9400M vs 9600GT M vs ATI X1600

Question

9400M vs 9600GT M vs ATI X1600

Hi all,
I'm going to buy one of the new MacBook Pros, the ones presented at WWDC 2009, but I'm not sure about graphic cards performances.

Now I've got an iMac, the last white model, with an ATI X1600 on it, that allows me to play videogames at the highest detail.

But how would you compare 9600GT M and 9400 M to the ATI?

I also know that with Snow Leopard we'll can use the graphic chip's power to boost the system performances.... So wich model should I get... one with only the 9400M or a more expensive one with the 9600 ?

Thanks in advance, Alberto

Posted on Jul 1, 2009 8:35 AM

Reply

Answer 1

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 1, 2009 10:50 AM in response to albertopilato

well, your iMac is about 3 years old, so yeah, the ATI X1600 is NO match for the Nividia 9400 or 9600.

what are you going to be doing with the machine? if you are doing graphics or gaming, then you will want to go for the 9600.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards,1.html

Reply

Answer 2

Jul 2, 2009 2:06 AM in response to kmac1036

So you are saying that 9400 beats the x1600 itself?
I play games such as need for speed carbon or the sims 3 occasionally but I'm really intrested about snow leopard use of graphics card computational power to boost performance, that could be useful when running virtualizaton software (Fusion with Win 7 in my case) or any other power-hungry process.

But infact virtualization and gaming are the heavier processess I run... I'm not intrested in high-end video editing or 3d modeling...

Reply

Answer 3

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 2, 2009 6:40 AM in response to albertopilato

albertopilato wrote:
So you are saying that 9400 beats the x1600 itself?

the 9400 is going to kill it. there's 3 years worth of innovation & speed increases, of course even the 9400 is going to be better overall. the 9600 is even better.

Reply

Answer 4

Jul 2, 2009 6:46 AM in response to kmac1036

and what about meomories speed? 9400 shares system memories that's slower than 9600 gddr3 that's dedicated... so.. 9400 or 9400+9600 for gaming and with an eye on snow leopard technology?

thanks for wasting your time for me 🙂

Alberto

Reply

Answer 5

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 2, 2009 7:01 AM in response to albertopilato

ok, let's try this: http://www.xbench.com/

install xbench. restart your machine so we're fresh & close any other open apps.

run the full test 2-3 times, which will also do the graphics.

post the best set of results here

My system is a late 08 MBP & my wife's is a UB MB. I'll do the test on both machines & both cards on the MBP, posting the best results for each.

Reply

Answer 6

Jul 2, 2009 10:19 AM in response to kmac1036

ok... that's my score...

Results 59.91
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J61)
Physical RAM 3072 MB
Model iMac5,1
Drive Type ST3160812AS Q
CPU Test 123.46
GCD Loop 233.40 12.30 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 111.57 2.65 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 90.54 2.99 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 123.35 21.48 Mops/sec
Thread Test 161.52
Computation 165.92 3.36 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 157.35 6.77 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 118.35
System 133.76
Allocate 199.06 731.00 Kalloc/sec
Fill 112.60 5474.86 MB/sec
Copy 117.32 2423.18 MB/sec
Stream 106.12
Copy 102.12 2109.15 MB/sec
Scale 106.87 2207.93 MB/sec
Add 107.24 2284.40 MB/sec
Triad 108.49 2320.87 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 154.59
Line 134.80 8.97 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 180.65 53.93 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 149.62 12.20 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 147.68 3.72 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 168.47 10.54 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 203.17
Spinning Squares 203.17 257.74 frames/sec
User Interface Test 210.13
Elements 210.13 964.38 refresh/sec
Disk Test 12.83
Sequential 14.28
Uncached Write 42.16 25.88 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 27.65 15.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 7.45 2.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 11.63 5.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 11.64
Uncached Write 4.08 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 22.31 7.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 24.40 0.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 78.97 14.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So I think the numbers we should consider are 154,59 for Quartz Graphics Test and 203.17 for OpenGL Graphics Test, and 59.91 as General, now what about yours?

Reply

Answer 7

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 2, 2009 11:32 AM in response to albertopilato

can't run the test right now, but will as soon as I get home!

Reply

Answer 8

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 7, 2009 5:50 AM in response to albertopilato

sorry for the delay, having issues at home & not sure what the deal is...

With my macbook pro, I'm pulling in the 190s for the quartz, but is only running in the 150s on the Open GL marks with the 9600. the 9400 is only about 5~10% slower.

my overall score is in the 120s-130s with both macbook & MBP. I'm disappointed & not convinced that xbench is testing the NVIDIA cards properly. On the screen, it jams out the graphics test, not sure why the numbers seem low for a modern GPU.

The important points to keep in mind is that the newer cards are supporting two key features in OS X 10.6 - hardware accelerated h.264 & Open CL. The x1600 supports neither.

