My MAC Pro loves Half Life 2.

[smash]

I bought a Mac Pro to replace my Mac and PC.
Best decision, ever.

I ran the HL2: Lost Coast "graphics stress test" and got an average of like 31.65fps at 1900x1200 (!!!) on my 23-inch display! (cinema)


The game plays flawlessly even with like all of the graphics turned up. This thing is bitchin'!! I've never had a computer that could play games this fast at resolutions half that!

Oh, I'm running the basic Mac Pro setup... the one they have at the store. With Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2, 32GB partition.

Pics are from my cellphone so they kind of suck... but you get the idea! If you need a gaming PC, and a sweet Mac, buy a Mac Pro.

http://static.flickr.com/68/222667408_92e6ff3ec2_o.jpg

http://static.flickr.com/83/222673337_8384cb85e3_o.jpg

http://static.flickr.com/92/222674878_0574b84660_o.jpg

[Spanky Deluxe]

Wow, that's much better than I was expecting from the 7300GT, especially at those resolutions! Can you do a benchmark of the normal game, not the Lost Coast?

[plinkoman]

impressive given that you only have the standard 7300 gfx card.

then again, I run halo at 1680x1050 on my powerbook and achieve similar results.

In any case, i wish I could afford a new mac pro. :cool:

[mkrishnan]

Wow....pwetty! :eek: :o

[Dagless]

Very nice :) HL2 is the only game I still play on a daily basis. absolutely love it, just waiting for the Episodes to come out in a trilogy before I get there, oh and a better video to handle HDR. Probably will end up being a Mac Pro as uni finishes and my career starts in a nice 12 months time.

Really glad to see it can handle this game :) pray tell, what about Doom 3?

[Eevee]

very nice!

Question: were you using Boot Camp or Parallel? Just want to get the best for my macbook pro

[Abulia]

very nice!

Question: were you using Boot Camp or Parallel? Just want to get the best for my macbook pro
Boot Camp. You can't run DirectX games in Parallels.

[MacRumorUser]

I thought the MacPro has terrible problems with hard disk performance in Windows and so your results may actually be misleading. It's possible final results with an updated driver set will boost that score significantly.

[Abulia]

I thought the MacPro has terrible problems with hard disk performance in Windows and so your results may actually be misleading. It's possible final results with an updated driver set will boost that score significantly.
Disk performance won't affect gaming performance much unless he has little memory and is doing lots of swapping to disk. For example WoW, with its huge disk cache, would be more adversely affected.

Getting the SATA issues ironed out wouldn't hurt, obviously. :)

[Mr. Mister]

How many hours does it take to load?

[Dont Hurt Me]

My 2 yr old 3500+/6800GT gets higher frames rates so i wouldnt get to googggly eyed. Now Take that Mac pro & Mate a high end GPU to it and it will dust my 2yr old 6800GT. The 7300 just isnt all that, it holds the Mac pro down in gaming if you will. HL2 looks a lot better at 60 plus frames.:)

[Spanky Deluxe]

My 2 yr old 3500+/6800GT gets higher frames rates so i wouldnt get to googggly eyed. Now Take that Mac pro & Mate a high end GPU to it and it will dust my 2yr old 6800GT. The 7300 just isnt all that, it holds the Mac pro down in gaming if you will. HL2 looks a lot better at 60 plus frames.:)

Yeah that's true although for the card it is I'm quite impressed. 30fps at 1920x1200 is pretty good and is playable. That kind of thing could tide quite a few people over for a while until a better card than the 1900xt comes to market for the Mac Pro.

[CyberPrey]

It is rather funny that people feel games "look" better at higher FPS..... The average human eye clocks in about 32fps in the everyday world..... Provided your getting 32+fps, and no adverse slowdown, there really would be no noticeable difference between 32fps and 132fps.....

[Dont Hurt Me]

MacPro's new CPU really is showing itself driving the crap out of that 7300GT, I wonder what kind of frames could be had from a old 6800UT or GT for example? MacPro is a cpu powerhouse and overkill for any consumer in my view, its GPU is lacking big time but because its cpu is so killer Apple can get away with it....for now. Though I have a smaller resolution1280 x 1024 that old 6800GT can pull mid 60s in that resolution everything on powered by that old Athlon64. Not bad for a 2 yr old system that was under 2 grand 2 yrs ago. Apple is almost there.

