Product Reviews

ATI'S comeback seems to be going quite well. The latest addition to the revitalised Radeon range is the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition graphics card.

To be honest, the Radeon 9000 isn't much faster than its predecessor, the Radeon 8500, but it is only about half the price, making it a good bet if you're looking for an affordable upgrade.

Like most recent graphics cards, the Radeon 9000 needs to be installed into an AGP slot rather than the older PCI expansion slot. That includes all current Power Mac G4 models sold, though, with only the very first G3 Macs missing out.

Monitor progress

The card is equipped with 64Mb of video memory, which is pretty good for its price range. Unlike the Radeon 8500, it has both DVI and ADC interfaces, and ATI has thrown in a DVI-to-VGA adaptor so you can use the card with just about any type of flat-screen or CRT monitor.

You can also connect a monitor to each interface, allowing you to have a dual-monitor setup for, say, video editing applications. Remember, though, that if you want to use two Apple monitors with ADC interfaces, you'll need a special adaptor so that the Radeon 9000's DVI interface can be connected to an ADC monitor. These adaptors are quite expensive - about the same price as the Radeon 9000 itself, in fact - so you'll have to take that into consideration. Non-Apple monitors with DVI interfaces can be hooked up more easily as a DVI adaptor for the card's ADC interface only costs about £15. Still, one monitor is enough for most of us.

Installation is fairly simple, but you'll need to pay close attention to the manual and the Read Me files supplied with the ATI software, as the process varies for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. If you're using OS X, you need to install the ATI software before you

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install the card. We did this with an OS X machine and experienced no problems.

With OS 9 you do it the other way round, installing the card first and then the software. However, the card may be incompatible with the extensions used by your existing graphics card. That was the case with our test machine, which crashed when we tried to restart it after inserting the Radeon 9000. You'll need to restart the machine once more and hold down the shift key to disable all extensions. This will allow your Mac to start properly so that you can then install the necessary ATI software.

Once we got past that hurdle, the card ran perfectly well under both OS X and OS 9. We tested it in a 933MHz Power Mac G4, which originally came with a GeForce2 MX graphics card. For the speed tests we used the venerable Quake 3. It's getting old now, but many recent games, including Medal Of Honor and Jedi Knight II, are based on the same graphics technology, so it's a good 3D performance test.

Test drive

Our first test used the game's 'normal' quality settings, with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. At this resolution the GeForce2 achieved a score of 90 frames per second (fps), while the Radeon 9000 managed only slightly better at 92fps. However, the difference between the two cards became much more pronounced once we started to crank up the image quality and resolution settings.

We raised the image quality to 'high', which uses more detailed colour and texture settings, and increased the resolution to 1024 x 768 pixels. This caused the GeForce2 card some trouble, and it dropped to 57fps, but the Radeon 9000 barely paused for breath, and maintained an impressive 89fps.

Next, we increased the resolution to 1280 x 1024 pixels, which is supported even on the low-cost eMac. The GeForce2 card pretty much gave up the ghost at this point and slumped to 37fps. The Radeon 9000 slowed a little, but its 78fps was still more than twice the speed of the GeForce2.

That makes the Radeon 9000 a very worthwhile upgrade for any G4 with an older Nvidia or ATI graphics card. It's not quite as fast as Nvidia's top-of-the-range GeForce4 Titanium card, but then, as that is more than double the price, the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition offers the best overall value for money.

Needs: Power Mac G4 with AGP slot, Mac OS 9.2.1 or Mac OS X 10.1.3, QuickTime 5.0