[blues02]

Hello, I have a Power Mac G4 GE model with the stock ATI Rage 128 AGP card. I'm looking to upgrade the card and was wondering if anyone could say how much better a Radeon 7000 would be in terms of video playback and general GUI operation? I've tried to flash a PC GeForce2 MX card in vain, too many screen artifacts, so now I'm going to see about buying a mac card.

Another related question. The Rage card says it does not support Quartz Extreme or Core Image while the GeForce I flashed showed it did support QE. What are those two things?

[DrBoar]

The radeon 7000 is inferior to the original Radeon and as such a very small step up from the ATI 128. If you want better GUI and video playback, a faster CPU is the way to go if you are well below 1 GHz. The GPU card options are terrible with the 9000 as a very outdated card, the 9800 is a decent low end card by PC standards but the mac price is anything but low end.
QE and CI are rendering engines used in OS X, having it done in the GPU is supposed to speed things up.

[Cadaver]

I have a Gigabit G4 w/ a 1.4GHz processor upgrade as a "spare" machine (actually, its a good machine looking for a job), and about 18 months ago I put a Radeon 8500 AGP Mac Edition in it that I found cheap on eBay. Except for not being Core Image compatible (not that it really matters on that machine), its a pretty good card for general computing - decent UI speeds, acceptable DVD image quality, will drive a VGA and a DVI display, and has enough VRAM to handle some of the fancier UI tricks (smooth Exposé animations, etc) on most displays.

[blues02]

Thanks for the replies. I may upgrade the CPU to a 1.0Ghz+ this summer but since this mac is just a toy for messing around with OSX and doing a little C++ programming on I'm not in a rush to upgrade it too much. I think I've scored a GeForce4 card to replace the Rage 128 though. That should be a decent upgrade from the Rage.

Thanks for the replies.