eMac Radeon 9200 vs. eMac Radeon 9600

[AppleVenom]

I recently bought a 1.42GHz G4 eMac with an ATI Radeon 9600 64MB GPU. I've been throwing games at it and I'm pretty underwhelmed with its performance. As someone who has owned two Windows XP desktops with 128MB Radeon 9200 LE's in them and was thrilled with their abilities, I'm wondering if I should have gone with the 1.25GHz eMac with the 32MB Radeon 9200.

Has anyone had any experience in comparing these two models when it comes to graphical/gaming performance? I'll say that the performance isn't terrible on the 9600, but I know that my old AGP 9200 LE cards could probably blow it out of the water and I don't think it's only due to the higher 128MB VRAM.

The games I've tried so far are:

007 Nightfire - sub-30fps even with low settings @ 640x480
Aliens vs. Predator 2 - pretty good performance with medium settings @ 640x480
Doom 3 - surprisingly playable, but low FPS even with the lowest settings @ 640x480
Halo: Combat Evolved - good, but not perfect performance with high settings @ 640x480
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - good, but not perfect performance with high settings @ 640x480
No One Lives Forever - good, but not perfect performance with high settings @ 640x480
Quake III - excellent performance with settings maxed @ 800x600
Return to Castle Wolfenstein - excellent performance with settings maxed out @ 640x480
Total Immersion Racing - good performance with environment mapping (reflections) turned off @ 640x480
Unreal Tournament 2004 - decent performance with medium settings @ 640x480

Many times I will notice that the resolution barely makes much of a difference in the lesser demanding games like Quake III-era stuff.

On my AGP 9200 LE cards in a PC, I could run all of these games MUCH better at higher resolutions all day long EXCEPT for Doom 3. My old 9200 cards would barely even touch it, but this 9600 actually runs it at what I would think was "ok" for back in 2005.

So I'm torn. I would love to get my hands on an eMac 1.25 GHz model just to put them side by side benchmark them. Before I do that, I'm hoping someone else out there can simply tell me which is actually better. Is this down to just driver availability or maybe just worse game optimization? I know that the ROM updates from ATI back in the day don't apply to the eMac at all, so I'm not even sure how drivers could be updated on them if at all possible.

 

[GMShadow]

The Radeon 9600 is going to run OS X a lot better than the 9200 will, as it's Core Image capable, so I'd stick with it in a heartbeat.

That said, some of your issues are going to be down to optimization problems or just needing more hardware than an eMac will ever be able to handle.

Doom 3, for example, wants a 1.5GHz G4 and has a 9600 as minspec, but it wasn't like performance was great even on a kitted-out G5 at the time. Macworld reported 47.1FPS at 640x480 with an X800 that had 256MB of VRAM, in a 2.5GHz DP G5, and that was with anti-aliasing turned off. Table below, I posted it here as Macworld's formatting is busted due to site updates.

	640x480	800x600	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
no FSAA	47.1	45.3	41.3	35.6	29.5
FSAA 2x	44.9	42.5	38.2	31.7	24.8
FSAA 4x	40.8	36.7	30.3	23.6	18.4

 

[AppleVenom]

I appreciate the reply! That's interesting to know that the 9600 is core image capable. I actually didn't think it was specifically on Apple's list. The Mobility, Pro and XT were, but not the "regular" 9600. In fact this card is such a weirdo, it's hard to find any information on it at all. I'd like to figure out its exact specifications, but I really haven't been able to find any documentation on it.

And yeah...Doom 3 is a hog. I wouldn't expect it to run enjoyably on anything short of a 9800 Pro (maybe a 9700 Pro). My issue is that even games like Medal of Honor Allied Assault and No One Lives Forever can slow down quite a bit even at 640x480. I specifically remember running these (and even games like Serious Sam) on my AGP 9200 LE cards with pretty stellar performance for a budget card. I watched this video of a 1.25GHz G4/Radeon 9200 eMac running Quake III and Unreal Tournament 2004 and it seems like the guy is getting around the same performance I am (around the 21:00 mark):

Making a case for the eMac

I don't think I ever ran UT 2004 on my 9200 LE cards.

If anyone has exact specs on the Radeon 9200 and 9600 cards used in the later eMac's, that would be extremely helpful to me. Thanks again.

 

[GMShadow]

https://web.archive.org/web/20090223225613/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1582

I had to dig but here's the Core Image specs, the base 9600 is compatible. The 9550 was so it would have been really odd for the 9600 not to be there. Once Tiger shipped they made any Macs sold at the time capable.


NOLF running that poorly feels a bit odd, but I've only tried to run it on my DLSD PowerBook which does have a bit more grunt, and I haven't played it extensively.

 

[AppleVenom]

Lol that goes to show just how new I am to OS X. I didn't know it was as simple as looking in graphics/displays in system profiler to see if it was compatible. Thanks for that.

NOLF, among some of these other games, I figured would run pretty flawlessly at even 1024x768, but the one thing my old 9200's had over this 9600 was Pentium 4 CPU's at 1.8Ghz and up. I'm sure that extra CPU juice made them play a lot smoother. Performance on paper gets really twisty when it comes to the G4 vs. Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 chips, especially when it comes to gaming performance. So the performance lull probably has to do mostly with that and optimization. A lot of these games came out in the early days of OS X, so while Halo and Doom 3 run pretty respectively (relatively), it's probably because they were better prepared.

Still requesting actual specs of the eMac 9200 and 9600 if anyone stumbles upon this and has them handy. I just know my curiosity is going to get the best of me and I'll end up buying a 1.25 GHz eMac with a 9200 just to find out for sure...because I'm stupid and lack self control.

 

[Intell]

Looking at the eMac OpenGL benchmarks (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-ppc-openmark-benchmarks.1848060/), the Radeon 9200 gets 1179 vs the 9600's 4147, roughly 4 times the score.

 

[AphoticD]

Despite being sold as a low-end education market model, the final eMac (G4 1.42GHz) was an excellent Mac. It had all the right stuff to fit the bill as a near perfect PowerPC desktop which has stood the test of time. I would have no regrets about obtaining this model with the 9600 GPU over the model with the 9200 GPU. It's is without a doubt, a better performer than the 1.25GHz model.

In my observations, the Mac port of Doom 3 for either PowerPC or Intel never performed as well as the Windows version. I remember seeing massive performance gains in Doom 3 when run on XP or Windows 7 via Bootcamp on the same (early Intel) hardware. The same could be said for many other Mac ports, so it's no surprise your experience of the 9200 LE in your Windows XP PC outshines your eMac's gaming ability.

 

[AppleVenom]

Thanks to both of you as well, I appreciate the input. That benchmark sheet is exactly what I needed! And yeah. Doom 3 is one thing - I would just expect the 9600 to handle things like No One Lives Forever and Aliens vs. Predator 2 without a hitch. I guess it just comes down to optimization. Quake 3 based stuff seems to run great, but Medal of Honor and Return to Castle Wolfenstein don't run amazingly with really high settings - acceptable at best. Alice and Heavy Metal FAKK 2 run incredibly well.