ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition: One Card for All

Application Pixel Shader Performance

For our last tests, we have two applications that use pixel shaders and thus GPU acceleration, Apple's Motion 1.01 and iMaginator 2.0. 

Motion is Apple's motion graphics software package and many of its effects are rendered on the GPU.  For this particular test, we use the Motion Mark RAM Preview test described here.

As is expected, the more memory bandwidth and pixel throughput that you have, the faster the test runs.  There are no real surprises here.

Next up, we have iMaginator 2.0, a image processor that uses OS X's Core Image framework to apply GPU accelerated filters and other effects to images.  For these tests, we standardized on the benchmarks introduced by Macwelt.  The three tests used basically combine a number of filters and play 200 frames of their effects with a 0-second delay between frames, timing how long they take to play back.

Test 1 performs the following filters in this order: Kaleidoscope, Bump Distortion, Bloom, Bloom, Glass Distortion, Glass Distortion, Transition: Mod.  Our test 1 is slightly different than what was introduced by Macwelt. 

Test 2 does the following: Perspective Tile, Glass Distortion, Gloom, Edges, Ripple.

Test 3 does the following: Vortex Distortion, Glass Lozenge, Pinch Distortion, Gaussian Blur, Disintegrate with Mask.

With iMaginator, we see that having more pixel pipelines can really impact application performance where pixel shaders are extensively used.  If you find yourself using a lot of applications that leverage Tiger's Core Image, you may want to think about moving to a 9800 Pro, X800 or 6800 Ultra based GPU instead of the 9600 Pro. 

It is interesting to note that in Test 1, the 256MB frame buffer of the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition actually gave it a significant advantage over the 128MB Radeon 9600XT, despite the fact that the 9600XT has more memory bandwidth.