Anyone with a RADEON 7000 Mac Edition?

**BlingBling 3k12** · June 7th, 2002, 05:53 PM

You guys have any problems if you're on a G3? On the ATI site, they list a few and I wanted to know if any had had any troubles.

It says that everything was fixed in 10.1.5, so anyone have any problems after that update??

Thanx!

**thedbp** · June 7th, 2002, 06:23 PM

And i haven't had any problems at all, period. Love the card. I just wish it was AGP (sigh). I'm stuck w/ PCI graphix till i buy a new Mac :`(

**BlingBling 3k12** · June 7th, 2002, 08:05 PM

what's the problem between AGP and PCI?

**thedbp** · June 7th, 2002, 09:36 PM

Well, basically, the way PCI slots are desinged, even on a faster 66MHz slot, you can only get a certain amount of bandwidth through the board. something on the order of about 500/sec. Which, really, is a lot. But it isn't enough for Quartz Extreme, the new graphics rendering engine for 10.2.

Quartz Extreme requires an AGP 2x slot at least. AGP has a bandwidth that far exceeds that of PCI graphics - about 1GB/sec for 2x. The standard is now 4x, which is you would imagine, much faster. The other problem lies in that the PCI graphics can't access the main RAM directly; AGP can. This makes it much faster for information to get to the AGP graphics card as it doesn't have to be passed to the processor to be redirected to the graphics card.

So there you go. PCI graphics are fine for 3D gaming from about 1998 or 9 at the latest. But AGP is where its at baby, and 8x is right around the corner. that's when i'm getting a new Mac.

**BlingBling 3k12** · June 7th, 2002, 10:05 PM

but it does get the job done... right? i can still use all the functions of OS X without a MAJOR slowdown in performance....

**thedbp** · June 8th, 2002, 09:53 AM

basic OS functionality will NOT be affected. whether or not some of the advanced parts of Quartz Extreme will work will have to be seen however. Things like transparent windows showing a DVD playing through them, the super screen zoom effect, and some other really intense visual effects. 10.2 will DEFINITELY speed up the interface regardless of what graphics card you have, but the benefits to AGP users will be extraordinary.

Basically what Quartz Extreme does is offload ALL of the display processing into a single OpenGL channel to the GPU on the graphics card, thus freeing up your main processor to do more important things, and also allowing ALL the screen data to be intermingled as opposed to each application getting its video data processed separately by the main CPU before it gets output to your monitor.

Brilliant idea.

**BlingBling 3k12** · June 8th, 2002, 11:14 AM

thanks for the info... what i really meant was right now, before 10.2, does the card pretty much get the job done with all the features or are there certain "no-no's" to do...