Product Reviews

Gaming may have a less than illustrious pedigree on the Mac, but that doesn't stop software and hardware companies from continuing to innovate in the games arena. The latest salvo comes from ATI in the shape of its Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition graphics card.

It requires a G5-based system but serious gamers will already be using a G5. Despite offering performance that usually outstrips the competing GeForce 6800 Ultra DLL card from Nvidia, the X800 is around half the height; the Nvidia card's heatsink is so tall that it blocks one of the G5's PCI slots.

While the cards from both companies allow you to drive one of Apple's high-end 30in Cinema Displays, the X800 can 'only' support one; anyone

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who wishes to run two £2099 displays side by side is unlikely to notice the extra few pounds on the Nvidia's price. The X800 has DVI and ADC connections, and includes a DVI-to-VGA adaptor.

Unusually, we saw a very slight change with our custom 2D redraw test - from 5.52 seconds up to 5.62 - when comparing our test dual 2GHz G5's built-in Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics card with the X800. When we tested the X800 with Cinebench, we saw a 53% increase in OpenGL Hardware Lighting performance.

The biggest performance gains were when the X800 was tested during gameplay. Using Halo as our benchmark, we recorded an increase in frame rate using default settings from 42fps to 69fps, meaning that the X800 performed 64% better than the G5's card.

Fitting the X800 gave us access to additional rendering technologies. In particular, we could use vertex shaders and full-screen antialiasing to give Halo a much higher level of polish. Even with all the settings pushed to their maximum, Halo reported an average frame rate of 32fps.

The ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition will also natively support the forthcoming Image Core technologies in Mac OS X 10.4.

There's no doubt that this is an expensive card, but it's also good value for money. You want the best? This is it.