Ati 9600 vs. GeF 7300

[RAMd®d]

I took Close Combat: First to Fight to my local Apple Store and installed it on a standard 24" iMac.

Unfortunately, it plays not better on it than on my MDD with a 9600 card, The frame rates might be higher, though it didn't seem to make any difference.

All in all, it looked like a early version of Tomb Raider. Well, maybe not quite that bad. But not the realistic look with all the subtle textures and reflections when played with a hi-po card.

So now, I have to find out if the 7600 does more than double the RAM. The ATi 9800 apparently has additional functionality beyond RAM.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

The Radeon 9600 is a little dated. It used to be the lowest card I would recommend for playing games. The Geforce 7300 GT is a decent chip but it is not really a performace gaming chip. Is the game Universal Binary? If it is running non-native on an Intel Mac, that might contribute to the iMac not smoking the MDD.

Looking at the info on Newegg for PC cards, both cards use 128 bit memory. the 7600 GT has 12 pipelines and runs at 560 MHz, the 7300 GT has 8 pipelines and runs at 375 MHz. The chips in might run at different speeds in the iMac.

[RAMd®d]

Thanks for the info.

I didn't think about FtF being PPC only. That covers the speed, and under the circumstances, it probably did better than I realized.

But I don't think that would account for the texture and shading that I saw in the G5s back at MWSF.

Maybe I'll try stuffing the 9800 in my MDD and see if I can get it to play nice, instead of freezing the box.