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I see the lobotomy was a success. Excellent.

Well, Apple does sell 200k PowerMacs a quarter, more or less, and all those duals should be able to play it just fine (assuming a dual 1.8 is better then a single 2.0), so that's a decent number. Still, most of those are probably professional machines and not personal, so likely not a lot of gaming. The G5 iMac will be crucial here for sales.

Yeah.  The XBox version will probably end up with about 1/2 the polycount and 1/2 or 1/4 the texture resolution.  Probably lower res normal maps, specular, etc. and less precise shader effects.  To top it all off XBox gamers will have to wrestle with a dual-analog control setup rather than using a keyboard and mouse.

I'll play it on my Mac, thankyouverymuch.

Take what sign you want, but it's gold, and these are the final specs:

[color=brown]Minimum System Requirements:

Certain parts of OpenGL and CoreAudio are automatically multi-threaded and offloaded to the second CPU if available.  Since DOOM 3's audio is entirely client based, and very CPU intensive (real-time 5 channel mixing, which is something CoreAudio is designed from the ground up to handle), a second CPU to handle it is going to be a great asset as far as I can tell.

That said, DOOM 3 is still going to eat any system alive.  My friend has a brand new 3.2 GHz P4 Dell with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800, and even at 800x600 he runs into some framerate problems.  It's mostly smooth, but get a handful of enemies on screen and it drops to the teens or low 20's.

But, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that any G5, especially a dual processor G5, will run the game rather well.  The iMac G5 will be limited by what it's GeForce FX 5200 GPU can do, and anyone with a tower, especially a dual processor tower, and a good video card (especially a 9800, X800, or 6800), will be able to run it at high settings and a decent resolution and yield a good framerate.

I'm just guessing, though.  I could be wrong, of course, but I'm confident that we're going to get a chance to see the G5 and its processing power and excellent bandwidth really shine.

Twisted Guy wrote:

I'm just guessing, though.  I could be wrong, of course, but I'm confident that we're going to get a chance to see the G5 and its processing power and excellent bandwidth really shine.

The G5 is more analogous to the Athlon64 architecture, which does tend to outperform the P4s quite nicely.  That said, much depends on how much optimization Aspyr was able to do.

dj phat 2000 wrote:

robco wrote:

Twisted Guy wrote:

I'm just guessing, though.  I could be wrong, of course, but I'm confident that we're going to get a chance to see the G5 and its processing power and excellent bandwidth really shine.

The G5 is more analogous to the Athlon64 architecture, which does tend to outperform the P4s quite nicely.  That said, much depends on how much optimization Aspyr was able to do.

Thats the key right there buddy, OPTIMIZATION!  All that power in our Mac's go wasted on games cause they lack proper optimization.

Bit of a slap in the face of the fine coders at Aspyr, Westlake, Ryan Gordon... I don't remember if SMP was possible (Grand Prix Legends, by the same dev, actually supported that on Win NT in '98-9, but that game never came over. It probably didn't sell 12,000 copies on PC), but Altivec was used in Nascar 2003 (or 2004, I forget). It helped but didn't run outrageously fast or have system requirements lower than on the other side, and it's a physics-intensive game.

Quake III is still the only game (well, that Giants game was too) that supports FULL SMP, and Altivec.  Which is why it kicks ass on a Mac.

I don't recall it running faster than, or even quite as fast as, equivalent or top PCs. I think currently that's something over 500 f/s at 1024x768.

I can only pray and home that future games ( Some how I thought that this was the future, like now in fact) will have support for SMP and Altivec.  SSE, SSE2 and 3dNow! gets the love.  We need the same on the Mac.  Being that G3's are dead and gone for the most part, optimizing a game for even a G4 would make a huge difference I am sure.

The Nascar 200x example again. People like Glenda Adams keep saying there's no such magic to make Macs faster than PCs, but still many don't listen.

Intel took 3DNow! and made SSE a superset of it; AMD has supported that since the AthlonXP. No one's optimized specifically for it now for 4-5 years.