[mkrishnan]

It is rather funny that people feel games "look" better at higher FPS..... The average human eye clocks in about 32fps in the everyday world..... Provided your getting 32+fps, and no adverse slowdown, there really would be no noticeable difference between 32fps and 132fps.....

This is mostly true. But you have to be careful about your metric. If your metric is average fps, then the minimum fps sustained over a typical gaming session will be lower. You really want to know fps under the worst case scenario that will be encountered in terms of rendering complexity. I don't really play this kind of game that often, but my limited experience is that if you talk about the mean fps as, say, 32, then the standard deviation of that mean is fairly substantial, and the mean - 1SD will probably be down below your threshold of perception....

[Spanky Deluxe]

This is mostly true. But you have to be careful about your metric. If your metric is average fps, then the minimum fps sustained over a typical gaming session will be lower. You really want to know fps under the worst case scenario that will be encountered in terms of rendering complexity. I don't really play this kind of game that often, but my limited experience is that if you talk about the mean fps as, say, 32, then the standard deviation of that mean is fairly substantial, and the mean - 1SD will probably be down below your threshold of perception....

That's very true, its the minimum fps that's the important thing. However, the eye can only see about 30 fps but it can detect flicker up to 60 fps. To be perfectly smooth a game has to have a framrate of higher than about 60 fps.

[ReanimationLP]

Pretty nice for a low end card. I get about 50FPS at 1600x1200 on my 9800XT, which is what, 3 generations old?

[ifjake]

It is rather funny that people feel games "look" better at higher FPS..... The average human eye clocks in about 32fps in the everyday world..... Provided your getting 32+fps, and no adverse slowdown, there really would be no noticeable difference between 32fps and 132fps.....

The extra frames are also good for providing something of motion blur when it isn't done on the frame itself. Motion blur does make a noticeable difference. Without it there's a slight hint of a strobe lighting effect, where you get still frame after still frame. More frames helps the time between frames lessen and the movement from frame to frame be less drastic. Looking at old stop motion special effects movies will show the frame by frame strobing. For example, in "Jason and the Argonauts" while the skeleton army scene is still one of the most awesome uses of special effects ever, you can definitely see the difference between the movement of the actors and the stop motion skeletons. This is why in modern CGI, so much processing power is actually put toward motion blur. I'm not quite that dismayed at the 30 fps level in the next gen consoles, provided that some of the new fandangleness of the systems provide some kind of motion blur. Film still runs at only 24 frames, but still looks smooth. Gaming could do the same, visually, although some FPS would play best with enough frames for knee-jerk reaction times.

[kingtj]

I just read in another message thread where a few people were successfully using standard PC/Windows nVidia 7800GT video cards in their Mac Pros for the Windows XP side of things, while leaving the factory 7300 in place for the OS X side.

With something like Dell's 2045 24" LCD display (which I happen to own already), you can attach one card to the DVI input and the other to the VGA input. Then, switching between video cards is as easy as pressing the selector button on the display. You just have to remember to select one for when you're in Windows and the other for OS X.

And this one, I'm unclear on... but is it possible to use a standard parallel ATA hard drive in a Mac Pro, by attaching it to the connector intended for the second "Superdrive", and installing Windows on that drive - thereby bypassing the poor SATA performance issue in XP? Seems like that could be a nice work-around too, if that works. Then, when Apple releases better SATA drivers - you could image the drive over to a new SATA drive and pull it back out again....


Yeah that's true although for the card it is I'm quite impressed. 30fps at 1920x1200 is pretty good and is playable. That kind of thing could tide quite a few people over for a while until a better card than the 1900xt comes to market for the Mac Pro.

[barr08]

My iMac handles HL2 flawlessly at highest settings too!

[patseguin]

Yeah, I was wondering if the SATA speed issues would hold back HL2 performance. I already have XP installed on my Mac Pro but the only game I got around to testing was Guild Wars, which ran great btw! I think I can get rid of the laptop in my sig. ;)

[padré]

hy everybody

uhm i got a kinda stupid question, has anyone tried oblivion yet on the mac pro, or is it to soon to tell that cause of the "old" nvidea card...

