Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

20 Oct 00

MacCAD News: Is the Radeon your next CAD necessity?

Architosh is happy to bring to your attention the good work being done at barefeats.com. Robert Morgan of barefeats purposely sent these tests our way to share with you professional 3D users.

Is the Radeon the fastest graphics accelerator for the Mac?

That's the question being asked by barefeats.com in this report.

It appears from the initial gaming tests (which are not like the types of rendering done in static rendered views) that the Radeon is the superior card for frame-rate, animated, dynamic rendering.

What About Static Rendering, like in Architecture?

Barefeats ran the Cinebench 2000 benchmarks from Maxon. However they posted frames per second scores on a rendered walkthrough. Not scores from the benchmarks.

With the OpenGL walkthrough the Radeon and Formac ProFormance 3 Plus PCI tied. On LightWave the Radeon and ATI Rage 128 Pro were very close.

2D performance is just as important to CAD pros as 3D rendering performance, in most cases. In this category the Formac ProFormance 3 Plus card ruled by far, leading one to imagine what the next ProFormance card might do.

Conclusions:

While these tests are interesting they don't tell us what might happen with a long high-quality rendering for architecture, industrial design or engineering. Architosh has come into a dual processor G4/450MHz tower with a OEM Radeon card. With this machine, a new Athlon 800MHz with Radeon, and a G4/350MHz tower with ATI 128 Rage Pro, we will test all three machines using some CAD applications and Strata 3D or Studio Pro 2.5.3.