ATI Radeon 9800 Pro: OEM VS Retail

dstranathandstranathan
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro: OEM VS Retail



OK, well all know the main basic differences:



External Connectivity:



Retail = RGB (15 pin)/S-Video and xxx pinouts

OEM = ADC/DVI pinouts



Internal Connectivity:



Retail = AGP 4x/2x (requires an internal "Y" Molex adapter)

OEM = AGP 8x (internal AGP power from the AGP pins)



Customization:



Retail = Control panel with OpenGL 3D overrides. Tweak away!

OEM = None.



et. al.





What I want to know is THIS:



If I have an OEM card, what is the card set to in terms of things like FSAA, Ansitropic Filtering. etc? I mean really? How to I tell games like AA (in the .ini config files) what to render and at what quality?



Since I can CONTROL the output of the retail card, I can always KNOW exactly how the card is set, but with the OEM card, how do I know?







*OEM = "Original Equipment Manufacturer". Apple hires ATI to build a card to their specs. ATI sells this card to Apple exclusively. Apple sells this card directly to customers as a BTO option. Not available to public as stand-alone product.



*Retail = ATI makes the card the way they want (with Apple's blessing usually) and sells it to public as an upgrade option.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    the pie manthe pie man Posts: 425member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dstranathan

    ATI Radeon 9800 Pro: OEM VS Retail



    Deja Vu
  • Reply 2 of 2
    ionyzionyz Posts: 491member
    Since I couldn't run the OEM (using a Power Mac DA) I picked up the retail. Having control over FSAA and AF is so much easier then having to look into it for each game. By default though no game should have those features on, and only some allow you to tinker with them. You can tell if FSAA is on by a few things. Generally in an FPS game, a dark object, against a bright sky should yield some stair-stepping (Aliasing) in the geometry without FSAA. While AF is sometimes harder to spot, it lessens the mipmap effect, so textures are still sharp further away. At least these are my findings.



    If I went for a G5, I wouldn't go OEM. The 3D overrides are great for gaming or any other 3D program.
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