Doom 3 for Mac Shipping

[Dippo]

With a Resolution of 640x480, lowest settings, and all advanced settings turn off.

I turned off 3D rendering with "r_skiprender 1"
I used "timedemo demo1"

I got an average of 156fps with my Athlon XP 2.5Ghz Processor and an ATI Radeon 9600XT.

Without "r_skiprender 1" I was getting ~90+ fps, but the game looks really bad.

 

[deanbo]

Doom 3 on Tiger

I would be quite interested to see how this game runs under Tiger, when it's released of course.

 

[broken_keyboard]

I would be quite interested to see how this game runs under Tiger, when it's released of course.

Tiger is no faster at 3D. The video (as in movies) handling has been improved, but not 3D (that's what I've heard at least).

 

[~loserman~]

Tiger is no faster at 3D. The video (as in movies) handling has been improved, but not 3D (that's what I've heard at least).

There have been OpenGL improvements. Then again you would have to couple the Mac with a Video Card that does OpenGL reasonably well.

 

[Dippo]

I found a big improvement in fps when I turned off the shadows.
I couldn't really tell much difference with them on because it's so dark anyways, but without them I got like an extra 20 fps!!!

 

[~loserman~]

Please share whatever it is you're smoking with the rest of us.

Also, I feel bad for all you people without a PC to play games on who are all excited about Doom 3. The game was mediocre at best, and certainly not worth this level of anticipation.

Preach baby Preach it.

The game does not have good game play.
IMO the only reason people are excited about it on the Mac boils down to the lack of titles on the Mac.

 

[broken_keyboard]

There have been OpenGL improvements. Then again you would have to couple the Mac with a Video Card that does OpenGL reasonably well.

It sounds like you know first hand so I will take your word. I am just going from what I have heard second hand.

 

[a1291762]

I have managed to get the game playable on an original quicksilver with a Gigadesigns 1.2 G4 and Radeon 8600.

Do you mean Radeon 8500 or 9600? I've got a GigaDesigns dual 1Ghz (stable at 1.3Ghz) with a Radeon 8500. Sadly, my G4 is a sawtooth so the OWC 9600 cards aren't going to work (AGPx2 instead of AGPx4) and the Radeon 9800 is too much for a single game.

 

[iGuy]

market share stikes again

Apple optimizes their drivers for desktop work not in rendering 3D games. I read about it somewhere, how Apple focuses their driver writing to support FCP, Photoshop, Motion, etc instead of games. And as such most games look for work arounds. I was actually surprised at Apple including 3D updates to the drivers specifically for Doom 3 and WoW.

It's true Mac gaming sucks, but it's not without reason

Perhaps a game developer can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if anyone devoted the time and effort to a Mac game that they do for a PC game, then the games would be just fine.

The problem isn't Apple's hardware but that the games aren't optimised for it.

The solution is an increase in market share resulting in more dollars for the game developers. Until a larger market share is reached, all we'll get are games that are 'ported', not optimised.

I'ts late. Am I making any sense?

~iGuy

 

[ifjake]

i remember reading an article about how Carmack was totally not liking the multiprocessor thing that the industry was leaning towards. said it made coding games too bogged down with code that didn't really render anything, just delagating tasks to the separate processors. personally i think he's one the last of the generation of one-man game creators, and he just wouldn't want to do all the extra work himself since that's how he does things (i think he did the whole engine thing).

games just aren't written for the processors in Apple computers. they are written for the x86 bunch. it's just not going to be as good when trying to whittle a square peg down to fit a round hole. fine by me to be honest. Apple kicks the pants off everyone else on everything else.

what'll be interesting will be to see if how all 3 next generation consoles going to IBM Power-esque processors will have any effect on the gameability of the Mac platform. considering microsoft is using PowerMac G5s as their development machines, it might not be too far off. or Apple will continue to not really care about games and it won't make a difference whatsoever.

 

[Bibulous]

Demo

Demo - I think most people would like a demo to test their system before buying this game, all the more so with the average reviews for the pc version of the game.

 

[isgoed]

I'm sorry, but not in Doom 3. It hits the video subsystem so hard, the CPU is almost bored. When they turned off the video processing, the game ran at 120 or so frames a second. And the sort of game logic they are using is really pretty simple. That's why they didn't add dual CPU support, the only dual that will give you any better performance is SLI.

WRONG!!

The CPU is the limiting factor. (This of course does not hold for every system configuration, For example if you're running a PCI radeon 7000 in a G5 or so, but generally it holds). To see what limits Macs, we should look at the top Mac available. BareFeats shows tests of a dual Powermac with a X800 at high settings. The results are:
dual 1.8 G5 + X800 = 24FPS.
dual 2.5 G5 + X800 = 34FPS.

