ATI Technologies 100-435057 Radeon 9800 Pro Special Mac Edition Review

Product description

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition – For those of you who like to ride on the bleeding edge of technology, the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition offers you the ultimate in Mac gaming graphics! Supporting today’s latest video games, as well as those yet to come, this video card features 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM, support for both 4x and 8x AGP bus configurations, 8 parallel rendering pipelines, 4 parallel geometry engines, support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 specifications, and much much more. Supports up to 2048×1536 @ 85Hz with 16.7 Million Colors Requires – Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later, AGP 4x or 2x capable Macintosh, Power Mac G5, & 512MB of system memory

From the Manufacturer

The cinematic revolution continues with the RADEON 9800 MAC EDITION, the fastest and most visually advanced 3D performer on the planet. A supercharged, 256-bit DDR memory interface and 8 thrilling pixel pipelines generate the power to deliver real-time, Hollywood calibre graphics for the most demanding next-generation games.

Features
Generation Now Technology
RADEON 9800 PRO MAC SPECIAL EDITION is ATI’s most advanced Visual Processing Unit (VPU) and is optimized to run the most demanding 3D next-generation games and applications.

VERSAVISION allows you to view your desktop the way you want, providing hardware accelerated display rotation and scaling.

Cinematic Rendering
Backed by highly programmable shader engines and supporting the latest OpenGL feature sets, the RADEON 9800 PRO MAC SPECIAL EDITION is designed to bring the most detailed worlds to life with motion picture quality lighting, textures and effects.

Maximum 3D
Savor a 3D experience with the sharpest, clearest picture quality imaginable, thanks to SMOOTHVISION 2.1 and its latest anti-aliasing and texture filtering technologies. Add eight parallel rendering pipelines, a 256-bit wide memory interface and support for the AGP PRO 8X standard, and you have the blazing fast performance to deliver interactive frame rates at the highest resolutions and detail settings.

Technical Specifications

• 256MB DDR memory
• Dual Integrated 10-bit per channel 400MHz DACs
• Dual 165MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI compliant)
• Multiple display connections
• ADC port
• DVI-I port
• DVI-I to VGA adapter included

System Requirements

• Mac OS X 10.2.8 or 10.3.3 and later
• Power Mac G5
• 512MB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive

Graphic Features

• Eight parallel rendering pipelines process over 3 billion pixels per second
• Four parallel geometry engines process up to 380 million transformed and lit polygons per second
• High precision 32-bit per channel rendering
• SMARTSHADER 2.1 technology
• Advanced programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
• 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass
• 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
• Shadow volume rendering acceleration
• High dimension floating point textures
• SMOOTHVISION 2.1
• State-of-the-art full-scene anti-aliasing
• New technology processes over 18 billion anti-aliasing samples per second for unprecedented performance
• Supports up to 6x mode with programmable sample patterns
• Advanced anisotropic filtering
• Supports up to 16 trilinear filtered texture samples per pixel
• Efficient adaptive algorithm enables this feature with minimal performance degradation
• HYPER Z III+
• Hierarchical Z-Buffer and Early Z Test reduce overdraw by detecting and discarding hidden pixels
• Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth consumption by over 50%
• Z Cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

Video Features

• DVD AND QUICKTIME ACCELERATION:
• Top quality DVD and all-format DTV/ HDTV decode with low CPU overhead
• Seamless integration of programmable pixel shaders with video data
• ADVANCED DUAL DISPLAY SUPPORT
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
• Apple Display Connecter built-in
• VERSAVISION provides hardware accelerated display rotation and scaling

Warranty
3-year limited warranty