New Graphics Card, Not Much Difference

[Macmadant]

Hey,
I recently purchased a Radeon x800 graphics card for my MDD G4 to replace the Radeon 9000 in there. pleased to see more eye candy such as the dashboard ripple and transparent menu-bar that i didn't have before to my dismay when opening up wow today i saw a minute increase in the FPS by maybe 5 FPS, and it's still jumpy when playing. I'm sorely disappointed. maybe I'm being naive but i thought with double the clock speeds and quadruple the VRAM I'd see more than a 5 FPS increase i haven't had chance to test any other games but at the moment I'm not expecting much
My specs:
1.25 Ghz G4
1.25 GB RAM
X800 256 mb

 

[Eric5h5]

The G4 is hampered by a slow front-side bus, among other things. There's generally no benefit to anything faster than a Radeon 9800 in a G4, I'm afraid.

--Eric

 

[Macmadant]

Sigh..... i was hoping for a bigger difference over the Radeon 9000

 

[MacsRgr8]

It's all about bottlenecks regarding fps in demanding games.

Usually in default Apple configs, the grfx card is the bottleneck. So upgrading the card to a better, slightly newer generation grfx card is a good thing to do.
In the case of the MDD G4, the Radeon 9800 Pro is the best deal. Far better than the default 9000, but not overkill like a much newer X800.

So, in your case the G4 is held back by its poor 167 MHz FSB. Even the Dual 1.42 GHz 1.42 had to share this FSB, resulting in a serious bottleneck there.

 

[Macmadant]

It's all about bottlenecks regarding fps in demanding games.

Usually in default Apple configs, the grfx card is the bottleneck. So upgrading the card to a better, slightly newer generation grfx card is a good thing to do.
In the case of the MDD G4, the Radeon 9800 Pro is the best deal. Far better than the default 9000, but not overkill like a much newer X800.

So, in your case the G4 is held back by its poor 167 MHz FSB. Even the Dual 1.42 GHz 1.42 had to share this FSB, resulting in a serious bottleneck there.

But still even if the x800 is acting as a 9800 surely the increase in performance would be more than what i'm getting, my macrumors WoW guides logic i should be Averaging between 30 and 40fps outdoors, 20-30fps in cities/raids, but this is not the case