Quake 4 released

[plinden]

I haven't seen this on MacRumors ... sorry if this is old news. I no longer follow the games scene closely, but I might be tempted by this.

http://www.macobserver.com/gamingnews/2006/04/14.1.shtml

[Mord]

i found it to be as boreing as doom 3.

the biggest problem was it's too slow, and the audio is bad

for example; the shotgun, shotguns should go bang and sparky **** should fly out of them, they should not go "pop", the same with most of the guns, they had no power, also their was no speed to it, with halo you feel like your driveing through a warzone on a warthog about to catch fire, flood from the left cov to the right and hunters blasting at you in the front with great music and guns that make loud noises, whereas in doom three i'd get scroll wheel cramp from whipping out my torch every 5 seconds.

[xPismo]

i found it to be as boreing as doom 3.... with halo you feel like your driveing through a warzone on a warthog about to catch fire, flood from the left cov to the right and hunters blasting at you in the front with great music and guns that make loud noises...

Yep. Halo really was the big one for me too. I kinda gave up after being dissapointed with Halo 2... the rest of its competitors never really gave me the same feeling as Halo 1 either. So now I play old Bungie games like Myth II.

Did you know the Myth series is OSX compatable? I had no idea until I found:

http://projectmagma.net/what/index.php

And oh my, how many work hours have I lost since! I haven't even started playing online yet either. Oh well. Bungie, we miss you so.

[quikssurfer]

I haven't seen this on MacRumors ... sorry if this is old news. I no longer follow the games scene closely, but I might be tempted by this.

http://www.macobserver.com/gamingnews/2006/04/14.1.shtml

i'm a long time quake arena fan (still play)
i love quake 4 :shrug:
i'd recommend that anyone pick it up.. the multiplay is as chaotic as it always was. nothing "slow" about it

fragenstein

[thecheda]

Really nothing special about the singleplayer mode in any of these first person shoot em ups. Look at Half Life's counterstrike.

[quikssurfer]

Really nothing special about the singleplayer mode in any of these first person shoot em ups. Look at Half Life's counterstrike.

half life 2?

[ibookowner2]

Quake 4 is so weak. I tried it even on medium quality and it still sucked, and i'm on a imac g5 rev. b.

[BlizzardBomb]

If its like Doom 3... yuck. Sure its got great graphics but its basically select shotgun, open door, kill alien thingy. Select shotgun, open door, kill alien thingy and so on.

[jeffy.dee-lux]

how do y'all think it'll run on a 17 inch intel imac with 512mb of ram? I'd like to get another 1 GB stick in there but can't justify the expense until i actually have money to expend. That ram's expensive...

[voyagerd]

It runs smooth here on a Single 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 with a Radeon 9800 Pro w/128MB VRAM.

[Soulstorm]

It runs smooth here on a Single 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 with a Radeon 9800 Pro w/128MB VRAM.
It would be nice if you posted your settings, so that we can see how 'smooth' it is... ;)

[voyagerd]

It would be nice if you posted your settings, so that we can see how 'smooth' it is... ;)

Ultra Quality 1680x1050 works in multiplayer >20fps

High Quality 1680x1050 works in single player at >20fps

[Soulstorm]

It would be nice to clarify some things here.

Ultra quality and High quality inthe doom 3 engine will have no difference at all if the card cannot support 512 mbytes of textures. Textures will revert to the ones that the card can handle.

So, with your card, it's the same.

Also, you don't mention if you have all the shadowing effects turned on.

But I believe your machine can handle Doom 3 engine at High quality pretty well. I had originally a 9600XT in my G5 (see specs in my sig) and Doom 3 was running pretty well. But I couldn't see any difference in the textures between Utra and High quality.

My X800XT changed all that.

[dmw007]

I for one enjoy playing Quake 4- plenty of action, awesome graphics, etc...


Although, I agree with Hector, the guns could have been a bit more powerful. But if one was so inclined, there is a cheat code to make your weapons four times more powerful ( here it is: give quad ). :)

[Sdashiki]

Doom3 was basically a test for the new graphics engine, with all the fancy dynamic lighting.