As you can see the performance scales lineary with Mhz ( (24FPS)*2.5/1.8 = 33.3FPS ). The CPU is the bottleneck.
You can argue that this proves nothing, since no test is run with a different GPU. For this I refer to the test by macologist. Their test showed:
iMac 1.8Ghz + FX 5200 HighQ = 11.5FPS
PB 1.5Ghz + Rad 9700 HighQ = 9.4FPS
and
iMac 1.8Ghz + FX 5200 LowQ = 28.4FPS *(no shadow support)
PB 1.5Ghz + Rad 9700 LowQ = 19.2FPS

In both cases performance scales better than linear with Mhz. This test may not be entirely be valid since the FX5200 does not provide shadow support. But your claim that the GPU is the limiting factor is FALSE, because then the radeon 9700 in the PB should at least have a performance in the vicinity of the iMac, which it hasn't. THE GPU IS BORED!!!

I am an OpenGL developer myself and if I shark my application I see that sometimes even more than 50% of CPU time is spent outside my application ,in the driver libraries of Apple (CoreImage and Ati libraries and such). The real bottleneck is thus the drivers of apple.

Perhaps a game developer can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if anyone devoted the time and effort to a Mac game that they do for a PC game, then the games would be just fine.

The problem isn't Apple's hardware but that the games aren't optimised for it.

Well as i said this is not the main issue. I think 75% is apple's fault and 25% is the game developers fault.

 

[broken_keyboard]

I am an OpenGL developer myself and if I shark my application I see that sometimes even more than 50% of CPU time is spent outside my application ,in the driver libraries of Apple (CoreImage and Ati libraries and such). The real bottleneck is thus the drivers of apple.

Well as i said this is not the main issue. I think 75% is apple's fault and 25% is the game developers fault.

From what you and Glenda Adams have said it sounds like the video card has special hardware for doing OpenGL, and instead of using it, Apple does all the exact same stuff in software of their own, just so they can have a separate layer. Nice design guys...

 

[eXan]

I will not buy this game, because it's AWFUL! And only High-end G5 owners will be able to play it!

 

[Italiano]

I'm a contractor (remodeling) and work with "the general public" everyday - I love to come home and do "a little killing" on my Mac... I wanna try it out. My G4 with an upgraded 1.2 ghz. chip and Radeon 9800 may not be fast enough but I still wanna try this sucker out!

 

[tdewey]

True but who's fault is that? i mean look Apple doesnt offer any video upgrades for anything but powermac but at the same time tells us how great its products are with the fx5200. It forces you to buy the latest OS just to get half decent drivers to play. The blame for Doom3s poor Mac performance starts with Apple and no one else. Come on Steve/Apple i would love to hear your spin on why? sure fx5200 is under 20 bucks each is that why? i think we know that is the real answer. Im glad it made to Mac ( thanks Aspyr) im not glad about Apples use of what i term garbage video. Its in almost every product they make and with billions in the bank there just isnt any excuse for milking your user base as they have. rant over on this one.

Exactly. The thing holding Mac games back is the GPU. The gap between the PB and iBook and their Dell equivalents is ridiculous.

 

[Mord]

Exactly. The thing holding Mac games back is the GPU. The gap between the PB and iBook and their Dell equivalents is ridiculous.

dells equivilent to the ibook have intel extreme graphics which is on par with the GPU in my ibook a 16MB radeon mobility (i remember soem benchys with an über thin thinkpad and a laptop with intel integrated **** and one with a 9700) and the gpu's in the powerbook equivilents are about the same radeon 9700's, put the crack pipe down.

 

[tdewey]

dells equivilent to the ibook have intel extreme graphics which is on par with the GPU in my ibook a 16MB radeon mobility (i remember soem benchys with an über thin thinkpad and a laptop with intel integrated **** and one with a 9700) and the gpu's in the powerbook equivilents are about the same radeon 9700's, put the crack pipe down.

Umm. Incorrect as a quick perusal of the Dell website will show. Drop the fanboi flag. A 6000d has a better GPU and a better screen and is cheaper than an iBook.

Look,
I'm not asking for Doom3 to run like a champ on an iBook--I don't care if the PB/iBook doesn't have the latest notebook PCIx GPU (the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra--which BTW had DOOM3 perf of 30fps in a _centrino_ notebook at highest 1920x1200 settings and 88 fps at lowest 1024x768 settings--putting to rest the issue that Doom3 performance is CPU bound. A G4/5 >= Centrino on a per-cycle bases---so either Apple has really bad drivers or their UNIX overhead is unbelievable or their GPU's suck or some combination of all three--the CPU is not the problem).

I just want them to be in-the-running GPUwise. I'm buying a new laptop in summer and I want a reason not to buy a Dell.

 

[gweedo]

Doom3 == Yawn

Doom3 has a nice engine. The game itself is pretty boring. Save your money. Half-Life 2 has an equally nice engine, and a much more interesting game. However, I seriously doubt you will ever see HL2 ported to the Mac (the original game wasn't).

If you are a gamer, it is not that pricey to get a PC for playing games. Let your mac do the real work... Heck, messing around in XCode or FinalCut is way more fun than a game anyway.

 

[Mord]

Integrated Intel® Media Accelerator 900 Graphics

right....

that laptop dosent correspond to the ibook as it's a 15" laptop, when you compare spec for spec apples come out about the same or cheaper, apple just dose not offer certain price points on certain models like a big screen laptop (15-17") or a desktop replacement brick

 

[seamuskrat]

Radeon 8500 sorry. Typo.