Reply

Answer 9

parry_pb

Level 2

290 points

Jul 7, 2009 6:00 AM in response to albertopilato

I love the x1600 as like you said, it allows me to play games at decent detail levels and does not get any where near as hot as the 9600M or 8600M for that matter. (it doesn't suffer from high failure rates like the nVidia for a bonus!)

The x1600 is actually a very decent card and if you are not interested in the highly dubious benefits (to regular users) of OpenCL or H264 hardware acceleration (the CPU does that fine already) - x1600 rules!

Reply

Answer 10

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 7, 2009 6:57 AM in response to parry_pb

parry_pb wrote:
I love the x1600 as like you said, it allows me to play games at decent detail levels and does not get any where near as hot as the 9600M or 8600M for that matter.

says who? my 9600M doesn't run any hotter than what I've seen with my other machines.

(it doesn't suffer from high failure rates like the nVidia for a bonus!)

Did you forget about the bad ATI iBooks & the eMacs?

The x1600 is actually a very decent card and if you are not interested in the highly dubious benefits (to regular users) of OpenCL or H264 hardware acceleration (the CPU does that fine already) - x1600 rules!

going forward, supporting h.264 & Open CL in the GPU will be a huge advantage to everyone. the CPU puts out the most heat, esp. when playing h.264 or streaming content (hulu HD, You tube HQ, ABC HD, etc). The newest Intel chips are still running pretty hard to play back this content.

Reply

Answer 11

parry_pb

Level 2

290 points

Jul 7, 2009 7:17 AM in response to kmac1036

kmac1036 wrote:

says who? my 9600M doesn't run any hotter than what I've seen with my other machines.

Says me! I've all three machines and the {8/9}600M ones get awfully hot - so much so that I avoid using them for gaming. No such problem with the ATI.

(it doesn't suffer from high failure rates like the nVidia for a bonus!)

Did you forget about the bad ATI iBooks & the eMacs?

Selling the 8600M after 3 repairs - ATI x1600 one still rocking!

going forward, supporting h.264 & Open CL in the GPU will be a huge advantage to everyone. the CPU puts out the most heat

CPU TDPs are going down all the times - Intel is doing 32nm already - no such thing for the GPUs. If you thing CPUs are hotter - do some research as that is clearly not the case! (The 9600M is 35W TDP - the 2.66Ghz Core 2 in my MBP is 25W and nehalems are even better!)

Reply

Answer 12

Jul 7, 2009 9:37 AM in response to kmac1036

kmac1036 wrote:

The important points to keep in mind is that the newer cards are supporting two key features in OS X 10.6 - hardware accelerated h.264 & Open CL. The x1600 supports neither.

That's what i wanted to hear... are you sure about it...

Talking about HD streaming, here in Italy we don't get any of these amazing services such as Hulu or Netflix..., but i tried once or twice to watch an hd trailer from apple and it worked with any issues like heating or fans speeding up....

But as i said i'm really intrested about opencl in 10.6 and talking with two mac user friends i was told that "pulling off" 300 $ or € worths the game...

Being a student i'll also get a free iPod Touch that i'm going to sell somebody so i'll get some of these 300 $ back :-P

watching to your results i also think (hope) that xbench has some problems with nvidia cards... so... the last word?

Reply

Answer 13

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Jul 7, 2009 10:06 AM in response to parry_pb

you are comparing the laptop heat levels to a desktop machine. esp. machines with reasonably high end graphics cards. true, a desktop is going to have more airspace to spread things out. I had a macbook pro with the x1600 - it ran just as hot if not hotter.

People had the same issue with the ATIs in the iBooks with the chips going bad. NVIDIA did also with the 8600s. Both dogs have had their day in the sun. there were still issues with the x1600s in the MBPs too, but not as wide scale - mine went out once.

Graphics chips are constructed differently & handle different types of instructions, so it's hard to draw direct correlations between GPU & CPU as you had done.

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardware/74503-whats-difference-between-cpu-gpu.ht ml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphicsprocessingunit

Reply

Answer 14

Smith.md

Level 1

0 points

Aug 5, 2009 6:25 PM in response to kmac1036

Sorry to burst your bubbles kiddies, but the X1600 strictly speaking beats the 9400M. The 9600M itself isn't too far ahead. Face it, laptop graphics suck, get what you need to be portable and move on. I love my X1600 based Macbook Pro, but I'm not pulling any graphics feats here (~50fps in UrbanTerror 4.1) Even the Mac Pro options wither in comparison to what you can buy for Linux/The Empire these days, which is unfortunate considering the parallel processing technologies Apple is building into their operating system.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Reply

Answer 15

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Aug 6, 2009 1:06 PM in response to Smith.md

that's BS, look at the Pixel & vertex shaders, the 3Dmark05 & 06 test. the 9400M beats the x1600. they averaged the '01 & '03 which most modern cards didn't even run.

drop the '01 & '03 tests off, the NVIDIA 9400 / 9600M cards win.

Message was edited by: kmac1036

Reply