People who wanted original DOOM or Quake 3 type stuff, were disappointed, but true fanboys would have read that already and knew it before playing.

Quake 4 is Quake 2, skipping Quake 3 (which if you watch the Q3A intro its basically "Sarge" in Quake 2 running and then "jumping" to the Arena" so in essence Quake 3 didnt happen...).

So its Quake 2 with the DOOM3 engine.

If you liked Quake 2, youll like Quake 3.

The multiplayer is pure Q3A inspired and is not like the Solo at all in terms of some crazy shizzle.

So if you liked Q3A youll like Quake 4, at least the multi.

Quake 4 is a good game so far.....but how long that lasts remains to be seen. They even said its just another test for next gen machines graphically/etc

[voyagerd]

It would be nice to clarify some things here.

Ultra quality and High quality inthe doom 3 engine will have no difference at all if the card cannot support 512 mbytes of textures. Textures will revert to the ones that the card can handle.

So, with your card, it's the same.

Also, you don't mention if you have all the shadowing effects turned on.

But I believe your machine can handle Doom 3 engine at High quality pretty well. I had originally a 9600XT in my G5 (see specs in my sig) and Doom 3 was running pretty well. But I couldn't see any difference in the textures between Utra and High quality.

My X800XT changed all that.

The difference between Ultra and High Quality are that the textures are uncompressed in Ultra Quality, that's why it says it requires so much texture memory. I believe if you video card doesn't have enough, it just loads the texture files into your normal RAM, which the video card can't access as fast, hence the game gets slower.

On High Quality, the intro video runs awesomely. On Ultra Quality, it has real problems with low frame rates and hangs. The reason that Ultra works for me alright on Multiplayer maps is because they're small and don't have near as many textures as the single player game.

I have shadows, bump mapping, high quality special effects, specular mapping, and player shadows turned on. I tried Anti-Aliasing, but my graphics card couldn't handle that in Quake with all the other stuff on.

[MacsRgr8]

Until a few weeks ago I had a PC gaming rig (may he rest in peace):
P4 3.6 GHz
1.5 GB RAM
SB Audigy 2
ATi Radeon X1800 XT (512 MB VRAM)

I bought Quake 4 for it, and as it has 512 MB VRAM, the default settings were "Ultra", and as I had a 20" LCD native 1600 x 1200 rez screen, I played it at those settings...
Well..... it was slow during the intro movie, and even crashed after about 1 minute... pretty much unplayable. Doom 3 could easily be played at Ultra settings though.

So... I only have my Quad now.. 4 GB RAM and the GeForce 7800 GT card :cool:
You bet ya, I'll be getting the game for Mac, and trying the "Ultra" settings, but me thinks 256 MB of VRAM just won't cut it.

[MacRumorUser]

Running on my 2 systems

Powermac G5 Dual 1.8 ghz 2.5gb Ram Radeon X800XT

Game on High settings at 1680x1050 anamorphic checked :) All settings on except V-Sync & AA. The games is extremely smooth more so than I would have thought and never seems to chug

Intel iMac Core Duo 20" 2ghz 2gb Ram X1600 256mb

Game on High Settings but at 1344x800. Same settings as Powermac. Looks good, just not as good as the powermac. Runs very smooth no noticeable frame rate chuggers.

Game at 1680x1050 you can see framerate drops, so keep it below.

Intel iMac Core Duo 20" 2ghz 2gb Ram X1600 256mb
BUT RUNNING WINDOWS XP & MultiCore patch for Quake 4

Basically you can run the game at full 1680x1050 without frame rate drops and it looks really good. Exactly the same as the powermac.

So basically the MultiCore patch gives you the performance boost you would have got from your better gfx card.





Let's hope Aspyr put out the dualcore patch asap? Or is it already integrated?


--------------
Can't seem to get console running? What are the keyboard shortcuts for console?

[Soulstorm]

Look at my specs below in my G5. I have enabled Ultra Quality (although my card doesn't have so much VRAM) and all advanced settings except V-sync and Anti Aliasing. I run the game in 1024x768.

It runs absolutely smooth.