Do you mean Radeon 8500 or 9600? I've got a GigaDesigns dual 1Ghz (stable at 1.3Ghz) with a Radeon 8500. Sadly, my G4 is a sawtooth so the OWC 9600 cards aren't going to work (AGPx2 instead of AGPx4) and the Radeon 9800 is too much for a single game.

 

[Eric5h5]

But how much of the negative reviews are from the backlash that most hyped games get, and how much is legit? If Doom3 really is oldschool, which is to say, if it plays like Doom and Doom II, then I'd enjoy the heck out of it. The Quake games aren't as fun to me, but they're not bad.

Personally I expect Doom3 is more like Quake gameplay-wise, but that's still good enough to bother with. I'm not expecting it to be the most mega-fun game of all time that I'll still be playing it years from now, for sure. I'll probably get it, but not until the 5.1 surround sound patch is out. I mean, if I'm paying for something that turns out to be more eye candy then game, I want ALL the candy. (Ear candy, in this case.)

--Eric

 

[Mav451]

Doom 3 is NOT old school Doom. Its dark and creepy (vs. fast-moving/expansive). Kinda like horror film with random scares vs. Aliens 2 (I for one would have preferred Aliens 2); in the pace anyway.

For the PC, an expansion is coming out where they are rumored in trying to correct the darkness problem, but who knows.

*edit*
Oh yeah. The sound is probably the best I've heard EVER in any game. I guess that is the shining point for this game.

 

[ASP272]

Just one more reason why Apple should make higher Vram graphics cards a standard in their machines. Doom 3 recommends a 128mb card, whereas most macs are still only coming with 64mb. Irks me.

 

[Dokter_Mac]

Comments by Glenda Adams (see the article at http://www.barefeats.com/doom3.html)

"Just like the PC version, timedemos should be run twice to get accurate results. The first run the game is caching textures and other data into RAM, so the timedemo will stutter more. Running it immediately a second time and recording that result will give more accurate results.

The performance differences you see between Doom 3 Mac and Windows, especially on high end cards, is due to a lot of factors (in general order from smallest impact to largest):

1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed. It requires re-engineering much of the game's math code to keep data in native formats more often. This isn't 'bad' coding on the PC -- they don't have the performance penalty, and converting results to ints saves memory and can be faster in many algorithms on that platform. It would only be a few percentage points that could be gained on the Mac, so its one of those optimizations that just isn't feasible to do for the speed increase.

2. Compiler differences. gcc, the compiler used on the Mac, currently can't do some of the more complex optimizations that Visual Studio can on the PC. Especially when inlining small functions, the PC has an advantage. Add to this that the PowerPC has a higher overhead for functional calls, and not having as much inlining drops frame rates another few percentage points.

3. More robust and modern OpenGL implementation on OS X. The fact that OpenGL is engineered from the ground up on OS X to be accessible from many applications at once is wonderful for the rest of the world, but does have a performance hit for games. Sharing GL with the rest of the system invokes a small overhead that Windows doesn't have, since Windows can basically assume GL is just in use for one application.

4. OpenGL framework/drivers split on OS X. On Windows, ATI and nVidia are responsible for the OpenGL code all the way from the hardware to the game. On the Mac, Apple handles the top layers of OpenGL and then hands data off to the video card drivers. On Windows this allows the video card manufacturers to do some more direct optimizations that make sure data gets passed to the card as fast as possible. The Mac can't short circuit that process, since there is a fairly well defined boundary between GL and the video card drivers. This is complicated by the more modern GL implementation on OS X as well- Apple can't just put in a bunch of hacks to shove data around the wall and into the cards, just for the game.

5. And the last, but definitely most important factor: Amount of time Apple/ATI/nVidia have had to optimize specifically for Doom 3. On Windows, ATI/NVIDIA spent multiple programmer years tuning their OpenGL implementations for Doom 3, starting back over a year ago while the game was still in development. Apple/ATi/NVIDIA have done an immense amount of work on OS X's GL in the last 3-4 months, but there is no way they could get as much done as the dozens of Windows engineers working on the problem for over a year. 10.3.8 includes a huge number of GL optimizations that make a big difference in Doom 3, and the game wouldn't have been in any shape to ship without these. One of the biggest things ATi & nVidia do on the PC for Doom 3 is have application specific OpenGL optimizations just for the game. They can detect Doom3 is the application using GL, and even which shaders it is downloading -- then they can shift to a mode that is highly optimized just for those cases.

The good news on all of these fronts, especially the last one, is that Doom 3 is such a highly visible benchmarking application, Apple/ATI/NVIDIA/Aspyr are all going to be continuing to work on increasing performance over the coming months/years. Just like what happened with Quake 3, the Mac OS matured, video card drivers got more optimized, and the game was tweaked so that eventually Mac performance is now as good or better than comparable PC hardware (I'd be really interested to see benchmarks with Quake 3 with the original shipping Mac app & version of OS X versus the latest app & current OS on the same hardware). Games drive hardware and the OS, and Doom 3 will likely push Apple to upgrade consumer video cards and continue to spend engineering time in the future to speed up OpenGL."

"An Apple a day , keeps Windows away"