[Tiffany Mac]

Apple has two new graphic cards. Which one is better?

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Titanium
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro


-Tiffany

[Steve Bosell]

the 9700 pro is quite a bit better than the geforce4 ti, nvidia's new card the geforceFX is about the same as the 9700 pro, but is not avaliable yet, and has a big loud stupid fan on it.

[Adam Betts]

ATI's drivers is better than Nvidia's.

For this alone, I'd prefer ATI's products over Nvidia even though if Nvidia produce some powerful cards than ATI's

[Pepi Picklefoot]

As Steve said...the ATI Radeon 9700 is much better. The GeForce FX isn't even out yet and probably won't be out on Mac for quite a few months.

There's really no competition*...if you're looking to buy the GeForce 4 Ti and the 9700 is right next to it with the same price tag, change your mind quick.

* this is assuming the new drivers are decent. I'd wait a few days before deciding to buy a videocard so people can give you their experience on the 9700's performance.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
ATI's drivers is better than Nvidia's.

Bull. Current Radeon drivers:
a) don't accelerate rectangle texture copies
b) break VBL sync in windowed contexts
c) look like crap in 15-bit color

I agree that the Radeon 9000/9700 hardware is currently the best you can get on the Mac, but the drivers are junk compared to Nvidia.

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
Bull. Current Radeon drivers:
a) don't accelerate rectangle texture copies
b) break VBL sync in windowed contexts
c) look like crap in 15-bit color

I agree that the Radeon 9000/9700 hardware is currently the best you can get on the Mac, but the drivers are junk compared to Nvidia.

1) I have no idea what the heck a rectangle texture copy is.
2) VBL sync... right.
3) Who the heck uses 15 bit color?

I've always had a little bit of a favoritism going for ATI, maybe because they've been with Apple for quite some time now. If I could fit a 9700 Pro in this Pismo 400... I would.

In other news, my PC friend just bought a 9700 Pro for his Athlon XP 2000+... he loves it.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
1) I have no idea what the heck a rectangle texture copy is.

FYI:

Copying from the framebuffer to a texture is an operation often used in effects like motion blur. Rectangle textures are a relatively recent addition to OpenGL to support arbitrary sized textures (standard OpenGL only supports square textures of certain sizes) and is used by Quartz Extreme. Copy operations are accelerated with normal textures on both ATI and Nvidia drivers, but only Nvidia drivers accelerate rectangle textures fully.

2) VBL sync... right.

The process of synchronizing screen updates with the Vertical BLanking of the display. In other words, keeping animation smooth. A lot of common operations in windows (scrolling, quicktime, dvd, etc) get out of sync with the display refresh rate on ATI cards (in 10.2.3 with current drivers.) The result is a horizontal break visible in the middle of rapidly updating graphics. No problem on Nvidia cards.

3) Who the heck uses 15 bit color?

Try most emulators (RockNES, Snes9X, MAME etc.) Recent 3d games (Jedi Knight II, etc) also like to default to 15 bit color because it is a bit faster. You can change back to 24 bit in most games, of course. On ATI cards 15 bit color has really awful dithering.

[KidRed]

arekkusu-
So are you against the 9700pro? I have the GF4 MX and was wondering about upgrading to the 9700 pro. I do photoshoip work mostly and watch dvds on my cinema display. I remember the 8500 didn't have the ADC or so for the cinema display?

Any opinion on the upgrading to the 9700 pro?

[Sarc]

IMHO, from my experience alone, MacOS X likes ATI better then nVidia.
All the MacOS X systems that I know that use ATI just feel better, graphics wise.
just my humble opinion

[KidRed]

Originally posted by Sarc:
IMHO, from my experience alone, MacOS X likes ATI better then nVidia.
All the MacOS X systems that I know that use nVidia just feel better, graphics wise.
just my humble opinion

Can you clarify? if X likes ATI better, then why do systems with nvidia feel better?

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
Bull. Current Radeon drivers:
a) don't accelerate rectangle texture copies
b) break VBL sync in windowed contexts
c) look like crap in 15-bit color

I agree that the Radeon 9000/9700 hardware is currently the best you can get on the Mac, but the drivers are junk compared to Nvidia.

