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You are here: MacNN Forums > Enthusiast Zone > Gaming > ATI 9800 Pro Macintosh Edition - anybody find it?

ATI 9800 Pro Macintosh Edition - anybody find it?
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macenthusiast
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Aug 11, 2003, 12:20 AM
 
i can't seem to find the 9800 pro anywhere. I went to www.pricegrabber.com and looked it up and on 5 different web sites it was out of stock. I went to fry's and it was out of stock, same with compUSA and the apple store doesn't have it. Anybody know where I can find it in stock?
     
Adam Betts
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Aug 11, 2003, 01:52 AM
 
You could get it from ATI's website

I'm going to order from there soon.
     
DBvader
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Aug 11, 2003, 02:48 AM
 
http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?dpno=260126

it doesnt say out of stock (but rather call...maybe that means the same thing.)
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Conscript
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Aug 11, 2003, 09:19 AM
 
if you buy it retail, does it have adc? I heard the retail card was a bit different.
iBook G3 800 MHz/640mb RAM/30 GB HD/CDROM/Airport/12.1" LCD
     
macenthusiast  (op)
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Aug 11, 2003, 12:16 PM
 
yea, if you click on the call button, it gives you a definition of the terms.

call us = out of stock
     
DBvader
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Aug 11, 2003, 01:20 PM
 
oh..sorry.

the Retail version has VGA and DVI outputs.
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a2daj
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Aug 11, 2003, 01:32 PM
 
I ordered mine a few weeks ago from the ATI store. Most retailers/etailers should have stock this week, many quoting August 15th.
Great card. Absolutely love it.
     
Adam Betts
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Aug 11, 2003, 02:37 PM
 
Originally posted by a2daj:
I ordered mine a few weeks ago from the ATI store. Most retailers/etailers should have stock this week, many quoting August 15th.
Great card. Absolutely love it.
Could you post a short review of that card? I'd love to hear from another user, not from a biased website such as InsideMacGames
     
DBvader
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Aug 11, 2003, 04:38 PM
 
yeah, a2daj, im really intrested in getting this card, but im not sure how much of an improvement it will be over my 9000 in my Dual 867. many of the people i have talked to say that the major bottleneck is my processors (since many games dont support smp), so i dont want to spend 400-some dollars if its not going to make a huge difference.
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a2daj
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Aug 11, 2003, 05:01 PM
 
I've actually posted some comments over at the IMG forums so if you'd like to skim through that you can read them here. Since the 4.1 drivers are now released I can also post some screen shots of FSAA and Anisotropic filtering. With the new drivers I can use Supersampling FSAA in Diablo II.
Once I do some more performance testing with FSAA and AF, I'll post more thorough comments. But I'll probably post screenshots first since those are so fun to look at
It can't work miracles though. BloodRayne still looks like crap...
     
a2daj
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Aug 11, 2003, 06:27 PM
 
Some quick screenshots are up
http://homepage.mac.com/a2daj/PhotoAlbum14.html

With the Diablo II shots, you'll probably want to view them at twice the resolution and switch between them. Some of the changes are subtle, but things like the flames are interesting. With Perspective on, some of the FSAA effects seem more pronounced.

With the JK2 screenshots I posted a few different ones so if you want to compare say 4xFSAA vs. 6xFSAA/16xAF vs. no FSAA.

Hopefully, I can get a chance to take some more screenshots of other games later on.
( Last edited by a2daj; Aug 12, 2003 at 01:24 PM. )
     
7Macfreak
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Aug 11, 2003, 07:54 PM
 
Originally posted by a2daj:

Hopefully, I can get a chance to take some more screenshots of other games later on.
that'll be cool.
also mind taking some screenshots of truform in effect on some newer games than quake? maybe something like RtCW? thanks.
     
a2daj
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Aug 11, 2003, 08:33 PM
 
TruForm isn't enabled in the 9800 drivers. It doesn't have the same hardware support that the 8500 does. The Truform support can be added via the drivers but it's not really trivial. Since the only card that had explicit support for it was the 8500 support for TruForm isn't really widely spread. You'd be better off looking at old reviews of the 8500.
     
DBvader
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Aug 11, 2003, 08:39 PM
 
a2daj, what kind of numbers do you get in UT2K3 (not the flybys)? I looked at some of the numbers for AA and im really impressed, essentially, you can run any and every game AAd with little or no performance tradeoff. im getting 20-30 FPS in UT2K3 on my Dual 867 with a 9000, and i would love to see numbers in the 50-60s like on my PC. Do you think this will be possible (at either 1024x768 or 1280x1024) on my setup? to me, the 9800 would be worth it if it would bring me reasonable framerates on my mac, a TV-out, and AA w/o a performance penalty.
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a2daj
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Aug 12, 2003, 03:32 AM
 
I don't know what type of PC you have but keep in mind that you still have essentially an 867 MHz machine when it comes to gaming. The fact that it's a dual basically just means most games will act as an 867 MHz PC with a really good sound card. There are pretty much only a handful of games which will get a significant boost from SMP. Typically, MHz for MHz PCs and Macs are comparable in terms of game performance. So if you have a PC that's faster in terms of MHz then your dual G4 isn't going to get anywhere near the same performance in UT2K3. The Radeon 9800 Pro isn't a miracle card. It will be bottlenecked by pretty much everything on your G4, particulary the CPU speed and the system bus. Your machine won't be able to feed it fast enough to even make it sweat. Then take into consideration the game being a port designed to take advantage of PC hardware and compilers and the fact that no games can hog the CPU like you can in Mac OS 9 or Windows it'd be unrealistic for a game like UT2K3 to get the framerates you're asking for in the very CPU intensive bot match demos. In the flyby demos, there's no sound so to UT2K3 you're basically running a single proc G4 867.
     
DBvader
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Aug 12, 2003, 01:11 PM
 
yeah, im aware that my processors severly bottleneck the performance of games, and probably wont be able to fuel the 9800. Do you think FPS has peaked, then? Thats really too bad, becuase considering the computer is a bit less than a year old, it didnt last too long in terms of game playabilty. Im pretty sure that the Quake 3 based games will see improvements with the 9800, but maybe for newer games like sim city and UT2K3, its not even worth it.
I think that before i go to s chool, i will pick one of these up at Frys and try it out on my computer and see how it does.

Do you think that Games like UT2K3 will see smp integration later on? (I know that some games, like MOH, dont do so well with SMP, but i was just wondering)
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a2daj
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Aug 12, 2003, 01:29 PM
 
The current Unreal Engine does not take advantage of SMP and it wouldn't be trivial to add SMP support to the renderer, so I don't see any of that type of optimization occuring in the near future aside from the current game/sound threads in the current implementation. However, maybe a future version of the engine might see it, but probably not until the next gen games are out.

The main advantage of the 9800 in your case would probably be that you can play at higher graphical settings with less of a performance hit. The 9800 doesn't do nearly as well in the higher resolutions, and FSAA isn't nearly as much of a performance hit on the card as it is on other cards. Your FPS may have peaked in the lower resolutions, but with a 9800 Pro you could probably turn things up and not see much of a difference in speed.
     
DBvader
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Aug 12, 2003, 02:22 PM
 
cool, thanks for the help, ill try the card out when i see one at my local Frys and tell you guys how it goes.
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macenthusiast  (op)
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Aug 13, 2003, 02:35 AM
 
fry's will never carry it. the highest i've ever seen them carry is the 8500. They dont stock Macintosh stuff, only the bare minimum.

better try the internet
     
   
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