Forums | MacLife

robco wrote:

gd wrote:

Have you seen some of the boxes for PC game titles; some, but not all, have the minimum Mac requirements. Though I really don't care since all I ever play on my Mac is the Halo trial (the only thing I actually like from MS) and some emulators for N64, NES and Game Boy games. Those old games really are more entertaining than some of the current titles. Makes me sad for my PS3 since I haven't used it in months.

Few people want to play on minspec. You're speaking of average folks who would be happy playing at 10x7 and/or with medium settings. Gamers want to play at full 30" rez (even if they don't have a display that large) with all the options cranked, getting triple digit fps numbers.

I'd disagree on that point a bit, tho. With enough high-quality antialiasing and texture filtering (beyond what consoles use, for the most part), I've seen games look quite nice at 10x7, tho that was on my 19" NEC CRT, and nowadays the window on an LCD might be too small to satisfy... also I've never needed triple digit framerates. Halo PC at 70 f/s most of the time was very nice, and something to go after, but I put image quality even higher except perhaps in multiplayer. 60+ is nice today, but less will do, and upgrades will make it better for those who wait, and it's sweet, as long as you have games with replay value. I've played Halo at various framerates and rezzes on multiple platforms, and each improvement was just that- better. And I'll play any of them on the 'Box, but I really live by m/kb control.

(In passing, Halo PC/Mac is over 5 years old now. Most any machine will play either. H2 came out [stupidly, needlessly] for Vista [only] 2 years ago, and 3 will apparently wait for 7. Perhaps it really needs DX10.1/11 hardware tesselation. The likelihood of OSX ports of either is miniscule.)

robco wrote:

Few people want to play on minspec. You're speaking of average folks who would be happy playing at 10x7 and/or with medium settings. Gamers want to play at full 30" rez (even if they don't have a display that large) with all the options cranked, getting triple digit fps numbers.

Actually, in a few of today's games, min-spec beats the 360.  Also, most folks have no concept of framerates.  My target framerate is around 35fps; console devs shoot for a similar target (sometimes lower).  But anyway, I play with the best settings that give me this fps (except in multiplayer).  No need for tripple-full-HD resolutions... What modern PC devs consider "medium" is substantially better than a 360.

To reiterate, THE VAST MAJORITY of PC gamers buy mid-range hardware.  Developers generally reserve the "High" designation for the current mid-range part.  Next year, what used to be called "high" is now considered medium.  The image quality is the same; only the name has changed.  Some more time passes, we get jealous over all the technical advances, and we buy new mid-range cards. That's pretty much how it works.  Your generalization is extremely far from reality.

Kool-Aid Guzzler wrote:

I would bet that your own personal research pales in comparison to what Apple has done.

Perhaps so.  But in my opinion, Jobs (in particular) is motivated more by his vision than market research.  This works well, for the most part, but I believe there is room for improvement.  For example:  Jobs isn't even officially retired yet, and we already have variable pricing on iTunes.  Evidently, there are those within Apple who have access to the same research data, and have reached a conclusion based on that research that differs from Steve's. (shocking, isn't it?)

Take less risks, so that you can't fail big.

But Jobs has failed big on more than one occasion (the Cube was his brainchild; there's a laundry list of others).  Don't get me wrong, he's had some real winners, too (and these have been huge).  Nevertheless, any failed idea is considered sub-optimal, by definition.  Apple's current strategy is obviously working.  I just think it could work a bit better.  And I think that one day, in a post-Jobs Apple, we'll see a re-emergence of a tower.  If not, oh well..  I don't personally care one way or the other.

Last edited by Mr. T (2009-04-15 3:59 pm)

avkills wrote:

Apple's graphics card options for the Mac Pros are lame.  The rest is fine from what I see "most" people do with their computers.

-mark

Here's some workstation stuff for you...

"Eureka provides a vital link between simulation and analysis by allowing scientists to probe and interrogate their data in an interactive manner," says federal computer scientist Paul Fischer of the Argonne lab. "Since Eureka and Intrepid share a disk, there is no need to move data between machines. Eureka dramatically reduces the amount of time needed to create these hugely complex visualizations, while greatly boosting their quality."

The Intrepid supercomputer itself, ranked fifth on the latest Top 500 league table, is a half-petaflop machine able to perform up to 557 trillion floating-point operations in a second. It's used to model and simulate all kinds of fiendishly complicated stuff: currents in the liquid metal coolant of nuclear reactors, what goes on inside Type 1a supernovae, that style of thing.

The only difficulty is displaying the data properly, and that's where the Eureka GPU comes in. Eureka consists of multiple racks containing stacked "pizza boxes", each of which holds four NVIDIA QuadroPlex S4 GPUs. Eureka has 212 Quadros, and another 214 Xeon four-core processors as well. The whole thing together apparently offers "111 teraflops and more than 3.2 terabytes of RAM" in its own right.

US superputer nuke boffins puff mighty, arse-kicking GPU

Balance is good. Oh, and let's not forget

The Argonne boffins consider that their special visualization graphics unit will "enable breakthrough science" to be achieved using Intrepid. It would also be able, of course, to run <cripplingly resource-hungry game of your choice> with everything turned up to full.

Finally... a compy that can run 512 instances of Marathon: Resurrection, or even... Crysis.

avkills wrote:

nVidia just released the Quadro 4800 1.5GB card for the MacPro.  I'll go back to my cave now. 

-mark

Not so fast. First we gotta rib Rob et al for saying Apple musta not sold more'n 5 or so, hence didn't offer any new workstation cards. Dunno how many times I gotta show he's off on the l33t grfx front afore he retires to his cave.

'K, you can get back to work now.

avkills wrote:

nVidia just released the Quadro 4800 1.5GB card for the MacPro.  I'll go back to my cave now. 

-mark

1800 bucks...and is it compatible with all Mac Pros, or just current?

That card does seem a bit behind, tho. The memory bandwidth of ~75GB/sec is about half of the GTX 280, not much over half of the less-pricey 4890 at 121 with its GDDR5. Better than previously, but not top shelf.

I'm guessing without checking that it's not GT200-based.

Last edited by Bat (2009-04-21 11:50 pm)

robco wrote:

Sorry to piss on your parade.

No, you're not... but I've been aware of the Ars article since before you first cited it. This is a new card, and there will be new drivers that invalidate your citation.


...sorry.

The parade is still on, and dry.

NV claims to be working with Apple on OpenCL. They have a release schedule, so don't be surprised to see the drivers leverage the OpenGL/CL implementation coming in Snow Leopard.

Gee, I gotta do alla gfrx thinking for ya.


The retail upgrade market is always an iffier proposition with lower sales; that's why you hardly see retail cards anymore. I'd bet other than your edit assertion.

Last edited by Bat (2009-04-22 12:59 am)

I didn't mention gaming, and Mark doesn't think it's worthless. I don't game on the Mac, so that's academic to me too.

avkills wrote:

The workstation class cards do a lot for 3D content creation, and post production in general.  All of the leading content creation apps leverage OpenGL for doing stuff; and when you are talking about manipulating textures that are huge, that 1.5GB gfx memory comes in real handy.

I am not saying I'll personally buy one -- but I will probably get at least one of them for work the next go around of upgrades and purchases.

I do like to play games, but I'd much rather have kick ass performance in Lightwave (soon to be LW Core), After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

-mark

Oh most definitely, but 1800 is around 650 out of any feasible budget I can come up with though. So maybe in 2yrs

Last edited by nayrk (2009-04-22 8:31 am)