On Thursday, July 25, 2002, at 08:20 AM, (Unsupported OS X) wrote:
> Just considering my options for a new graphics card for my old 7500...
>
> As all the newer boxes use AGP slots for the graphics cards (am I
> right?) does
> this mean that I can't use these cards in my 7500's normal PCI slot or
> just
> that they will be running on a slower bus, and otherwise be Ok.
to begin with, you wouldn't even be able to fit the AGP card in
your PCI slot, it's a completely different socket required.
>
> Can someone enlighten me as to what my choices are?
for the best possible performance on your Mac with OS X, the bare
minimum is going to be an ATI Rage 128 card with 16 MB of RAM aboard.
The earlier Rage Pro cards (like the XClaim 3D Plus) now have some
support under 10.1.5, but for the most acceptable performance it's going
to have to be the Rage 128 with 16 MB. I'm using a Rage Orion 128 on my
UMAX J700 and am getting some pretty good performance from it.
Do note that when Jaguar (10.2) comes out that it will require an
even beefier video card, since Apple has now started using Open GL to
take on graphic redraws within OS X with that release, they're saying a
32 MB card and an AGP. Of course we won't know how well it'll work with
a Rage 128 PCI machine until Ryan gets XPostFacto working with 10.2 .
One thing I could recommend to get speedier response with redraws -
shut off the shadows in Aqua using the program Shadowkiller at bootup, I
did and saw a decent speedup in redraws. Also shut off any animation
stuff in the Dock (bouncing icons, magnification), that should also free
up some processor speed that will give you better performance. One other
thing I did was use the Duality theme program to install a different
theme that didn't use transparency, which is also a resource hog.
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