Bull? Ask the guys at BareFeats, InsideMacGames, MacGamer, IGNMac, etc

That's where I learned about nVidia's terrible drivers.

EDIT: Wait a min, I think you jumped over the conclusion... I said *better* because ATI offer some more features and support to ATI's cards than nVidia does to their card. There are lot of missing supports such as pixel shaders, etc in nVidia drivers.

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by KidRed:
arekkusu-
So are you against the 9700pro? I have the GF4 MX and was wondering about upgrading to the 9700 pro. I do photoshoip work mostly and watch dvds on my cinema display. I remember the 8500 didn't have the ADC or so for the cinema display?

Any opinion on the upgrading to the 9700 pro?

It would pretty much be like upgrading from this

to this

I don't think there is a single category in which the 9700 Pro doesn't blow any CURRENT video card out of the water in terms of performance.

[Sarc]

Originally posted by KidRed:
Can you clarify? if X likes ATI better, then why do systems with nvidia feel better?

typo ...

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
FYI:

Copying from the framebuffer to a texture is an operation often used in effects like motion blur. Rectangle textures are a relatively recent addition to OpenGL to support arbitrary sized textures (standard OpenGL only supports square textures of certain sizes) and is used by Quartz Extreme. Copy operations are accelerated with normal textures on both ATI and Nvidia drivers, but only Nvidia drivers accelerate rectangle textures fully.

So would that mean that Quartz Extreme acceleration suffers somewhat under ATI cards?

The process of synchronizing screen updates with the Vertical BLanking of the display. In other words, keeping animation smooth. A lot of common operations in windows (scrolling, quicktime, dvd, etc) get out of sync with the display refresh rate on ATI cards (in 10.2.3 with current drivers.) The result is a horizontal break visible in the middle of rapidly updating graphics. No problem on Nvidia cards.

Oh my, that's horrible. Scrolling, DVD playback, QuickTime... those are very common for users of all levels of expertise. I was going to argue that someone like me that doesn't use very GPU-intensive tasks wouldn't really notice such quirks, but that would affect nearly everything I do. Youch.

Try most emulators (RockNES, Snes9X, MAME etc.) Recent 3d games (Jedi Knight II, etc) also like to default to 15 bit color because it is a bit faster. You can change back to 24 bit in most games, of course. On ATI cards 15 bit color has really awful dithering.

But I suppose if you've got a card of such stature as a Radeon 9700 Pro, you'd better be running in something better than 15 bit, you gotta get every penny's worth.

By the way, thanks for for explaining that technology to me, I appreciate it.

[KidRed]

Originally posted by Sarc:
typo ...

K, so which did you mean was better?

So I'm hearing that the ATI 9700pro is better and kills anything out there but the drivers lack features. So then on a mac is it the best seeing to how it's limited?

I would get it if I knew it was that good, but half of you are saying it's not because of the drivers.

[Adam Betts]

From MacGamer's EOC to one of the users in MacGamer Forum:

On WC3 freezes:

I think you're illustrating once more the reason I am going to get a Radeon 8500 instead of an NVIDIA card. I just see too many people posting glitchy problems who have NVIDIA cards, no matter if the Mac came with one or if it was an upgrade card. the problems are generally non-specific and they vary so widely that they're hard to trace. I've even noticed it doesn't happen with just games. Regular apps might just up and die on NVIDIA machines which don't ever crash on ATI machines.

I'm not talking out of my ass as previously pointed out by arekkusu

[cowerd]

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030127/index.html

You should at least read what the other side thinks about both cards.

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by cowerd:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030127/index.html

You should at least read what the other side thinks about both cards.

The funny thing about that article is that its comparing the Radeon 9700 Pro to the GeForce FX (Next Generation - shipping in February) and the Radeon wins a good deal of the tests. This thread is comparing the Radeon to the GF4 Ti4600 - there is really no comparison there; Radeon EASILY wins.

