If I'm booted into OS 9.2 so that I can use the analog video input to put live TV onto a second monitor, the performance of the 7500's built-in video is by far superior to either ATI card. Neither ATI card can display 640x480 @ 120Hz 24-bit without dropping frames and jittery viewing even when it is dedicated to a single monitor. This may be a problem known to ATI since their support site mentions something about this inability to display live video properly.
In trying to troubleshoot this problem, I came across "Video Toolbox" which is a utility for measuring & optimizing video in OS 9 and before. It's a little old, being from 1996, but it measures many of the attributes of video display so that some real numbers can be assigned. I believe that if you test the 7500 (or 7600?) built-in video using Video Toolbox, it will outperform the fanciest ATI cards in several attributes. If I remember correctly, it almost doubles the data rate of the ATI, which I interpreted as being exactly the ratio of the 50 MHz built-in bus to the 33 MHz PCI bus. In the many other attributes that the ATI cards were better in, the ratio was nearer to 10-to-1 or greater in favor of the ATI, which I interpreted as more VRAM and processor power.
Video Toolbox has a special page devoted to 'speed' and shows test results of many older cards against built-in video, and built-in doesn't fair so poorly for some things. See:
http://vision.nyu.edu/Tips/Speed.html
In OS X, I've had OpenGL problems using the built-in video, and it's never functioned correctly. (To test quickly, I open an OpenGL screen saver like Flurry and it's all choppy). This broken OpenGL effects all video cards also if I'm using the built-in video, and I've attempted many times to fix this, and don't think any solution is satisfactory, so if you're primarily OS X, you probably should get an ATI card. Kris
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