Product Reviews

ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro is one of the fastest graphics cards available for either the Mac or PC, and since the latest Nvidia GeForce cards don't run on the Mac, ATI pretty much rules the roost in the Mac market at the moment.

That doesn't mean the 9800 Pro is a good upgrade for all Macs. It's a meaty card, but you'll need a pretty powerful Mac to get the best out of it. To be blunt, this card will be wasted on any Mac that runs at less than 1GHz.

You get some idea of the power of this card as soon as you take it out of its box. It's a fat beast with both a large metallic heat sink and a cooling fan mounted on top of the main graphics chip.

Installation isn't too difficult, although ATI's manual is a bit vague so you may need to spend time rooting around inside your Mac to sort out the power cable. The only non-standard task is to connect the fan's power cable to your Mac's internal power supply.There's no need to install any software, as the card will work with the graphics drivers built into Mac OS X. You will need to be running at least OS X 10.2.5, and preferably OS X 10.3.2, as this has the latest drivers and will provide the best performance. There's no support for Mac OS 9.

One important detail to note is that unlike the Radeon 9000 card, the 9800 Pro doesn't have an ADC (Apple Display Connector). It has a standard DVI interface, as well as a VGA connector and an S-Video port for connecting the card to a TV monitor. This means you'll need to buy a DVI-to-ADC adaptor if you want to use it with an Apple ADC display.

Halo, sailor

To put the card through its paces we ran some tests using Halo - one of the latest Mac games, which has some pretty demanding 3D graphics. The minimum system requirement for Halo is an 800MHz processor and a graphics

ADVERTISEMENT

card with 32Mb of video memory. We started by running Halo on a machine that just met that basic specification - an 867MHz Power Mac G4 with a Radeon 9000 graphics card.

As the machine only just met the system requirements, we started with a low resolution of 640 x 480 pixels and turned off vertex and pixel shaders. These features provide high-quality textures and detail for graphics, such as hair or rippling water, and require an awful lot of processing power.

On this setting the Radeon 9000 managed 24.5 frames per second (fps). That's a playable speed, but the graphics looked a bit bland on these low-quality settings. Turning on vertex shaders improved the quality of graphics, but the frame rate dropped to 16.8fps, which is barely adequate for a high-speed action game such as Halo.

When we installed the 9800 Pro in the same machine, we were initially surprised to see that the frame rate remained at 24.5fps with vertex and pixel shaders turned off. That suggests the Mac's main processor is the bottleneck here, and you really need a faster machine backing up the graphics card.

However, when we turned on vertex shaders for the 9800 Pro the frame rate remained the same, so the card maintained its speed while also providing better image quality. We then also turned on pixel shaders to achieve the very highest image quality, and increased resolution up to 1280 x 1024 pixels. On these settings the Radeon 9800 Pro maintained a relatively healthy 22fps, while the old Radeon 9000 slumped to a mere 13fps.

Clearly, then, the Radeon 9800 Pro can provide both higher speed and better 3D image quality. However, on this 867MHz machine we were never able to get frame rates of more than 25fps, the Mac itself simply wasn't powerful enough to make use of the full power of the card.

Serious business

Further tests with a dual-processor 1.25GHz Power Mac G4 showed that the 9800 Pro regularly managed to run twice as fast as the Radeon 9000 at any given resolution.

The Radeon 9800 is clearly the king of the current crop of graphics cards, but there's probably not much point in buying it for any machine that runs at less than 1.5GHz (or perhaps dual-1GHz processors). Those performance requirements and the £300 price tag suggest this is a graphics card for the serious 3D designer or gamer rather than the average games enthusiast.