[gwillikers]

I opted for the 9600 Pro over the NVidia in my G5 (couldn't afford the 9800). But I wonder about the lack of info about the 9600. There is a nice benchtest comparison on XLR8yourMac, but otherwise there's very little info on this card. And most importantly, what about drivers?

There is no mention of the Mac 9600 on ATI's website, drivers or otherwise. There's little to no results from searching Apple's web site for the 9600.

So is it just the 9800's little brother, or what?

Puzzled,

-Howie

 

[monokitty]

As for drivers, the latest build of Mac OS X available (either 10.2.6 or 10.2.7) have the required ATI drivers built-in with the system. There were no drivers on the ATI web site for the 9600 Pro, which leads me to believe Mac OS X (the latest version) has the required drivers built-in. And yes, the 9600 is a cut-down version of the RADEON 9800 Pro with half the VRAM-- but no worries, the Radeon 9600 Pro is a very powerful graphics card. Hopefully that answers that question.

 

[MacGenius]

The 9600 is no slouch. It have it in my dual G5 and it smokes.

A little more VRAM would be fine though but I'm not complaining too much.

 

[PosterBoy]

The main difference is that the 9800 has eight parallel rendering pipelines and four parallel geometry engines while the 9600 has 4 parallel rendering pipelines 2 parallel geometry engines.
Considering the 9800 can process 8 billion pixels and 380 million polygons per second, a rough guess would put the 9600 somewhere in the 4 billion pixels/160 million polygon area, except that the clock speed of the chip and memory bandwidth are different too (256bit DDR on the 9800, 128bit DDR on the 9600)

--PB

 

[gwillikers]

I wrote this post after I saw the spanky new ATI update for the 9800 on versiontracker. With the neato application front-end and all.

I was jealous.

-Howie