I just wanted to let you guys know that the Radeon9700 mac edition was released yesterday. Now mac gamers can enjoy fast fps!
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RADEON 9700 released
- Thread starter Jeffx342
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I dont know where you got this information, but the only version currently 'available' is the OEM version that Apple gets...
You have to get a new mac to get the card. RAW! Sure would be nice if ATI announced an all in wonder 9700 for the mac. But if you look at the history of this company and mac then you know they are very slow moving their stuff to the mac and i wont even talk about the drivers. This card has had solid reviews on the pc side.
I know... I want to have this card, if it was avaible I would e-mail apple sales right now and ask them to change cards since my powermacs not comming till the 19th of next month so it shouldnt realy change the date
If i was getting any new powermac this is the card i would want in it even if i had to wait a few more days.
Or at least, faster Fps. The biggest slow-up on mac games right now is the lack of a sound card. This is both a plus and a minus.
The good news about no sound card is that you never have to worry about driver conflicts or the card going bad. As long as the processor still runs, and your speakers still work, you will still be able to get full sound. It also reduces the load on the PCI bus, frees-up a PCI slot, and lowers the temperature of the computer b/c that is one less processor heating things up. It also helps with mobile products b/c that is one less item drawing power (although mobile sound cards are for the most part not very power hungry).
The bad news about this is that you are draining those precious clock cycles from the processor and therefore, slowing games up. Need proof? Try running Quake 3 on a MacOS9 system with the sound extensions disabled. You should see a considerable speed boost.
Believe it or not, the largest load while playing games is given to your primary processor. It has to tell the graphics card what to get and where to get it. The graphics card just calculates the vectors and such. The primary processor (the G4 or whatever you have) has to do all of the guess work and all of the calculations for movement. I don't think graphics cards even have branch-prediction units.
Here is the best example in the way that I see it:
1. You have an upper arm. The shoulder is point A,a,Aa. The elbow (initially) is at point B,b,Bb. (remember, we are dealing with an x,y,z axis system for 3 dimentions)
2. The CPU sends those coordinates to the graphics card and tells it to draw a line between those two points.
3. The graphics card calculates every point between those two points and draws them to the screen. It already knew what kind of operation it was going to have to do, so there is no guess-work, just a bunch of calculations.
4. The user presses a button telling the computer to move the elbow in a direction and holds the button down for 2 seconds leaving the shoulder in the same place (A,a,Aa), but moving the elbow to H,h,Hh.
5. The CPU gets the user's input and realizes it has to start calculating as many co-ordinates from B,b,Bb in the direction the user told it to as possible It has to calculate the vectors to move them and the equasions to use to move them in the appropriate directions. Or maybe, depending on the design of the program and the graphics card drivers, the CPU tells the GPU (graphics processing unit) to start calculating as many points in a given direction as possible, but it first has to relay what points are to be moved and then what geometric equasion to move them along.
6. The as the CPU calculates these co-ordinates, it sends them to the GPU and tells it to erase what it already had drawn calculate every point between A,a,Aa and whatever coordinate the CPU last calculated. It repeats this operation over and over until the CPU stops recieving the user input.
Now, remember, this is a very simplified view of it b/c there are a million other things the processor is also animating on the arm alone, and yes, the graphics card does remove a large portion of the burden from the CPU by doing a lot of the redundant tasks, but still, the major thinking is done by the CPU. Now, add in the CPU having to process sounds which are a lot of redundant tasks, and the CPU is now bogged-down, thus not being able to feed the graphics card with nearly as many coordinates and therefore, a much slower framerate.
All in all, I think the only reason I wrote all of this in response to a really innocent post, is so that I would actually get all these steps down and organized for my own understanding (and anyone else who is interested). This has little relavance to the post other to say that a new graphics card is not going to double your gaming experiance. Sorry for the long-winded post, and I hope this helps anyone who is interested. Also, I must note that this is not the exact way it all happens, I just read up on this stuff in my spare time and interpret it the best way I can.
Id wait at a max of an extra week.. I dont know about a few more months. Ive all ready gotta 5 more weeks and Im gioing crazy because Im on a dam dell laptop thats about 2 years old now because my PC went down a few weeks ago which led to me buying the powermac
Nice post king! really if you aint got a cpu that can feed it the fastest card in the world just aint going to matter. You need a fast cpu and a fast video card. One with out the other is like a v8 with no gas.
thanks Don't Hurt Me. I am glad my rambling is worth something.
It is funny, though, that you are able to sum up in a few sentences what I was saying (in way too much depth) in about a full page paper. Now only if my professors could get me to do that much writing
I take that back. Times New Roman, 12pt font, double-spaced, it is 2 and a half pages, and that is taking out all of the extra spaces I added to section things off. Wow. I never thought I could pull something like that off the top of my head in under a half-hour! Now my Macro-Econ paper is going to be another thing all together
It is funny, though, that you are able to sum up in a few sentences what I was saying (in way too much depth) in about a full page paper. Now only if my professors could get me to do that much writingI take that back. Times New Roman, 12pt font, double-spaced, it is 2 and a half pages, and that is taking out all of the extra spaces I added to section things off. Wow. I never thought I could pull something like that off the top of my head in under a half-hour! Now my Macro-Econ paper is going to be another thing all together
So youre saying that all the sound cards in our current Macs do is relay what the processor tells it to? converts it to sound from data?
Would a card like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 (Product Page) would take that load off of the processor? Or has Apple designed Mac OS X to run sound processes thru the CPU all the time?
Also, if you think this card might do that, would it benefit me in a Beige G3 much? I have a 500mhz G3 and the games I play are limited by the CPU more than my GPU at this point...
Would a card like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 (Product Page) would take that load off of the processor? Or has Apple designed Mac OS X to run sound processes thru the CPU all the time?
Also, if you think this card might do that, would it benefit me in a Beige G3 much? I have a 500mhz G3 and the games I play are limited by the CPU more than my GPU at this point...
Although not 100% sure how the drivers are set-up for third-party sound cards for the Mac, I am pretty sure that they would have an advantage over the normal config. Any Mac that you purchase HAS NO sound card. That is the point. I believe a sound card's drivers would override the normal Mac Sound drivers, but I am not sure. That would be a question I would ask customer support for that particular company before buying the card. I will say this, though: Without a sound-card, macs cannot utilize the digital new surround sound systems to their potential. It would see it just as another external speaker. A third-party sound card can give you digital surround sound, so unless you are planning on forking up for a sound card, don't buy those expensive speaker systems.
Although not 100% sure how the drivers are set-up for third-party sound cards for the Mac, I am pretty sure that they would have an advantage over the normal config. Any Mac that you purchase HAS NO sound card. That is the point. I believe a sound card's drivers would override the normal Mac Sound drivers, but I am not sure. That would be a question I would ask customer support for that particular company before buying the card. I will say this, though: Without a sound-card, macs cannot utilize the digital new surround sound systems to their potential. It would see it just as another external speaker. A third-party sound card can give you digital surround sound, so unless you are planning on forking up for a sound card, don't buy those expensive speaker systems.
