PM 8500 + G3 = video artifacts

[croissantking]

Oooh a showdown.

 

[Phipli]

Oooh a showdown.

Pffft.

Nah. I'm probably misremembering something. Plus these things depend what benchmark you use. For example MacBench scores things vastly differently to everything else.

Plus... OS versions, host machine (66MHz slots Vs 33MHz)... Bit depth, driver version.

We could be both right, both wrong, or most likely, I'm wrong.

 

[ObeyDaleks]

LOL, actually I would have preferred if you were right and told me how to make the PCI Radeons amazingly fast. I did read some reports that they are faster in OS X, but I never tried it myself. I would surmise that ATI probably put most of their effort into 3d drivers since that was the primary selling point in the early 2000s. So making the drivers perform well in 2d on a soon-to-be-obsolete OS probably wasn’t a huge priority. But that’s just a theory.

 

[Phipli]

LOL, actually I would have preferred if you were right and told me how to make the PCI Radeons amazingly fast. I did read some reports that they are faster in OS X, but I never tried it myself. I would surmise that ATI probably put most of their effort into 3d drivers since that was the primary selling point in the early 2000s. So making the drivers perform well in 2d on an “obsolete” OS probably wasn’t a huge priority. But that’s just a theory.

My half remembered stuff is that the Radeon 9200 is slower than the Radeon 7000 at 2D stuff, and my 7000 and Rage 128 are fairly similar. My Radius PC PCI, Matrox Mil and Mil2 are all slower than the Radeon 7000.

I only have the slower of the two types of Rage 128, so you might have the faster one. It's a while since I tested my TT or my Ultimate Rez, but I remember the driver versions made /huge/ differences. They were spectacular at image copy / shift operations and font drawing (one specific driver version had them doing fonts faster than a G4 dual 450 in my... 8600/250).

I've done most of my testing in a Blue and White lately, but used to use the 8600 until I wore out a PCI slot.

I've been collecting 8, 16 and 24 bit scores for various cards / chips for the last while, meaning to feed them into @macuserman's spreadsheet of card performance. I also graved a RAVE and OpenGL benchmark for the same purpose but since then have spent my time playing with older cards.

The Radius Precision colour PCI was the biggest disappointment - it is slower than integrated graphics on the 7200. Reading old reviews they said it was slow, but good for high resolution. Mine is the one with only half the VRAM so it isn't good for that either!

What benchmark tool did you use? I have a feeling you're not using the same one as me because I'd never consider the 7000 not fast enough. The iXMicro Ultimate Rez is a good card... But I didn't think it was as good as a card from 4 years later. That's a long time in 1990s/2000s video cards.

(I can grab one later to check).

 

[Phipli]

I would surmise that ATI probably put most of their effort into 3d drivers since that was the primary selling point in the early 2000s. So making the drivers perform well in 2d on an “obsolete” OS probably wasn’t a huge priority. But that’s just a theory.

This certainly happened, the 2D performance gains levelled off after the Rage128 Pro, but they didn't start dropping until a bit later. Like I mentioned, the 9200 is worse than the 7000 at 2D QuickDraw.

Random photo from my phone (while testing a Matrox Mil) :



The G3 400 outperforms my Radeon 7000, that will be a Rage128 Pro... But the later higher clocked one. Mine scores pretty similar to the Radeon 7000.