Well, only a few months late and after hearing reports of it being available for sale at Macworld: SF I finally got my PCI Radeon card yesterday. I got it for my Beige G3/300MT with 224 MB RAM, 12 GB HD OS 9.1. This is replacing the stock ATI Rage that my Mac came with and the Voodoo 3 2000 I'd added.

Some initial impressions:

• Easy to install. Simply pop in the card and load the drivers. Drivers for PCI card are not availabe on ATIs web site as of yesterday. But CD comes with most updated version of OpenGL (1.2.1) and install painlessly.
  
  Doesn't like Diablo 2. After rescanning my card, RAVE and Software are the only acceleration options. Doesn't even recognize OpenGL. With Rave selected, at both thousands and millions of colors, game play is choppy and slow. I've tried this both with regular extension set and my limited "game" extension set.
  
  Loves simple games like Monopoly or Age of Empires. Before Radeon (BR), monopoly was rather slow. Now the race car truly flies around the board!
  
  Does wonders for Unreal. I have yet to test it with Unreal Tournament or Quake 3.
  
  Hates DVDs. I can't get my DVD player to work. In fact, this has caused me the most concern as it caused my monitor to display a jumble of colors and completely lock when I attempt to play DVDs. I tried this with 3 different DVDs with the same result. Haven't attempted to troubleshoot this problem yet so I haven't contacted ATI tech support.
  
  2D scrolling in documents is much faster

Overall, I'm not wowed. I was expecting some significant improvement in D2 and have been sorely disapointed. A better solution may be to wait for Nvidia to see if they continue the Voodoo line for PCI Macs. My two cents, FWIW.

Dev

[This message has been edited by Dev-Em (edited 01-16-2001).]

[mac freak]

Really? The Radeon that came with my dual 450 runs Diablo II VERY fast (60 FPS average, I'd say)... could it be your processor that's slowing you down?

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Be Happy.

I have a blue and white G3 300 Mhz with 128 megs ram, and 3D acceleration (with my rage 128) slows diablo 2 down a lot as well. I think it's just the way that diablo 2 is made that makes it slow down like this. The 300 Mhz machine is pretty low on the requirements list, so I think that it is the processor. There's no huge difference in appearence anyways, just a few more colored lights and a perspective thingy that isn't very obvious. Just my 2 cents.

-Yoshi

[Solobrus]

PCI Radeon? Where where? I've checked on Outpost and shopati.com to no avail, please tell me where you guys ordered it from, since I'd love to get one!

Thanks,
Erik

Mac Freak - I'd considered that my processor might slow some things down, but when I ran Diablo with my Voodoo 3 2000, it ran just fine. Completely different 3D format (Glide) versus Rave, but I wouldn't expect such a dramatic difference.

Yoshi - thanks. I didn't think I was missing too much in terms of FX, but I at least want to be able to run from one end of Lut Gholein to the other in less than two minutes!

Solobrus - Ordered it at Mac Mall. Placed the order Thursday, they got stock friday and I had it Monday! They also have a $30 rebate going so you can get it for $169!

Dev

[Del Vach]

I ordered mine last week from MacMall for $200 and it arrived yesterday. FYI, my system is a G3/266 upgraded to a Newer Tech G4/400, 192M, OS9.1. My existing card was an ATI Rage Orion.

INSTALLATION: There was a conflict- with the preexisting ATI drivers. Every time I booted, it would freeze after a few keystrokes, or just on it's own. This made it rather difficult to load the new drivers from the CD- booted with no extensions and disabled all the ATI extensions and I was able to boot without a problem. Installed the drivers and tried some games.

GAMEPLAY:
- Pod Racer: Runs great, but no noticable improvements over the Rage Orion's performance; there are few video options in Racer.
- Quake 3: Didn't run at first, reinstalled a clean copy updated to 1.17 (I think 1.27 MAY have given me problems- just a guess and I didn't feel like really testing that last night). It ran fine after that, I ran around at 1024x768 with everything set to high and I was very impressed. Now I just have to figure out why my Logitech wheelmouse won't work anymore.
- STV Elite Forces: Big problems. It either freezes before or during the LCARS screens, or lets me navigate a few and freezes when I try to play the game. I'm quite disappointed about this one. EF kicks butt and I hope I don't have to wait 6 months for somebody to release a fix. If it's ATI, I know it'll be longer than that.

Not to preach to the converted, but I feel a little dirty about buying this card. After all the jerking around, I hate giving ATI any money, but I feel like this is the lesser of evils right now. By the time I have another decent, supported option, I'll probably be in the market for a G4/G5

You guys need to go over to the boards at xlr8yourmac.com if you want detailed info about the Radeon PCI and AGP cards.

There is an acknowledged bug in the drivers and opengl 1.2.1 that causes problems running ALL quake3 engine based games on e PCI Radeon. Also, other games that are having problems currently with the card are pod racer and cromag rally. ATI is working on a fix which is expected to be out very soon.

Regarding performance from the Radeon card, if you have it configured right, and the drivers, etc. are working right, you should experience better performance form this card than any other card available for PCI Macs. The only exception is in regards to glide games, where the voodoo cards outshine it.

Also, regarding DVD playback, you need to get the patched version of Apple's DVD player, and then DVD playback works again.

Again, like I said, if you want the latest info on all of these issues, you need to go to the forums at xlr8yourmac.com