(yes i shearched on google :) )

sry for my english

[mkaake]

MacPro's new CPU really is showing itself driving the crap out of that 7300GT, I wonder what kind of frames could be had from a old 6800UT or GT for example? MacPro is a cpu powerhouse and overkill for any consumer in my view, its GPU is lacking big time but because its cpu is so killer Apple can get away with it....for now. Though I have a smaller resolution1280 x 1024 that old 6800GT can pull mid 60s in that resolution everything on powered by that old Athlon64. Not bad for a 2 yr old system that was under 2 grand 2 yrs ago. Apple is almost there.

Actually, I think the reason they get away with it is because the pros the machine was designed for don't need a top end 3d graphics chip, they need fast 2d. Which is why you *can* upgrade the video card (if you want to). There's no reason to have a top end card in the bottom end spec for pro's who use it for 2d work. For those who do 3d work, or want fast games, upgrade cards are available. No sense in upping the base price for something the machine doesn't need in a fair share of it's intended audience.

[smwatson]

How does CSS run?

[barr08]

How does CSS run?

Since it's the same engine, probably the same. CS:S is getting a little old (even though it's still amazingly fun), so a beast like the mac pro should be able to impress.

[greatdevourer]

hy everybody

uhm i got a kinda stupid question, has anyone tried oblivion yet on the mac pro, or is it to soon to tell that cause of the "old" nvidea card...

(yes i shearched on google :) )

sry for my english Other than "shearched" (probably just a typo), the English was perfect :) Far better than what I can say for some other forum members...

No-one appears to have documented the MP specifically, but the 7300GT doesn't appear to do well:
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?type=3&id=82&page=5&desc=gainward_bliss_7300_gt_golden_sample
There's a better site with more thorough testing and a better layout, but the profanity filter won't let me link to it (it's at elite*insert 7 letter word beginning with B and ending with D*s.net)

[padré]

thx for the reply greatdevourer

[Uma888]

My 2 yr old 3500+/6800GT gets higher frames rates so i wouldnt get to googggly eyed. Now Take that Mac pro & Mate a high end GPU to it and it will dust my 2yr old 6800GT. The 7300 just isnt all that, it holds the Mac pro down in gaming if you will. HL2 looks a lot better at 60 plus frames.:)

my 3 year old 2800+/6800U gets 65fps in CSS (80+ fps standing, 60fps in battles)

i dont think mac pros are for gamiing....yet

[Mackilroy]

my 3 year old 2800+/6800U gets 65fps in CSS (80+ fps standing, 60fps in battles)

i dont think mac pros are for gamiing....yet

What resolution were you running at?

[Dagless]

My 3-4 year old Radeon 9600Pro 128mb runs HL2 in 1280*1024. 512mb DDR ram, god knows the HDD speed (IDE, 7200rpm?), Pentium 4 2ghz. HL2 maxed out (AA on 4x) and the thing runs like a dream. 40fps. very chuffed for such an old system.

[smwatson]

HL2 isnt maxed out if AA is only on 4x........obviously your options are restricted because of your system. :p ;)

[smash]

Update!
My friend just bought a 2.16GHZ MacBook Pro and it played Half Life 2 beautifully. (at 1440x900!) He was actually kind of shocked that it responded better than his 3.6GHZ tricked out desktop PC. Now he doesn't have to bring that to college for games! :D

There's no HDR support on the notebooks (obviously) but big deal considering how much power's crammed into that tiny machine! :)

http://static.flickr.com/95/225790827_7d1639a50c.jpg

[greatdevourer]

Update!
My friend just bought a 2.16GHZ MacBook Pro and it played Half Life 2 beautifully. (at 1440x900!) He was actually kind of shocked that it responded better than his 3.6GHZ tricked out desktop PC. Now he doesn't have to bring that to college for games! :D

There's no HDR support on the notebooks (obviously) but big deal considering how much power's crammed into that tiny machine! :)

http://static.flickr.com/95/225790827_7d1639a50c.jpg Any more details of the quality settings, framerate and specs of the MBP (hoping my deaded PB gets replaced with an MBP :))