SMP will probably make it into Mac games when it gets into the PC games that're ported over, since it's nearly impossible, certainly quite impractical to multithread a single-threaded app. However, since dual-core CPUs will start coming out in PCs in a few months, that could be as early as sometime next year.

However, if after getting this game ( which I have no choice but to do after not hearing a god-damn thing about its performance on the Mac), it runs GREAT.  I'll gladly support Aspyr and continue to buy games that they port and sell.  However, if the game runs like ass, then F this.  Cause, I still play Star Trek Elite Force 1.  The game is in need of patching.  Has needed patching since the Expansion pack and nothing has ever come to fix it.  So much so, that there were and or are people working at it themselves on such a patch.  Which may never see the light of day but, still.  This game had room to grow and is pretty much dead now.  EF2 sucked but, that has nothing to do with Aspyr.  And EF3 Arena would be F'n SWEET, but not likely as the Star Trek brand I am sure is not a big seller of FPS games.  Sorry for the rant but, I want quality this time around.  All the talk about not having fast enough computers and video cards and FSB's and yada yada yada on the Mac, is now all gone.  So, now that we can have the horse power to run these hot new games, the least that could be done is optimize them so they run at there bests.

You could always wait for the demo. Given a decent system, tho, how it runs will probably depend a lot on your settings. It will likely autoconfig itself; if so, leave those settings be and it will likely run well.

Believe in magic and max every option, and this most demanding game will likely smurf out.

Games have an economic lifespan such that after they stop selling, it makes no economic sense to patch them. No company currently has a license to make Star Trek games; AFAIK that's in limbo.

Final thoughts:

Tuncer: One of the things you'll also see in the IMG forum that really irks me is when someone complains about how slow a Mac game, such as Halo, runs on their computer. Most fail to realize that while gaming has taken a giant leap with graphics, sound, and gameplay, the Macs, until the G5 came out, have been years behind, in terms of performance. In other words, don't blame the game publisher, blame your Mac. That's just my opinion, of course, but what are your thoughts? Does it frustrate you when you see people complaining about performance in one of your games?

Glenda: It does frustrate me, because we spend an incredible amount of time and effort on performance. I know on a game like Halo that MacSoft spent a TON of time working on performance, and worked directly with Apple and ATI/nVidia to push it as fast as it would go. We do the same thing with our games. The Mac market is at an upgrade point. The 800Mhz iMac you might have bought a year or two ago is just running out of steam, it's the bare minimum to play today's games. These are games that want to run on a 1.5Ghz+ machine on the PC, but we're trying to figure out how to get them to run on even a 1GHz Mac. I really hope people who want to play games start looking at upgrades, and that Apple can push faster speeds into the consumer line quickly. We need a G5 iMac, and we need it yesterday. If you are a serious gamer and don't plan to have a G5 by the Summer, you are going to miss out on being able to really play the top games of 2004.

One on One With Glenda Adams (Part 19)
February 19, 2004 | Tuncer Deniz

http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=284

Halo recently received a major patch using recently added OpenGL extensions that puts it on a rough par with HaloPC graphically, but it still can't quite match it for framerates (we keep tabs on things like that in [MA]Halo, with member benchmarks and sites like xlr8yrmac and barefeats to watch). RISC is somewhat more inherently efficient than x86 for instruction handling, but in practical terms things like sound cards seem to offset dual processors, and the PPC970, despite fine floating-point performance and great bandwidth, lacks the on-die memory controller that helps make Athlon64 the current premier games processor. The videocard situation has improved, but still isn't there.

This is the ONLY game right now that fully pushes a Power Mac tower and will continue to do so for a bit.

Unless you think ca. 45 f/s is a blistering framerate, Halo Mac certainly does too, despite being lighter in the CPU dept.

http://www.macaddict.com/forums/topic/47173/1

So... improvement but no magic. Sorry.

Btw, Barefeats has updated their benchmark section with faster PCs, esp. Athlons. Bit of a hodge-podge, but their budget isn't very high.

http://www.barefeats.com/mac2pc.html

Your bank's windows are still intact!