The only problem is that it has much load times and that sometimes I get hickups while playing when my computer tries to load the next rooms.

I was surprised to see that quake 4 runs smoother than Doom 3 on my machine. The optimization done was remarkable.

[MacRumorUser]

Look at my specs below in my G5. I have enabled Ultra Quality (although my card doesn't have so much VRAM) and all advanced settings except V-sync and Anti Aliasing. I run the game in 1024x768.

It runs absolutely smooth.

The only problem is that it has much load times and that sometimes I get hickups while playing when my computer tries to load the next rooms.

I was surprised to see that quake 4 runs smoother than Doom 3 on my machine. The optimization done was remarkable.

Take off ULTRA and go high. You wont be able to tell the difference. Then run the game in a higher resolution. If I can run at 1680x1050 on my powermac 1.8 with X800XT you should too even though I have more ram/ you have more cpu...


The difference between 1024x768 & 1680x1050 is VAST in comparison to Ultra mode...

[Soulstorm]

Take off ULTRA and go high. You wont be able to tell the difference. Then run the game in a higher resolution. If I can run at 1680x1050 on my powermac 1.8 with X800XT you should too even though I have more ram/ you have more cpu...


The difference between 1024x768 & 1680x1050 is VAST in comparison to Ultra mode...
You are right. Although the difference is small, I see a vast improvement in load times and general gameplay. I will keep it at that... I also increased my resolution at 1280x1024.

[Mlord]

What an I Doing Wrong ???

My System..

Dual 2 G G5
ATI 9650 (256M ram)
2.5 Gig Ram
OS X 10.4.6

AA Of
Vertical Sync Off

1024 x 768 High Quality (most probably should be low right?)

Still does not cut the grade... Its Jerky..

Will a game ever be smooth on a (Dual G5) mac ???

I'm Sick of buying games that are not optimized for Mac.

[MacsRgr8]

I think your grfx card is not up to it.

Get a Radeon X1800 XT, or GeForce 6800 Ultra.... whichever is cheapest.
Both do well at Doom 3 / Quake 4.

[Mlord]

Its a bugger I upgraded the standard card to a 9650 for nothing.. Now its really worth that...

Oh Well...

Will check this out...

Thank you MacsRgr8...


‘’’’\\\
O O
   J
(---)   _
         []
        [  ]
        [  ]
Matt

(Muzak non-stop, Beer o'clock)

[Soulstorm]

Well, I remember reading a review about 9650 and I saw that it was slower than the 9600XT which was my previews card before I installed my X800XT.

I played doom 3 at high settings and ran pretty decently, but it was Doom 3, which ha no more than 2 enemies in front of th player at a time. You are not doing anything wrong with it, it's just your graphics card.

When it comes to today's games, 256 mbytes of memory do not necessarily mean faster gameplay. They must be clocked at a higher frequency and support many opengl and DirectX funxtions.

Quake 3 if far more optimized than Doom 3 was, and I think we owe that not only to Aspyr, but to ID also, which updated their engine in the first plac and made porting easier.

[MacRumorUser]

Its a bugger I upgraded the standard card to a 9650 for nothing.. Now its really worth that...

Its like trading cat shite for dog shite. At the end of the day there both shite!

You need a decent gfx card, X800Xt or Geforce 7800 for decent gaming peformance.

[srobert]

Let's hope Aspyr put out the dualcore patch asap? Or is it already integrated?

Patch not released yet but coming soon according to Aspyr's April Newsletter (http://www.aspyr.com/htmlnewsletter.php?p_newsletter_id=151):

DEVELOPMENT NEWS >

Quake 4™ Mac has shipped, and we are very close to
releasing our SMP patch, which will add dual core support
to the game. On our benchmarks on the Intel-based iMac,
we are seeing 20-40% speed increases in frame rate with
the extra processor! Other updates to our existing games
include the Sims™ 2 Mac Universal patch, which should
be released by the time you read this. A patch for
Civilization® 3 Complete Mac to make it Universal should
also be available.


Sounds like a substantial improvement to me.

[MacsRgr8]

That is excellent news!!!