If I were buying a new Mac and I had a choice between a GF4 Ti4600 and the Radeon (both are BTO options at $350) then there should really be no choice to be made. For the same price you get a card that just kicks the crap out of the other one.

Also, since we're talking about the 'other side' as you call it, lets discuss drivers. NVIDIA is well known for making the best drivers in the industry. Somehow they always manage to milk a ton more performance out of their cards with each new release of Detonator. ATI was known for making some the crappiest drivers ever but now they are coming around and from what my roommate tells me (he used to have a GF3 and now he's upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro All-in-Wonder) their drivers are getting much better than before.

[cowerd]

Thats pretty much the gist of the article--that NVIDIA's wintel drivers for the FX underperform--as of right now.

I know the thread is about the the Ti4600, but the article illustrates that the ATI card can keep up with NVIDIA's soon to be finest, and should easily beat the Ti4600. Don't even know why there is any argument.

BTW another article says that ATI will be releasing its newest R350 chips in a few weeks.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
EDIT: Wait a min, I think you jumped over the conclusion... I said *better* because ATI offer some more features and support to ATI's cards than nVidia does to their card. There are lot of missing supports such as pixel shaders, etc in nVidia drivers.

To clarify:
The features available to an application on a given system are the subset of the hardware features which are exposed (i.e. accelerated) by the driver.

Nvidia and ATI *hardware* have different feature sets (e.g. floating point pixel shaders on the 9700 vs register combiners on GF4.) Currently, the 9700 offers the "best" feature set on the Mac (this is of course subjective, but most people would rather have speed and flexible shader support over e.g. paletted textures.)

On the other hand, the ATI *drivers* do not accelerate certain _common_ features which the nvidia drivers do. Hence, in my experience, the ATI drivers are inferior. I can't comment on Windows drivers since I haven't done any OpenGL development on Windows, but reading articles about this, opinions appear to agree that the Windows nvidia drivers are better, with ATI catching up recently.

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
So would that mean that Quartz Extreme acceleration suffers somewhat under ATI cards?

No, I didn't say that. The framebuffer->rectangle texture copy is only one operation. Most operations are properly accelerated on ATI cards. However, if you are trying to create certain special effects (for games, etc) this operation might as well not exist on ATI cards, since it isn't accelerated (at least in OS X 10.2 through 10.2.3.) It's somewhat of a pain in the neck, as a developer, because you have to expend a lot of effort finding a workaround because of poor drivers.

Oh my, that's horrible. Scrolling, DVD playback, QuickTime... those are very common for users of all levels of expertise.

Yes, I agree. I am pretty annoyed that 10.2.3 shipped Radeon drivers with such a glaring problem.

...you'd better be running in something better than 15 bit, you gotta get every penny's worth.

Naturally on modern cards you ought to be using the highest quality display/textures etc that provide adequate performance. In the case of emulators however, most of them are written with older (OS 8...) systems in mind and they lock you into 15 bit color.

By the way, thanks for for explaining that technology to me, I appreciate it.

There are many references available for free online (opengl.org, etc) if you care to learn more.

[Sven G]

Originally posted by Steve Bosell:
the 9700 pro is quite a bit better than the geforce4 ti, nvidia's new card the geforceFX is about the same as the 9700 pro, but is not avaliable yet, and has a big loud stupid fan on it.

BTW, talking about fans, I just upgraded my old stock ATI Rage 128 Pro card (with a fan) to a Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition (no fan, "only" a heatsink): the resulting overall noise reduction of the computer (a Sawtooth Power Mac) was dramatic!

[zazou]

The 9700. Hands Down. Next to GF-FX performance, here a lot sooner...

.. and the kicker:

1)GF-FX needs its own power-supply, so you have to plug it in...

2)Takes up 2 Slots... AGP and 1 PCI.

and 3) it has its own Monster Fan. Loud enough that PC-techies with there super-cooled (meaning already loud with fans) Athlon and P4 boxes complain of noise.


All in all, the 9700 looks to be a good time to buy if this is the future of AGP cards...

...assuming any GPU is worth 400 bucks, which for most users I would say not so much.

