As the festivities of MacWorld San Francisco come to an end, the benchmark wars have just begun. Barefeats and Mac-Gamer (no relation to MacGamer) have published benchmarks they obtained from the show floor, comparing the ATi Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX. Although you can't directly compare the Radeon and Geforce2 MX because of the different system configurations and various versions of Quake 3: Arena that were used, the results are nonetheless interesting.

As shown in the benchmarks ATi provided IMG, the combination of a PowerMac G4/500 DP, Mac OS X and a Radeon easily breaks the 100 FPS barrier. With it's optimized OpenGL layer and support for AltiVec and multiprocessing, MacOS X is definitely the future of gaming. Despite the Radeon's higher fillrate, DDR SDRAM, and supposed use of both G4/500 processors, Barefeats' and Mac-Gamer's benchmarks seem to show that the Geforce2 MX wins at high resolution, which contradicts results posted at many PC hardware review sites.

The benchmark wars should be decided once independent parties get their hands on the new hardware and run them through rigorous tests, under controlled condtions. You can be sure that IMG will be one of them.

MWSF: GeForce 2 MX Benchmarks

MWSF: ATI Counters NVIDIA Benchmarks

Mac-Gamer Macworld Benchmarks

Barefeats Macworld Benchmarks

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