[::maroma::]

I'm in the market for an upgrade to my video card. Here are my current specs:

G4/500 Sawtooth AGP
GeForce3 64MB (flashed)
1G RAM
10.2.4

The GF3 I currently have is not too bad. The main problem with it is it has this really annoying faint flicker in the OS. Certain things make it flicker like selecting text, moving windows, scrolling, etc. I've almost gotten used to it, but I think my eyes are worse for it. I am also going to be getting a Sonnet 1GHz upgrade card and a faster hard drive. Additionaly, I want to play WC3 in OS X as well as I play it in OS 9 now. I've heard rumors that the nVidia cards don't work as well with WC3 as do the ATi cards.

So at any rate, I am wondering what ATi card would be best for my system? I definately don't want to go down in performance from the GF3, but I wouldn't mind a straight across trade in performance if only to get rid of that damned flicker. I've been trying to research the Radeon 8500 and 9000, but didn't find any good info. xlr8yourmac.com shows the 8500 to be slightly slower in most every task than the GF3.

So I thought I'd ask you kind folks if you've had any experience similar (or not) to mine, and could offer some advice. Would it be worth upgrading my GF3 card, or is the GF3 as fast as my 2x AGP can handle? Is there an ATi card that would do me better? And if anyone could chime in with their experiences with any of these cards and WC3, I would appreciate it.

(PS - I hope this is in the right forum)

[iamnid]

I have the 8500 and have no problems playing WC3 in OS X. That said, if you are going to upgrade to 1Ghz, you might as well wait until the Radeon 9700 comes out and get that. If you just want something basically as good as your GF3 get the 8500 and if you need ADC get the 9000 which is almost as good as the 8500 for most stuff.

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by iamnid:
I have the 8500 and have no problems playing WC3 in OS X. That said, if you are going to upgrade to 1Ghz, you might as well wait until the Radeon 9700 comes out and get that. If you just want something basically as good as your GF3 get the 8500 and if you need ADC get the 9000 which is almost as good as the 8500 for most stuff.

Cool, thanks for the info. Would the 9700 be overkill for my 2x AGP machine, even if it's upgraded to 1Ghz? And ADC is not an issue for me, since I've got a 21" CRT that will last me for a while. I think I read that the 9000's ADC port is disabled in the Sawtooth machines, but the VGA works (which is fine for me).

[iamnid]

yeah it would probably be overkill in an AGP 2X machine... also I think your machine has a 100mhz system bus right? I'd probably just go with the 8500 if I was you -- or the Geforce 4Ti if you wanted something a bit better -- but even that won't be able to be used to its fullest with AGP 2X and it costs more than the 8500.

[DrBoar]

With a 500 Mhz G4 also the ATI 9000 and 8500 will be definitive overkills. With a G4/400 Quake 3 FPS is unaffected by resolution from low resolution at 320x240 all the way up to 1600x1200 max details (50 something FPS). I assume that a dual 1.42 GHz G4 can get the 8500 in trouble at very high resolutions. But even if you upgrade your CPU to a dual 1.2 the card will keep up well to at least 1280x1024...
If you like the ADC port get the 9000 otherwise get what ever cyou get the best deal on.