I'm looking again to replace my 6 year-old PowerMac G3 by a G5, now that I can get one in less than 3 months. I'm wondering which graphic card to buy, the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, or the ATI Radeon 9600 or 9800 Pro? Nvidia does a terrible job in giving any useful information on their web site, beyond marketing gibberish (their PDFs are heavy scanned images of their glossy paper brochures, unreadable). ATI provides much more useful information, notably what interests me: the resolutions and maximum refresh rates (in Hz) for analog monitor display modes. I'm not interested in those beauty contests like how many zillions frames per second a card can spit out in such or such game, what's important to me (until I get a LCD screen) is how stable the image is on my 21' CRT screen for the kind of work I do on the Mac (DTP/web/photo/video). Unfortunately, the best card seems to be the most expensive one (the 9800), and I've been unable to find that simple refresh rate/resolutions info for Nvidia's cards!
I would greatly appreciate some advice here!
; "googlecertificateexpired.png")
; "wellbebacksoon.png")
; "sarkozysarkozysarkozy.png")
It's been a while since I've used a CRT with a decent video card, but that can't stop me dropping my pennies worth.
I know the driver software is a big deal as well, NVIDIA generally provide decent driver software for their cards on the Mac, ATI less so. This comes from a couple of colleagues who are trying to use their G5s for looking at and dealing with high resolution X-Ray crystallography images, which are usually reserved for Silicon Graphics workstations (primarily CRT where I am).
I tend to wait for the revision B model when buying a Mac, although I'm forced to break that rule now. I'm just about to buy a G5 for the workplace, I'm opting for the dual 1.8 Ghz with the nVidia card, I figure it's the cheapest option and if I need more vram or power I (we, you) could always upgrade.
I think video card stuff is more important when dealing with the iMac and portable line, as a personal gripe, I wish they would release a Powerbook where changing the video card would be as easy as changing the hard drive.