[KidRed]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
To clarify:

So then are you saying that if I upgraded to the 9700 pro from my GF4MX that I'd see a performance hit in QT, DVD playback and scrolling?

I would like to know if it's worth upgrading to (when released) but some of the info makes it sound like it may not be worth it.

Hopefully, someone can just lay it out, pros and cons for the 9700 pro, as opposed to comparing 2 cards together? DVD & QT performance is important to me.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by KidRed:
So then are you saying that if I upgraded to the 9700 pro from my GF4MX that I'd see a performance hit in QT, DVD playback and scrolling?

If you are running 10.2.3, you will have tearing in anything drawn in a window on the Radeon card. The tearing may be infrequent, or very noticible. It depends on the operation (window dragging/scrolling for example, usually looks quite smooth, unless the window contains OpenGL content which is being continuously updated. Universal Access Zoom In mode, on the other hand, tears continuously, which I find highly annoying. Quicktime content tears frequently enough to be distracting to me. Also, note that full screen applications (games) aren't affected.)

Note that "performance" is subjective. You will not notice any "speed hit" per se by upgrading to the 9700. The VBL tearing problem is one of synchronization-- graphics will be fast, but not smooth.

If you are running 10.2.2, you will have no problem. I can't comment on 10.2.4.

If you are worried about this issue, I'd advise you to travel to an Apple store and compare two identical machines, one with a Radeon and one with a GF4 to see if the difference bothers you. I know that the Santa Clara, CA store has MDD G4 systems config'd like this, and the difference is very obvious to me, but I'm attuned to the problem.

[stitzlein]

i have a radeon mac edition on my home g4. i much prefer it in terms of performance and image quality to my g4 at work with a geforce2.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by arekkusu:

If you are worried about this issue...

If you are interested in seeing an example of the Radeon cards performing very poorly compared to the Geforce, there is an application with a sample feedback effect here:

http://homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/bug...ToRectTex.html

I haven't put together a public VBL tearing app yet, but you don't have to look hard to see that problem.

[alex_kac]

So how about this...I'm a PowerBook user so I really haven't cared about graphics cards on the Mac for awhile - but I'm pretty well aware of the differences on the PC.

On the PC, I would typically only get NVidia stuff due to their drivers and support on games.

I just ordered a Dual 1.25 PowerMac with the built in Radeon 9000 Pro - which I plan to upgrade soon (with all the changes to video cards coming in the next few months, I didn't want to pay $300 for any one without more patience and consideration).

Now...the question is. If upgrading a video card from a 9000 Pro (which isn't all that great), to one specifically that will accelerate all the normal video that normal business use has PLUS the high end games like DOom 3 - looking at about 2 months from now (with new OS X updates, etc....) what would you pick? An ATI or NVidia card?

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by alex_kac:
So how about this...I'm a PowerBook user so I really haven't cared about graphics cards on the Mac for awhile - but I'm pretty well aware of the differences on the PC.

On the PC, I would typically only get NVidia stuff due to their drivers and support on games.

I just ordered a Dual 1.25 PowerMac with the built in Radeon 9000 Pro - which I plan to upgrade soon (with all the changes to video cards coming in the next few months, I didn't want to pay $300 for any one without more patience and consideration).

Now...the question is. If upgrading a video card from a 9000 Pro (which isn't all that great), to one specifically that will accelerate all the normal video that normal business use has PLUS the high end games like DOom 3 - looking at about 2 months from now (with new OS X updates, etc....) what would you pick? An ATI or NVidia card?

Unless it is changed for the Mac version, the GeForce FX (the only real competitor to the Radeon 9700) will not be useable in new Macs because of its heat dissipation system - so your only option might be the Radeon 9700 (it will probably be cheaper than GF FX for not that big of a performance hit anyway).

[alex_kac]

Well, my question is mostly targeted towards drivers rather than actual cards. I can always find out how good the cards are on the PC hardware sites.

But its the drivers that make the big difference.

