Forums | MacLife

Best:  Mac Mini (still overpriced, but it's a cheap Mac with an innovative design)
          iPod nano (not enough space for me, but it's lightyears ahead of it's time)
          Intel switch (This will hopefully make Macs a better hardware value)

Meh:   5G iPod (best iPod yet.  It's thinner and lighter and has 320x240 video, but I'm holding out for the "iPod Video")

Worst: Mighty Mouse (Worse than the hockey pucks.  Apple should just give up and contract Logitech to design future rodents)
           Intel switch (Rosetta runs Doom 3 playably @ ~20FPS on the Dev rigs [driver glitches aside] but it's still emulation)

Richard D Miller wrote:

was it this year that Gates was demoing some MS tripe and the thing crashed at some convention? a few weeks later Steve was doing his keynote speech and had some kind of a screen freeze? the difference was that in a few seconds Mr. Jobs was back in action because , as he said "we have backups" I of course found this the funniest thing.

Worst, hmm... the loss of the power pc.   best: having friendly debates with my old manager about PC vs Mac and when I asked him for a file he confessed his C:\ was being formatted from some form of virus and he lost everything. But of course he could play NFS:underground on his PC

I think that was a spotlight demo that locked the system up.

Worst:  Spotlight
Best:  Mac mini

Mr. T wrote:

Best:  Mac Mini (still overpriced, but it's a cheap Mac with an innovative design)
          iPod nano (not enough space for me, but it's lightyears ahead of it's time)
          Intel switch (This will hopefully make Macs a better hardware value)

Meh:   5G iPod (best iPod yet.  It's thinner and lighter and has 320x240 video, but I'm holding out for the "iPod Video")

Worst: Mighty Mouse (Worse than the hockey pucks.  Apple should just give up and contract Logitech to design future rodents)
           Intel switch (Rosetta runs Doom 3 playably @ ~20FPS on the Dev rigs [driver glitches aside] but it's still emulation)

What do you expect, the developer machines have an integrated graphics card.

Best:  Switching to Intel processors
Worst:  Back to $3000+ for a pro machine

iopossum wrote:

Mr. T wrote:

Best:  Mac Mini (still overpriced, but it's a cheap Mac with an innovative design)
          iPod nano (not enough space for me, but it's lightyears ahead of it's time)
          Intel switch (This will hopefully make Macs a better hardware value)

Meh:   5G iPod (best iPod yet.  It's thinner and lighter and has 320x240 video, but I'm holding out for the "iPod Video")

Worst: Mighty Mouse (Worse than the hockey pucks.  Apple should just give up and contract Logitech to design future rodents)
           Intel switch (Rosetta runs Doom 3 playably @ ~20FPS on the Dev rigs [driver glitches aside] but it's still emulation)

What do you expect, the developer machines have an integrated graphics card.

I don't remember where I saw it but the developer was running @ 800x600 on high quality, leading me to believe that low quality @ 640x480 didn't make any difference, thus I'm assuming that Rosetta was the limiting factor.  I don't know if r_shadow was enabled or not, but it seems that Rosetta has been upgraded to "not so bad."  But the 3.6GHz P4 is capable of consistantly running at the 60FPS limit set by Doom 3, so running native is still at least 3x faster than Rosetta.  But it's extremely fast for an emulator.

Mr. T wrote:

Best:  Mac Mini (still overpriced, but it's a cheap Mac with an innovative design)
          iPod nano (not enough space for me, but it's lightyears ahead of it's time)
          Intel switch (This will hopefully make Macs a better hardware value)

Meh:   5G iPod (best iPod yet.  It's thinner and lighter and has 320x240 video, but I'm holding out for the "iPod Video")

Worst: Mighty Mouse (Worse than the hockey pucks.  Apple should just give up and contract Logitech to design future rodents)
           Intel switch (Rosetta runs Doom 3 playably @ ~20FPS on the Dev rigs [driver glitches aside] but it's still emulation)

Where are you getting that benchmark from?

Also, my Powerbook runs Doom 3 about that fast, at that res., with a 128MB 9700

Last edited by mo' ron (2005-12-29 1:46 am)

Best: Switch to Intel
Worst: Not a switch to AMD. Also, Safari still gets my goat.

Best

- iTunes and Podcasting. As online distribution continues to become popular, I see the artists finally able to cut out the middle-man (greedy studios) and being able to offer their music directly from a legal music distribution center like iTunes.

Worst

-ROKR. Yes I know it's a Motorola product but it's still associated with Apple.

mo' ron wrote:

Mr. T wrote:

Best:  Mac Mini (still overpriced, but it's a cheap Mac with an innovative design)
          iPod nano (not enough space for me, but it's lightyears ahead of it's time)
          Intel switch (This will hopefully make Macs a better hardware value)

Meh:   5G iPod (best iPod yet.  It's thinner and lighter and has 320x240 video, but I'm holding out for the "iPod Video")

Worst: Mighty Mouse (Worse than the hockey pucks.  Apple should just give up and contract Logitech to design future rodents)
           Intel switch (Rosetta runs Doom 3 playably @ ~20FPS on the Dev rigs [driver glitches aside] but it's still emulation)

Where are you getting that benchmark from?

Also, my Powerbook runs Doom 3 about that fast, at that res., with a 128MB 9700

I found the link.  It's here. 

First, my assumption that Rosetta was the limiting factor (and not the GPU) was based on the assumption that the dev found 800x600 hi-q to be the best playable setting.  In other words, I was assuming that he tried 640x480 lo-q and didn't notice a performance increase - a sure sign that the GPU may safely be removed from the equation.  After reviewing the post, there is no evidence (either way) that my assumptions are correct, therefore the conclusion is not not necessarily true.  Secondly, I also made the assumption that Doom 3 was tested at least somewhat scientifically.  Again, there is no evidence to support this.  For all I know, he could've simply played the first level of the game (which isn't very CPU intensive) stated a subjective view of performance, and hit cmd-q.  Again, this further contributes to the unreliability of the benchmark.

However, I did notice that the dev also tried running UT04 and Halo.  Of particular interest is the UT04 screenshot.  In it, you can see the avg FPS counter at 19.  Since UT04's CPU requirements are significantly less than Doom 3's it's begining to look like the 20FPS is a bit overstated.  But I must again stress that none of these tests appear to have been conducted scientifically, as I had initially believed. 

The only remotely useful piece of information in the post is that the dev was averaging 19FPS in UT04 @ 800x600 (unknown quality).  This falls in line with the other Rosetta benchmarks, so it doesn't bring anything new to the table.  Sorry for all the confusion.  Totally my bad.

Actually, this all snowballed from a small (erroneous) comment I made in my first post.  Buy yes, I was trying to guestimate Rosetta's performance hit.  But to answer your question, Rosetta generally behaves similar to a 600MHz G4, often faster.  What that means is that old games like Quake III and prior will run so fast you can't tell the difference.  Games like RCW will be totally playable, but the difference is noticable.  Newer games like UT04 run okay, but most gamers would call it unplayable.  Apps like M$ Office should run so fast few would tell the difference.  Apps like Photoshop will run well enough for light-moderate duty tasks, but you'd pop a suicide pill before asking it to do heavy-duty work.

Richard D Miller wrote:

was it this year that Gates was demoing some MS tripe and the thing crashed at some convention? a few weeks later Steve was doing his keynote speech and had some kind of a screen freeze? the difference was that in a few seconds Mr. Jobs was back in action because , as he said "we have backups" I of course found this the funniest thing.

funny...i thought apples weren't supposed to do that