Gaming on the Mac
Well Mark quickly beat me to the news of a final release date of Aspyr's Doom 3 for Mac OS X. How long ago was that John Carmack demo at MacWorld Tokyo? Ah, a quick google search reveals it was in February of 2001. The same time as the announcement of Nvidia's GeForce 3. (Interesting that both Doom 3 and the GeForce were first introduced on the Mac but neither ended up being publicly available until after their respective PC releases.)
Well past product announcements are history now but MacWorld's rather lackluster benchmarks using a top of the line Power Mac G5 deserve some discussion. Here are a few conclusions that I came up with.
1. Forgive the obvious but DON'T buy a Mac for gaming. At least not exclusively for gaming. Use it for digital audio, graphics and video editing, DVD creation, 3D modeling and animation, anything else, but there is no way you can justify your $3000+ purchase on the latest FPS. Think of playing Doom as icing on your bread and butter cake. Enjoyable and definitely playable, but certainly nothing to brag about to your hardcore PC gaming buddies.
2. The requirements for Doom 3 are equivalent to the PC version. The problem for Mac users though is that the average MHz level is a few steps behind Intel leaving purchases made just a couple of years ago on the short end of the requirement stick. An argument can be made that AMD doesn't have the highest clockspeeds either but can still be on top of the benchmarks. I agree, but am rather at a loss to explain why a Mac system is unable to hit the same numbers. Similar graphic cards and processor performance should yield equivalent results.
3. Dual processors are useless for non-multithreaded games like Doom. This is another no-brainer but some people on Mac and gaming forums are arguing why would one spend so much on a Power Mac when you can build your own gaming PC for thousands less. While Apple prefers to label the Power Mac lineup as "Pro" it definitely falls into the workstation category, much the same as a dual Xeon or Opteron workstation. These PC workstations typically cost more than a similarly equipped dual Power Mac but are subject to the same law of diminishing returns. A $1500 pro graphics card and a 2nd 32/64 bit CPU do little to nothing for games like Doom 3. Again, games are not part of the workstation market.
Halo and Doom titles.
4. Apple apparently used Bungie's Halo as the target for their recent consumer iMac G5 product line. Just look at the minimum requirements between Halo and Doom 3.
Halo System Requirements:
CPU Processor: 800MHz G4/G5 or faster processor
256MB RAM
32MB AGP Video Card (GeForce 2MX/ATI 7500 or better)
1.4GB hard disk space
Doom 3 System Requirements:
CPU Processor: PowerPC G4/G5 or later
CPU Speed: 1.5GHz or faster
512 MB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 2.0GB free disk space
64 MB Radeon 9600 or better, GeForce FX5200 or better
Looks like Doom 3 pretty much doubled the requirements. My prediction is that the next refresh/update of the Mac lines will easily meet Doom 3's system requirements. That's technology for you.
Well past product announcements are history now but MacWorld's rather lackluster benchmarks using a top of the line Power Mac G5 deserve some discussion. Here are a few conclusions that I came up with.
1. Forgive the obvious but DON'T buy a Mac for gaming. At least not exclusively for gaming. Use it for digital audio, graphics and video editing, DVD creation, 3D modeling and animation, anything else, but there is no way you can justify your $3000+ purchase on the latest FPS. Think of playing Doom as icing on your bread and butter cake. Enjoyable and definitely playable, but certainly nothing to brag about to your hardcore PC gaming buddies.
2. The requirements for Doom 3 are equivalent to the PC version. The problem for Mac users though is that the average MHz level is a few steps behind Intel leaving purchases made just a couple of years ago on the short end of the requirement stick. An argument can be made that AMD doesn't have the highest clockspeeds either but can still be on top of the benchmarks. I agree, but am rather at a loss to explain why a Mac system is unable to hit the same numbers. Similar graphic cards and processor performance should yield equivalent results.
3. Dual processors are useless for non-multithreaded games like Doom. This is another no-brainer but some people on Mac and gaming forums are arguing why would one spend so much on a Power Mac when you can build your own gaming PC for thousands less. While Apple prefers to label the Power Mac lineup as "Pro" it definitely falls into the workstation category, much the same as a dual Xeon or Opteron workstation. These PC workstations typically cost more than a similarly equipped dual Power Mac but are subject to the same law of diminishing returns. A $1500 pro graphics card and a 2nd 32/64 bit CPU do little to nothing for games like Doom 3. Again, games are not part of the workstation market.
Halo and Doom titles.
4. Apple apparently used Bungie's Halo as the target for their recent consumer iMac G5 product line. Just look at the minimum requirements between Halo and Doom 3.
Halo System Requirements:
CPU Processor: 800MHz G4/G5 or faster processor
256MB RAM
32MB AGP Video Card (GeForce 2MX/ATI 7500 or better)
1.4GB hard disk space
Doom 3 System Requirements:
CPU Processor: PowerPC G4/G5 or later
CPU Speed: 1.5GHz or faster
512 MB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 2.0GB free disk space
64 MB Radeon 9600 or better, GeForce FX5200 or better
Looks like Doom 3 pretty much doubled the requirements. My prediction is that the next refresh/update of the Mac lines will easily meet Doom 3's system requirements. That's technology for you.
posted by Robert at March 11, 2005
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