Can't wait to let it loose on my Quad.... :cool:

[Soulstorm]

Patch not released yet but coming soon according to Aspyr's April Newsletter (http://www.aspyr.com/htmlnewsletter.php?p_newsletter_id=151):

DEVELOPMENT NEWS >

Quake 4™ Mac has shipped, and we are very close to
releasing our SMP patch, which will add dual core support
to the game. On our benchmarks on the Intel-based iMac,
we are seeing 20-40% speed increases in frame rate with
the extra processor! Other updates to our existing games
include the Sims™ 2 Mac Universal patch, which should
be released by the time you read this. A patch for
Civilization® 3 Complete Mac to make it Universal should
also be available.


Sounds like a substantial improvement to me.
Will this patch work for Dual processors, but single core? I have G5 dual with single cores... will this see any improvement?

[eXan]

Can't wait to let it loose on my Quad.... :cool:

Dual core support is not quad-core support, but who knows? :D

[eXan]

Will this patch work for Dual processors, but single core? I have G5 dual with single cores... will this see any improvement?

Definately

[MacsRgr8]

Dual core support is not quad-core support, but who knows? :D

Heh.. true..

Oh well... got two cores left over for other stuff besides Quake, then. :D

[Sharky II]

so, is it optimised for dual core/dual processor g5's as well as the intels, like quake 3a was?

otherwise, it will run like a pig

i have a dual core 2.0 g5 powermac, with 2.5gb and 'only' a nvidia 6600 256mb, and a 24inch dell screen

how will it run on that?

cheers guys

[Soulstorm]

so, is it optimised for dual core/dual processor g5's as well as the intels, like quake 3a was?

otherwise, it will run like a pig

i have a dual core 2.0 g5 powermac, with 2.5gb and 'only' a nvidia 6600 256mb, and a 24inch dell screen

how will it run on that?

cheers guys

It will run like a charm. Look at my specs. It ran flawlessly. Much faster than doom 3. I ran it at high settings at 1280x1024.

I just finished tha game. I actually liked it. I only wanted a game where I can kill everything without much thinking, and Quake 4 offered me just that.

[Sharky II]

Hi

I think your specs are a lot nicer than mine! CPU won't be miles apart, but i think that x800 is much more powerful, i think the 6600 is more comparable to the radeon 9800 pro or XT :(

Is there no demo? There usually is with quake/doom games, but I can't seem to fine one

[Cybix]

I installed the Q4 demo under bootcamp (XP) on my 2ghz MBP.. ran pretty nice, cranked the settings as high as I could, and ran 4x AA.. still looked pretty nice!

looking forward to picking up the OS X version and the core-duo patch!

[krwilkins]

A couple quick questions, I’ve just switched over from PC to the Mac so I’m still learning.

I have a Quad, 7800 graphics card, 2 meg of ram, and a 30 Inch Cinema Display. I can’t seem to get Quake 4 to use my entire screen. I’ve seleted the settings for full screen and chose 16x9 ratio, and I’ve tried different resolutions, No matter what I still have black space on the left and right of the screen.

Is there a way to get Quake 4 to use the entire screen on a 30 inch Cinema Display?

Also every time I load the game (which I have copied over to my applications folder) it asked me to insert the original disk.

Do I have to have the disk inserted to play the game?

Thanks for any and all help

[MacsRgr8]

Here's how you can force the resolution:

bring down console: (CTRL - OPTION ~)

seta r_customwidth 1680
seta r_customheight 1050
seta r_mode -1
vid_restart

Settings above are logically for a screen with 1680 x 1050 rez.
You could try 1920 x 1200 (the default for the 23"), or maybe even your native 30" rez: 2560 x 1600 (not sure if the game supports this resolution though.)

All these resolutions are 16:10, so all should fill the display.

[MacBoobsPro]

i found it to be as boreing as doom 3.

the biggest problem was it's too slow, and the audio is bad

for example; the shotgun, shotguns should go bang and sparky **** should fly out of them, they should not go "pop", the same with most of the guns, they had no power, also their was no speed to it, with halo you feel like your driveing through a warzone on a warthog about to catch fire, flood from the left cov to the right and hunters blasting at you in the front with great music and guns that make loud noises, whereas in doom three i'd get scroll wheel cramp from whipping out my torch every 5 seconds.

