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Doom 3 for Mac Shipping
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cal6n said:
Nope, not enough. I don't buy computers for their OS, I buy them for the software that runs on the OS. Sure OSX is better than Windows--but so what if it doesn't run the software I want better than Windows.
Of the software titles I use (almost) daily, most (Word, etc) run about the same on OSX or Windows, one (a screenwriting program) runs marginally better on the Mac and the fourth (WoW) runs much better on the PC.
I'm an old apple fan from days gone bye (my first PC was an Apple II+, and I've owned several macs in the past twenty+ years, including a Nov 2003 12" PB that is currently on perma-loan to my sister.
But I get moderately annoyed when Apple releases new powerbooks with (almost) year-old GPUs. The 9700 was released in Feb 3, 2004 and was in notebooks about a month later (Dell XPS). The PBs were released--well check the macrumors website.
Back when the MR 9000 was released, Apple upgraded to the 9000 only TWO MONTHS after the release of the chip. That was when the 9000 was the top-of-the line mobile GPU.
Took a little longer with the MR 9600. Apple had one in the 15 & 17 about eight months after launch or therabouts--but it was a screwy launch--didn't really see any shipping machines with the 9600 until April or May, IIRC.
In any event the 9600 was the top-of-the line chip at the time and the PBs had 'em fairly quickly.
What happened? Where is the MR 9800 (July 04 release) or Go 6800 (Nov 04 release)?
When I buy a new PB I'd like it to have a GPU that can hold out for at least 3 years worth of upcoming games.
BOTTOMLINE
You pay extra for a PB. For that extra $, I expect Apple to produce the best PB possible given the various leadtimes for the components, and various screwed-up sweetheart deals that ATI/NVIDIA have made with Dell, and various issues with hot CPUs.
Most PB recent releases measure up to this pretty generous standard--the last release didn't. Why this is--only Apple knows. Maybe there are some major hardware change coming in the PB line (faster FSB--new HD--PCIx GPUs--new CPU--whatever) and it was either delay the PBs another 3-4 months for the nextGen hardware and have sales drop off a cliff or release with whatever improvements they can so sales don't drop off a cliff. I don't know. I just know that I'm not buying this generation.
tdewey said:
Again, Macs are not for games. Most people who buy PB's - and Apple sells them plenty - don't play games, let alone take the time to drown their sorrows in Mac gaming threads. Instead, most are happy just to be able to to plug in to an overhead projector and give PP presentations at school or work, while at the same time enjoying the prospect that they may in fact be thinking different. For the most part, their children or younger siblings at home are the ones playing the games, and they have their consoles for that.
Quit your whining and do something constructive, or at least uniquely destructive. There are at least on the order of 10^6 other threads out there capable of sopping up your excess nervous energy.
So Doom 3 is shipping. Doesn't look like my PB will handle it. Getting board of UT2K4...any other suggestions?
aswitcher said:
Assuming you're into shoot 'em ups, both Call of Duty and the United Offensive expansion pack a great games and would run well on your PowerBook. United Offensive adds new multiplayer modes which also allow driving various vehicles. Also have you tried Battlefield 1942 and the Road to Rome and the Secret Weapons of WW2 expansion packs? They have a similar cooperative multiplayer feel to them like Onslaught does in UT2004. Probably the best reason to own BF1942 though is to play the Desert Combat mod, which seems to be more popular than the original game these days.
There's also Close Combat: First to Fight being released soonish, but I'm not sure if anyone has any idea how well it will perform on a PowerBook. It's feels like a bit of a lean time for Mac games at the moment.
iGuy said:
Your making perfect sense, the game developers are not going to levy the manning-years of time they spend optimizing the PC drivers and coding for a Mac until their is enough Apple marketshare to make the MAC OS a primary development environment.
As it is, much of the games that come out on Mac arent optimized for the platform AT ALL untill after they reach the third party conversion studio, such as Aspyr. These in-between companies have neither the money or the lead time to give us Mac users the kind of optimizations we want...
Its an ode to Apples hardware integration that we get the performance we get as it is...
