New iMac graphics no better than my 2 yr old iMac?

[Scott6666]

I have a couple year old iMac with a x1600 Radeon in it. The benchmarks that I see at notebookcheck show it has a 3DMark05 of 3708

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-X1600.2163.0.html

It then shows the 9400M at even less: 3262

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9400M-G.11949.0.html

Does this mean that if I upgrade my 2 year old mac there is no performance increase of the graphics? Kind of hard to believe.

 

[eawmp1]

If you are going to upgrade a 2 year old iMac for more GRAPHICS performance, you have more mony than sense. Unless you are doing some high end gaming (which one could question the utility of an iMac for) then graphics performance imprvements over the last 2 years are unnoticeable to most consumers.

 

[Scott6666]

I was going to upgrade for general performance reasons.

My kid uses it to play games on so I hoped to generally upgrade the games she could play on it. But if the graphics are the same I assume she will not be able to play anything she can't play now, so why spend the money.

 

[Badger^2]

9400M is equal to the 1600

http://www.barefeats.com/imac09d.html

but a video card isnt everything in terms of performance, not by a long shot

 

[Scott6666]

http://www.barefeats.com/imac09d.html

but a video card isnt everything in terms of performance, not by a long shot

The only 9400 they test is a MBP which seems to come in at roughly the same level as the X1600. It's clearly a systems test so even if the video card isn't everything the FPS don't show any difference despite a 2.8GHz CPU in the MBP vs my current 1.8GHz CPU

The Apple iMac site makes a big deal about better graphics that I'm surprised that the numbers don't show a difference unless you go to the ATI's.