Due to 3Dfx going out of business, no drivers are being developed for the Voodoo line of cards, making these cards obsolete with Mac OS X and many newer games. However, AGP is quickly becoming the standard for video cards, and PCI cards are on the way out. The Radeon 7000 is possibly the last PCI card that will be developed for the Mac. So now it's time to see if the latest and greatest is better than the old standby. On to the tests!

Test System:
• G3 233 upgrade to 500 MHz
• 288 MB RAM
• Mac OS 9.2.2
• OEM 4 GB Hard Drive and Maxtor 27.2 DiamondMaxPlus (startup) hard drives
• Voodoo 3 3000 PCI (latest ROM and drivers), ATI Radeon 7000 PCI (June 2002 driver update, and July 2002 driver update)

The 2D and 3D tests are as follows:

Display test in Norton System Info 6.0.3 with the display set to millions of colors at 1024x768 resolution. Larger numbers are better.


Scrolling through a 500 page AppleWorks 6.0 document. Times are in seconds, smaller numbers are better.


Using a Quake 3 timedemo. This first set of numbers is the FPS achieved at different screen resolutions under normal quality. Higher numbers are better.


Again using a Quake 3 timedemo. These numbers are the FPS when I ran the demo at 1024x768 on High Quality settings. Higher numbers are better.


Next I ran a timedemo on the Fly-Through of Unreal. I ran the timedemo at 1024x768 with the highest settings. Numbers shown are Frames Per Second, larger is better.


Finally, I ran a little application that opens and closes 1000 windows in the finder. The times are in seconds, smaller numbers are better.

Quite surprisingly, the much newer Radeon 7000 seems to be slower than the outdated Voodoo 3 card in all but a few tests. This is interesting because the Radeon 7000 has twice as much VRAM as the Voodoo 3 card, a faster card bus, and updated drivers and features. The main speed features that the Radeon has over the Voodoo card are full QuickTime acceleration and better OpenGL performance.

July 2002 update: With the release of the July 2002 driver update for the ATI Radeon 7000, significant speed increases were seen in some cases, and slight speed increases in others. The only test which showed slower performance of the Radeon 7000 using the July drivers versus the June drivers were the Quake 3 Normal Quality tests. I'm not sure why this is, because Quake 3 High Quality tests show improved performance. While still not as fast as the Voodoo 3 in most cases, the driver update helps to shorten the gap.