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NVIDIA GeForce 9400M vs. ATI Radeon X1600

B

BoingoBongo

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 27, 2008
217
3
I'm curious to see where my new MB's video card ranks in comparison with my iMac Core Duo's (with 256mb vRAM).

The iMac has the ATI Radeon X1600, and the MacBook has the new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. I know this is an odd question, but does anyone have any idea how these two compare?

Thanks. :)
 
im not sure that youll find a comparison.but the dedicated ati card would be better it seems,since the 9400m is intergrated.i know the same question was asked yesterday.:p
 
the x1600 are very old cards whears the 9400m just got out mid-08 obviously the 9400 wins in graphics performance but im not sure what your trying to get at. but if its a decision i'd choose the 9400 cuz its the latest and you can run it with newer parts as well as its Dx10 capabilities (though macs dont have it lol.. i think?)
 
Thanks for the responses guys! I know this was a really weird question, but I'm just trying to compare my new MacBook with my old iMac.

I know the MB beats the iMac in every area except for hard drive speed (7200 vs 5400), and I didn't know how the video cards compared. The old one does have dedicated RAM, but it is old, so that's where I got confused.

Basically, I'm just trying to figure out exactly how great my new computer is. :D
 
My old 17" iMac with 1.83GHz Core Duo and X1600 128MB scored about 1200 in 3D Mark 06. The new MacBooks get around 2000.
 
Thanks, this is useful for me as well.

We have a iMac that my kid monopolizes to play games under bootcamp. I am thinking about getting her a MB instead. Just want to make sure that all the games she is running now *should* play on the new MB before we buy.

I'd love to see more benchmark comparisons if anyone has them.
 
Ok here are my results. I don't know exactly what they all mean, but it seems that the MacBook is the clear winner (unless lower numbers are better...).

iMac-
Time: 3:56
Rendering (1CPU): 1980
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 3742
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.89
Shading (openGL Standard): 3424

MacBook-
Time: 2:51
Rendering (1CPU): 2619
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 5163
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.97
Shading (openGL Standard): 4003

So that's pretty cool. I'd appreciate it if anyone can help me decipher these results. :)
 
Scott6666 said:
Thanks, this is useful for me as well.

We have a iMac that my kid monopolizes to play games under bootcamp. I am thinking about getting her a MB instead. Just want to make sure that all the games she is running now *should* play on the new MB before we buy.

I'd love to see more benchmark comparisons if anyone has them.
Click to expand...

If she just plays in windows then get her a PC and save yourself some daddy dollaz.
 
This is a good comparison

I wish more people would do comparisons like this. It is good for people on a budget looking for a Macbook. You can get a used 17" Macbook Pro with X1600 graphics for the same price as a new 13" Macbook with 9400M graphics. If the performance figures for both are approximately the same, I'd rather have the used 17" Macbook Pro.

(Forget the Macbook Pro with 8600M graphics. Too many problems with that one, especially if it's beyond Apple's service period.)
 
Most of the benchmarks posted show them pretty close to each other in real world tasks and games and give the advantage to the 9400 in synthetic benchmarks. For comparisson, my neighbor has an older MBP with the 1600 and I have one of the Unibody MB with the 9400. We tried some games out to compare the two and we were pretty much dead even on fps in BF2 but this was at native res and the MBP is a higher native res. At 1280x800 we were still almost identical in performance on L4D and WoW (those are the only titles we compared).

It was weird though because, depending on the task the Unibody MB would beat the MBP. Using QT Pro to transcode some vid files into MP4 the Unibody MB was faster - Noticably faster. I'm guessing this is due to the GPU acceleration in QT that is Nvidia only currently... is that right? If so, that is a significant benefit to the Unibody MB over the older MBP assuming you might be doing any encodes and the new MB's have the benefit of the newer chasis/lighter weight as well. The MBP has some other obvious benefits such as FireWire and the larger screen though.

Really, I don't think you can go wrong with either; it's just a trade off of features so pick the one that best fits your usage.
 
davwin said:
Most of the benchmarks posted show them pretty close to each other in real world tasks and games. For comparisson, my neighbor has an older MBP with the 1600 and I have one of the Unibody MB with the 9400. We tried some games out to compare the two and we were pretty much dead even on fps in BF2 but this was at native res and the MBP is a higher native res. At 1280x800 we were still almost identical in performance on L4D and WoW (those are the only titles we compared).

It was weird though because, depending on the task the Unibody MB would beat the MBP. Using QT Pro to transcode some vid files into MP4 the Unibody MB was faster - Noticably faster. I'm guessing this is due to the GPU acceleration in QT that is Nvidia only currently... is that right? If so, that is a significant benefit to the Unibody MB over the older MBP assuming you might be doing any encodes and the new MB's have the benefit of the newer chasis/lighter weight as well. The MBP has some other obvious benefits such as FireWire and the larger screen though.

Really, I don't think you can go wrong with either; it's just a trade off of features so pick the one that best fits your usage.
Click to expand...

The things you mention where the Unibody has the advantage don't really figure much into my daily usage, so for me, I think going with the used 17" is probably a better way to go for the about the same money.
 
Cool then - and I'm sure the additional screen real estate will be nice to have. Congrats and let us know how your MBP works out :)
 
dagamer34 said:
Man, if this is true, it's time to ditch my Late 2006 MacBook Pro for something better!
Click to expand...

Having ditched a Late 2006 MBP for the base Unibody Macbook (2 Ghz) a few months ago, the MacBook seems to be easily as good as the 2006, and slightly better for Windows based gaming (not by a lot though, and it is running at a lower res).It doesn't seem to like having its hard drive upgraded. I'm waiting till I have some spare cash so I can hook it up to my external display, then we'll see if it is better at a higher res. Apparently the 9400 is better at higher resolution graphics than the x1600.
 
Interesting, I would rather get the unibody look than than a 2 year old macbook pro with slower ram.
 
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