Hey everyone,
Have a bit of a head-scratcher here. I recently picked up a cheap PM G5. It's a dual core 2.3 GHz with the Apple OEM 7800GT video board. The machine is super stable, and if anything, is a bit of an overachiever in pure CPU benchmarks. However, I can't help but feel something is up with the GPU.
First, GUI animations occasionally get a little choppy. For the most part it's fine, but every once in a while (particularly if I've had several windows open at once) they'll all get a bit jittery. And scrolling in the Aquafox browser is consistently slow, at around 10 fps.
These performance issues led me to the OpenMark benchmark, which scored 9331. I can't help but feel that's terribly low! My 1.25GHz MDD with a PC-sourced Radeon 9800 Pro actually beats it, hitting ~9500!
Unreal Tournament 2004 is also not performing as well as it should on a machine of this caliber. It averages around 80 fps, but heavy action can cause the frame rate to dip into the low 40s. I have a Pentium 4 (3.4GHz) with a generation-older 6800GT that, with the same in-game graphics settings, averages around 95-100 fps and dips into the upper-50s when things get hectic. The Doom 3 timedemo? Around 71 fps on the G5; 82 on the P4. Granted, the PC runs XP, but a dual core G5 with a newer video board should run rings around any P4, right?
The power cable is plugged into the card, and I've made sure that the CPU is in high performance mode. I also tried Sorbet Leopard after hearing that it's generally a bit speedier than Stock Leopard. However, a clean install of Sorbet yielded...exactly 9331! Weird that this benchmark is so freakishly consistent on this machine--even across different OS versions! Almost seems like it's running into an artificial limit somewhere. Normally I'd blame such behaviour on Vsync, but the benchmark does start at over 2000 fps.
Could this be a driver issue? I've noticed that the GPU fan doesn't slow down when the desktop appears, it just remains at full-blast all the time. Going back to my P4/6800GT machine again, that system screams like a banshee during POST, but becomes almost inaudible when the video driver kicks in & the Welcome screen appears.
Are there alternative Nvidia drivers for the Mac? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Have a bit of a head-scratcher here. I recently picked up a cheap PM G5. It's a dual core 2.3 GHz with the Apple OEM 7800GT video board. The machine is super stable, and if anything, is a bit of an overachiever in pure CPU benchmarks. However, I can't help but feel something is up with the GPU.
First, GUI animations occasionally get a little choppy. For the most part it's fine, but every once in a while (particularly if I've had several windows open at once) they'll all get a bit jittery. And scrolling in the Aquafox browser is consistently slow, at around 10 fps.
These performance issues led me to the OpenMark benchmark, which scored 9331. I can't help but feel that's terribly low! My 1.25GHz MDD with a PC-sourced Radeon 9800 Pro actually beats it, hitting ~9500!
Unreal Tournament 2004 is also not performing as well as it should on a machine of this caliber. It averages around 80 fps, but heavy action can cause the frame rate to dip into the low 40s. I have a Pentium 4 (3.4GHz) with a generation-older 6800GT that, with the same in-game graphics settings, averages around 95-100 fps and dips into the upper-50s when things get hectic. The Doom 3 timedemo? Around 71 fps on the G5; 82 on the P4. Granted, the PC runs XP, but a dual core G5 with a newer video board should run rings around any P4, right?
The power cable is plugged into the card, and I've made sure that the CPU is in high performance mode. I also tried Sorbet Leopard after hearing that it's generally a bit speedier than Stock Leopard. However, a clean install of Sorbet yielded...exactly 9331! Weird that this benchmark is so freakishly consistent on this machine--even across different OS versions! Almost seems like it's running into an artificial limit somewhere. Normally I'd blame such behaviour on Vsync, but the benchmark does start at over 2000 fps.
Could this be a driver issue? I've noticed that the GPU fan doesn't slow down when the desktop appears, it just remains at full-blast all the time. Going back to my P4/6800GT machine again, that system screams like a banshee during POST, but becomes almost inaudible when the video driver kicks in & the Welcome screen appears.
Are there alternative Nvidia drivers for the Mac? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