REALLY?

TBH I found Halo to be... well quite frankly crap! Its just the same aliens over and over again in different locations. With piss poor weaponry and poor storyline. I know there is a huge fan base for Halo but I honestly cant see why.

Doom on the other hand although similar in style shooting of random beings at least there is an atmosphere that pulls you into the game. It even scares the hell out of you when you dont expect an alien popping out right in front of you. Plus the graphics are infinitely miles better.

Just my 2 cents! :)

[harveypooka]

I downloaded the demo and ran it on my iMac CD in XP and it ran fine. But it was very dull. I might buy it for OSX just to see what it looks like and how it runs and then get a version for XP and compare.

[MacRumorUser]

I downloaded the demo and ran it on my iMac CD in XP and it ran fine. But it was very dull. I might buy it for OSX just to see what it looks like and how it runs and then get a version for XP and compare.

MMTS ;)






More money than sense :D :D

[aussie_geek]

Ultra Quality 1680x1050 works in multiplayer >20fps

High Quality 1680x1050 works in single player at >20fps


to me that sounds like crap mate - how can u play an fps game with those frame rates?


aussie_geek

[voyagerd]

to me that sounds like crap mate - how can u play an fps game with those frame rates?


aussie_geek


20 fps for a game like this isn't bad.

[hedge]

Hi, i'm running quake 4 on a dual 2.5ghzg5 with 1 gig of ram and an ati 9600 xt (128mb) i've put the game to the native resolution of my monitor 1680 * 1050 and was wondering what the best options would be to give the best performance on my machine ie what should be switched on / off in the advanced menu and also would this work for doom 3? thanks in advance

[MacRumorUser]

Hi, i'm running quake 4 on a dual 2.5ghzg5 with 1 gig of ram and an ati 9600 xt (128mb) i've put the game to the native resolution of my monitor 1680 * 1050 and was wondering what the best options would be to give the best performance on my machine ie what should be switched on / off in the advanced menu and also would this work for doom 3? thanks in advance

The 9600XT is A HUGE bottleneck and loads of memory and super fast processor are pointless with a dud gfxcard like that holding them all back.

[airmac]

the patch is already here

http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=19123

later

[MacRumorUser]

the patch is already here

http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=19123

later

Wow that's cool.

Before I would use a lower res 1344x840 on my 20" imac with settings ingame on high. Now with the SMP patch I can max out the Res to 1680x1050 and still get a smooth experience. God I love the new imac :)

Also well done intel. The core duo is definetly one of THE best chips out there.

[MacsRgr8]

Right.... now I definitely have to get it for my Quad :cool:

[Nermal]

I get better performance with the new patch, but it doesn't recognise my backup copy of the DVD anymore. Why can't it just work? Now I have to worry about damaging my expensive original disk :(

[MacsRgr8]

No PowerPC Core Duo (Dual Core) support..???

Taken from the Aspyr Quake 4 site: (http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/quake4/)


Issue
This official update addresses issues found in both multiplayer and single player since the release of the game, and includes several new multiplayer maps. In addition to the changes and fixes outlined below, this update enables QUAKE 4 to take advantage of the SMP of Intel® Dual Core Processors. Players who have computer systems with this processor will notice significant performance gains in QUAKE 4. With the update, Macintosh systems with an Intel Dual Core processor, which uses the SMP, will have a performance jump of 15 to 30 percent.


EDIT:
OTOH....

xlr8yourmac (http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/games/mac_quake4_timedemo_fps.html#reports) has other reports...

:confused: :confused:

EDIT2:
Seems like PPC Dual Cores do gain performance....:

From http://www.barefeats.com/quick.html


We forgot to mention yesterday that the patch also provides gains on the PPC Macs. Our Quad-Core with the GeForce 7800 saw a gain of 50% at 640x480 "Low" dropping to 7% at 1280x1024 "High."


Any reason why Aspyr wouldn't mention that on their site???