I am thinking about getting the Radeon 8500 card.
It says it's compatible with 2x and 4x AGP slots
I am wondering....my DP 500 only comes with 2x AGP slot. Will there be any big impact on performance? How much slower than when the card is on the 4x slot?
Comments
It depends if your games/applications use SMP, I heard in most cases the G4 is the limiting factor, not AGP 2X or the video card.
What will hurt the card much more than the AGP slot is your slow computer, relative to the current highend Macs.
That said, I have a G4/500 DP and I use the original Radeon 32 MB DDR (with AGP, I found one left at some mac store and I replaced my Rage 128 with it).
The original Radeon seems to be the perfect match for this system. It doesn't have the huge power that some of the new cards have, but at 1280 x 1024 it feels like both the system and the card are getting a good workout.
I get 50 fps solid in Red Faction (1024 x 768 is the top resolution in that game), 25-45 fps in Giants (which uses both processors 100% -- go OmniGroup!), and even 25-35 fps in Sacrifice (the biggest resource hog I've ever seen).
The Radeon is a good card for this system and it won't put such a huge dent in your pocket.
-Ender
About the Radeon 8500 card, its not the same as the card Ender is useing. The 8500 is the new top end card and will peform much better. I dont know how good on your computer but still better I guess.