[Arkham_c]

I have a Power Mac G5 2GHz with a Radeon 9800 (OEM) 128 MB card.

I am trading it in (for non-gaming purposes) for a 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with a GeForce 7300GT card (standard).

Will gaming performance on native games (World of Warcraft, for instance) be better or worse moving from a fast last-gen card to a mediocre current-gen card?

[derekn]

I'd lean towards better I believe. PCI Express has more bandwidth than the 8X AGP the G5 had. I threw the settings to max on Call of Duty 2 on my dual 1.8 G5 with a 9800 SE (256MB) and it stalled pretty bad with heavy action.

You'll just have to go easy on the settings with WOW, the MacMall store just down the street from me had it running on a 3Ghz with a 30" ACD and it stalled when the settings were really thrown up.

[mduell]

I think the 7300GT will have a slight edge. The 9800 isn't last-gen, it's ~3 generations back.

[P]

I don't see how you make the 9800 3 generations back, but I agree - the 7300 should have a slight edge in most things. They will be very close in most things, however.

[Leonard]

It's about 2-3 generations back. The Radeon 9800 was based on the R350-R360 chip depending on the variant of the Radeon 9800. The next generation was the Radeon X800XT which was based on the R420 chip. The next generation was the Radeon X1600 and Radeon X1900XT which are based on the R520 and R580 chip. Does that explain it?

[mduell]

Originally Posted by P 

I don't see how you make the 9800 3 generations back

I was guessing because I was too lazy to count back generations across product lines.

But it went something like 9ex, Xoxx, Xexx, X1oxx where e is even and o is odd, and 7oxx is the same generation as X1oxx, so that makes 3 generations back.

[P]

Ah, OK. I consider the 7800 and 7900 to be from the same generation but a later refresh - otherwise it becomes so confusing inside the generations. Is the 7300GT from a newer generation than the 7600? They're based on the same G73, so hardly.

So, by my counting: 7000-6000-5000, 5000 was the same as ATi 9000. Not the last generation but the one before that. Slighty more on topic: Both have 8 pixel pipes, but the 7300GT usually has a slightly higher clockspeed and supports newer OpenGL extensions, so it should be faster by a small but noticeable margin.