How well will the iMac G5 do with games...

S

solidsnake

///M Therapist
Well I was hoping the iMac G5 would have had a 128 MB graphics card but the 64 MB will have to do


but how well will this work with games like DOOM 3 and Unreal Tourney 2k4



I had the ATI Radeon 9600 64 MB on my PowerBook G4 15" and games played decently...
 
Not very well, I would think. The graphics card isn't really that good for games and if you look at any review sites, the fx5200 is pretty much considered a budget video card. As such, the performance is rather poor. This is a real shame since the iMac G5 looks like a decent machine. Wish they had put a Radeon 9600 in it.
 
It might be worth noting that the card is a 8x AGP card in an 8x AGP slot, so it has double the throughput of the previous 64Mb cards that were 4x AGP. The previous top of the line PowerMacs used this trick to get away with 128Mb cards, instead of splashing out on 256Mb ones.
 
Most benchmarks between AGP 8x cards vs AGP 4x cards show minimal difference. The difference becomes more apparrent on higher end cards, but less so on the lower-end models since these tend not to be so bandwidth constrained but rather by the processing power of the video chip.
 
I was under the impression, that AGP was "just" for swapping the vram content to the ram of the system in the case there is more memory needed than available. But in these days, the vrams got so fast, that swapping it to the much slower system memory is a huge decrease of speed and thus not really desired. So, there is actually no use for the faster interface and the graphic card vendors try to increase the vram so they will never have to swap to the memory.
 
AGP 8x provides about 2GB/s transfer speed, which is no where near the speed of VRAM on the latest video cards, but it does help a lot if textures and shader programs exceed the capacity of the onboard memory.

But like Zammy says, most vendors try to alleviate this problem by providing more video RAM and you rarely have such swapping.
 
even if it's not 512 mb video card. The new iMac has an improve front side bus, and that extra transfer speed will defiantly come in handy with games like COD, SL, maybe even photo shop. And there is some thing to be said about having a video card that supports the new technologies in video rendering. (programable vertex shaders)

But defiantly, I wish they used a top of the line video card. Or at least allowed for video card upgrades.
 
The extra transfer speed isn't really going to match anything the video card can handle. The iMac G5 uses PC3200 RAM which has a maximum bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s. Unless it sports a dual channel memory controller (which could potentially double the bandwidth), the increased FSB isn't really going to help it much.
 
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