU isn't any different than what we've had on the Mac and PC side for a while; it still runs at 400MHz like the OEM Radeon 9600XT and 9650".The GPU of a 9600XT is clocked at 500MHz, not 400MHz. It is the 9600Pro which has a GPU clocked at 400MHz. Which is what you would expect as the card you reviewed is a 9600Pro.
a2daj - Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - link
The Apple OEM Radeon 9600 XTs were clocked at the same speed most PC manufacturers clocked their retail Radeon 9600 Pros. The OEM 9600 Pros were clocked even slower when they were first introduced.tooki - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
1. This is not the first cross-platform card. Most 3Dfx cards were cross-platform.2. The Power Mac G5 does not use a SATA optical drive, it's standard parallel ATA.
3. ADC's high power requirements are because of ADC's ability to drive a 17" CRT display, not because of large LCDs.
stratusgd - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
Actually, all G5 systems that Apple sells come with SATA drives, not PATA. Go look at Apple's website.SDA - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
The poster you are replying to is referring to optical drives, not hard drives. Optical drives are drives that read or write optical media such as CDs and DVDs.a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
"1. This is not the first cross-platform card. Most 3Dfx cards were cross-platform."A Mac specific firmware had to be on the 3dfx cards starting with the Voodoo3s. The Voodoo3s were unsupported but you can flash them to run in a Mac. You had to reflash them to run in a PC. The Voodoo 4s and 5s had Mac specific firmware. They had to be flashed to run in PCs. You couldn't take a PC version and put it in a Mac and get it to run without flashing it.
The Voodoo1s and 2s were just pass through cards which only did 3D so they didn't need Mac firmware to handle the 2D 16 bit Mac OS issues (5551 (Mac) vs 565 (PC))
lancediamond - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Not entirely clear if you could do that unless I missed it - if so, that'd be sort of cool maybe?a2daj - Friday, August 19, 2005 - link
Yes. That's the target PC audience.