video card question: 64mb FX5200 vs. 128mb 9800 pro

[wkw]

I recently purchased a rev. b dual 2ghz G5. It came with the FX5200 card installed. I found an older oem 128mb 9800 pro with the ADC connection on ebay and picked that up. I have an ADC 20" monitor. I know there are several mac retail cards to choose from but I wanted to get something with ADC. I ran xbench and found the 9800 to be only a few points better than the FX5200. Is this a good benchmark utility to use to compare video cards? to be honest, I read so many complaints about the FX5200 I went ahead and got the 9800 without really checking out my 5200 thoroughly. Now I am tempted to sell the 9800 and spend the money on a faster sata drive like a WD Raptor 10,000 rpm instead of worrying about video performance. I really don't play many video games, just GT4 on my PS2. I really suck at FPS games like Doom and Quake so I don't play them much. I do alot of iPhoto and Photoshop , but not video editing or production. What do you guys think?

thanks

 

[Jigglelicious]

Don't bother looking at Xbench for video card scores. The Radeon 9800 is easily several times faster than the FX5200. But you won't really notice it unless you play games, or use Motion.

 

[Sutekidane]

The Radeon 9800 is MUCH better than the fx5200. XBench isn't really designed for graphic performance.

 

[Rocksaurus]

If you don't really play games, then you probably don't need the extra video power, but as an owner of the 5200FX, and someone who plays the occasional game, I just can't recommend you give it up, because the 5200FX is just so miserable... And the 9800 is so much better. But, if you never touch games, you probably won't notice the shortcomings of the 5200FX, and those raptors are very nice...

 

[freiheit]

If you don't play games, a Radeon 9000/9200 would be almost as good as the 9800. General consensus from all real-world benchmarks I've seen (ie. those that deal in frame rates of actual programs rather than purely scientific number crunching) is that the GeForce FX5200 is pretty much worse in most respects than a Radeon 9200 -- except that the 5200 is CoreImage (and DirectX9) compatible while the 9200 is not. The 9800 is and is much, much more capable than either the 5200 or the 9800.

Keep in mind that because of the fact that MacOS X does so much of its own graphics work in the GPU, the better video card will have benefit throughout the system if for no other reason than taking workload off of your CPU(s). In a modern Mac, the video card practically is a third CPU.

If you decide to use OSX 10.4 with all its neat gee-whiz visual effects, the Radeon 9800 just may prove much more valuable to you than the FX5200 Ultra. Now look toward OSX 10.5... 10.6...

 

[Ti_Poussin]

Stay with the 9800, it will benefit soon enough, Tiger use a lot VRAM, as soon as Photoshop get optimize with core image you will see a lot of difference in speed. By optimization I mean, get many filter and effect by the video card so the CPU can be free to compute other effect. Right now, it's not the day and night if you aren't playing game, but it will soon make a difference.

 

[wkw]

thanks for the suggestions everyone, I am undecided at this point so I will probably hang on to the 9800 for now.