Chris Curtis dot Org

Well, it was time.  With the advent of Final Cut Studio, I gained access to a powerful real-time motion graphics animator, the aptly named Motion 2.  I’ve had my dual 2.0GHz G5 since February of 2004, so it’s fast, but still has nearly 2 year old video technology in it, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (the 64MB member of that family.)

It still did great, and worked well with Motion, though I could tell that Apple really meant for this app to scream on the right systems.  I don’t really play games on my Mac, so it wasn’t a serious consideration.  After reading a nice review of the card, I decided it was the way to go.  The nVideo 6800 did boast slightly faster performance in Motion, but I decided that the very minor improvement that it had was not worth the extra $100 nor the fact that it would occupy two slots, require a power cable running to it, and was grossly large, no doubt affecting airflow inside the case.

I did my own performance tests, trying to be as thorough as possible with my old setup to compare the improvement.  I didn’t run any benchmarking software, as I hate the general idea of how those work.  I wanted real world tests, taking not only numbers into consideration, but the esoteric and software-unmeasurable human “feel” of speed.  I also upgraded my RAM, but did it incremental to the video card upgrade, to try to see if it had any effect on speed.  The effect was negligible, even where noticed, showing that at least with a base of 1.5GB of RAM, the performance increase was entirely based on the GPU.  This was significant in my mind for Motion 2.  It’ll use up to 8GB of system memory, but of course, only if your project accumulates that need.  On these 6-10 second templates that are indicative of standard use of Motion, the performance boost was again GPU (and VRAM) driven.

Motion 2 (RAM Preview rendering)

	Template	FPS Render	Time (seconds)
9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	Fire Mortice 1	7.89	38
X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)	Fire Mortice 1	14.29	21
9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	Water - Menu	7.2	25
X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)	Water - Menu	12.86	14
9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	Travel - Open	7.5	32
X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)	Travel - Open	12	20

Unreal Tournament 2004, 1680x1050, Defaults

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	23	59
“Feel”	Playable, choppy	Smooth

Unreal Tournament 2004, 1680x1050, Maxed

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	22	52
“Feel”	Playable, choppy	Smooth

Return to Castle Wolfenstein, 1280x1024, Maxed

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	75	90
“Feel”	Fast, Responsive	Fast, Responsive

Halo, 1680x1050, All options on / high

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	20	83
“Feel”	Oddly, smooth	Smooth

Halo, 1680x1050, All options on/high, 4x FSAA

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	6	75
“Feel”	Unplayable slideshow	Smooth

Doom 3, 1680x1050, Low Quality

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	6-18	45-60
“Feel”	Just playable, chopporific	Smooth, responsive

Doom 3, 1680x1050, High Quality

	9600 Pro 64MB (1.5GB RAM)	X800 XT 256MB (1.5GB RAM)
FPS	5-8	25-45
“Feel”	Completely unplayable	Responsive, occasional jitter

Posted Wednesday May 25, 2005 in by Derek Jones

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