Overall, the Voodoo5 performed better than the Rage 128 Pro, but the win was not wholly clear. The Voodoo5 suffered from Apple's OpenGL being optimized for ATI's card. When the Rage 128 Pro ran out of breath, the Voodoo5 could keep on running, but the ATI card kept the lead at lower resolutions.

The disheartening part of all this is to see the difference between the Mac and PC 3D performance. The Pentium III 933MHz consistently outscores the G4 450 by a wide margin, often earning more than twice the fps. This is, of course, due in large part to clock speed, but the fact remains that a G4 450 is the second fastest PowerPC you can buy and a Pentium III 933MHz is the second fastest Pentium III you can buy. The G4 450 is certainly playable but if you demand the fastest 3D, and we assume most people willing to spend over $300 on a graphics card do, then you just cannot get it in a Mac right now.

We tested with Ziff Davis' MacBench 5.0 to determine 2D speed. The Graphics test was performed full screen at 800x600@32bpp. The Publishing test was performed full screen at 1152x870@32bpp.

MacBench has historically been the standard of measuring Mac 2D performance but it looks like it has reached the end of its lifespan and ZiffDavis has discontinued it. The results of the test varied by as much as 100 points through multiple runs on the same card. Since the results for each card in each test are about 100 points off of each other and the different tests have different winners, we have to call a dead tie in 2D between the cards. To test 2D subjectively, we milled around a large document in PhotoShop at 1600x1200@32bpp and noticed no slow downs or waits with either card.