[Simon]

Originally posted by agasthya:
Unless it is changed for the Mac version, the GeForce FX (the only real competitor to the Radeon 9700) will not be useable in new Macs because of its heat dissipation system

Why this? The FX just needs the space of the PCI slot next to the AGP slot for its insane fan blower construction. My PowerMac has free PCI slots right next to the AGP. Why shouldn't an FX work in there?

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by Simon:
Why this? The FX just needs the space of the PCI slot next to the AGP slot for its insane fan blower construction. My PowerMac has free PCI slots right next to the AGP. Why shouldn't an FX work in there?

Look at the MDD Macs closer, they are the reverse of a PC in terms on where the PCI slots are, thus, you'll have hot air being blown into the case instead of having it go out via the PCI slot. They would either need to make two version of the card for the Mac population or make a new version that doesn't require the additional slot.

[edit, heres a picture from apples website]

[Gul Banana]

I have a Radeon 8500, have been running 10.2.3 since it was released, and have never experienced the "tearing" you speak of. Tiffany Mac, don't let yourself be talked into getting an inferior card by people with some sort of grudge against ATI.. the Radeon 9700 is far, far superior to the Geforce 4 Titanium. The Geforce FX is another matter, but since it's not out yet...

[Tominator]

Until Apple can produce hardware that will actually feed these two cards fast enough, the performance difference is largely irrelevant. There are driver differences, but none that I would consider significant at this point; they will both get better. I'd go with the ATi card simply because the 2D quality is noticebly better than the nvidia part.

[Simon]

Originally posted by agasthya:
Look at the MDD Macs closer, they are the reverse of a PC in terms on where the PCI slots are, thus, you'll have hot air being blown into the case instead of having it go out via the PCI slot.

Ah shucks. I was afraid of something like that. But actually the fan blower on the FX doesn't look like it would touch the DIMMs in my slots on that side of the AGP. Now to the other problem, the air would have to go outside the case. The PCI slot is on the wrong side, so no go as you said. But if you look at the back of the MDDs you'll see they're full of holes. Isn't that enough? I mean, it's not like if you're blowing against a solid case...

Anyhow, the fan on the FX is crazy. I really had to LMAO when I saw it for the first time. Hell, it looks like it would blow at higher power than my CPU fan.

[iamnid]

The MDD is the only G4 system that places the PCI cards on this side of the AGP slot... too bad. Also, I think the 9700 needs to be plugged into the computer's powersupply just as the Geforce FX does.

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by iamnid:
The MDD is the only G4 system that places the PCI cards on this side of the AGP slot... too bad. Also, I think the 9700 needs to be plugged into the computer's powersupply just as the Geforce FX does.

Yeah, but it'd be kind of weird for Apple to release a video card that only worked with older Macs eh? And you are right, they both need to be plugged into the power source...

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
If you are running 10.2.3, you will have tearing in anything drawn in a window on the Radeon card.

If you are running 10.2.2, you will have no problem. I can't comment on 10.2.4.

(update 10.2.4 did not resolve this issue, but 10.2.5 does. Hooray!

The Radeon 9700 Pro will get better drivers than any previous ATi card.
The new drivers use a WinRadeon9700compatibility layer, so we basically get the featureset and unbugginess of the windows version. NEAT

Steve

[alex_kac]

I'm really curious how well that works. I'd like to see some sort of in depth article describing how it works, how well it works, etc...

[coolmacdude]

So then are you saying that if I upgraded to the 9700 pro from my GF4MX that I'd see a performance hit in QT, DVD playback and scrolling?[/B]

NO, that is completely ridiculous. You would see a dramatic improvement in every area. So ATI may have a few bugs in their drivers, so does Nvidia. Any possible bug in the 9700's drivers is more than made up for by its speed.

[mac freak]

I can totally vouch for the 9700... I have one in my gaming machine (a PC ), and it has more than fulfilled my performance expectations in every possible area. Only downside I've found is the actual physical quality of the card, as I had to get a replacement after about a month of ownership. But hey, that's not too bad...

Additionally, from some benches I've seen, a DP1420/R9700Pro performs in Q3 about 95% as fast as as a P4-3.06/R9700Pro -- showing that the Mac platform isn't lagging THAT far behind in da gamez warz.