I mention this on the other Doom3 thread but http://www.barefeats.com has some new benches of imacG5s and powermacG4s with upgraded graphics. Some people might be able to see just what their machine may do. Its not pretty but i did see that this guy at barefeats i forgot his name suggested it can be played at 16 FPS 
anything below 25fps kills me. I wouldnt suggest anyone try to enjoy doom3 at 16fps but thats me. perhaps some folks can tolerate those frames.
anything below 25fps kills me. I wouldnt suggest anyone try to enjoy doom3 at 16fps but thats me. perhaps some folks can tolerate those frames.
Dont Hurt Me said:I mention this on the other Doom3 thread but http://www.barefeats.com has some new benches of imacG5s and powermacG4s with upgraded graphics. Some people might be able to see just what their machine may do. Its not pretty but i did see that this guy at barefeats i forgot his name suggested it can be played at 16 FPS
I would extend that point by asking a simple question to everyone out there... What good does anything over ~30fps do? Anything over that is too fast for the human eye anyway.
Man!, going from a radeon 9800 128mb to a radeon 9800 256mb on a dual 2Ghz G5 sported a performance increase of 16%! I didn't expected that much. So even if anything more that 512mb system ram doesn't matter so much, upping the video ram does make a difference.Dont Hurt Me said:I mention this on the other Doom3 thread but http://www.barefeats.com has some new benches of imacG5s and powermacG4s with upgraded graphics. Some people might be able to see just what their machine may do. Its not pretty but i did see that this guy at barefeats i forgot his name suggested it can be played at 16 FPS
isgoed said:
Thats mostly because Doom 3 uses a lot of large texture and various other graphics files. The larger amount of memory onboard the video card allows these textures and such to be cached and thusly delivered to the display much faster than having to be reloaded off of the HD. The larger the game, generally the more performance gain you'll see from having more RAM on the video card.
tdewey said:
The results of a poll would be insignificant as the majority of PB owners (of any mac really) do not participate in online computer fan clubs such as Macrumors, so they for the most part would not even see the poll. You missed the entire point of my first post. Most PB owners are adults, and most adults don't play computer games. Many have never even run the preinistalled games such as Ottomatic.
Well
Dude, I got your point. I just don't agree with you. The statement "most adults don't play computer games" may be correct but has nothing to do with your first statement "Most PB owners are adults."
The set of [Adult PB Owners] is not equal too, and indeed is much less than [Most Adults]. I suspect you'll find that the set of [Adult PB Owners] is much more likely to play games than you'd think.
But let us assume you are correct. Let's say that only 10% of possible future PB owners are in my category--going to play 3D games with their PB. Let us assume there are 1,000,000 possible future PB owners of which 100,000 would play 3D games with their PB.
Let us assume that you are Steve Jobs.
You can:
A) Make the PB with an old GPU and sell 900,000 units.
B) Make the PB with a good GPU and sell 1,000,000 units.
What do you do?
You're comments so far makes me think you'll pick (A)--but that doesn't make much sense right? Apple hasn't been designing for just one segement of the potential population--for, well a long time.
Look at the current chip the 9700 it can drive the 30" display. Almost no PB owners have 30" displays. By your logic Apple shouldn't put it in the PB--might as well have stayed with the MR 9600 or MR 9000.
My point--you design a computer like the PB so that it has the broadest range of uses possible--at the moment of its release (within the price-point). For the 1% that are going to use the 30" screen--it's in there. For people who are going to play World of Warcraft--that's in there too. For people who are going to use it for graphic design....surfing...linking to a network (wired or wireless)...etc
Well you get the picture.
In fact the single best argument for buying a PB over a windows notebook--which is CONSTANTLY pointed out by mac fans everyone--so you must have read it here or elsewhere--is that Apple does this better than everyone else with the PB. They put everything but the kitchen sink into the PB so that it appeals to the widest possible audience.
I'm not going to argue this anymore and waste Macrumors bandwidth. If you don't get it now, you're never going to get it.
TheGimp said:
Dude, I got your point. I just don't agree with you. The statement "most adults don't play computer games" may be correct but has nothing to do with your first statement "Most PB owners are adults."
The set of [Adult PB Owners] is not equal too, and indeed is much less than [Most Adults]. I suspect you'll find that the set of [Adult PB Owners] is much more likely to play games than you'd think.
But let us assume you are correct. Let's say that only 10% of possible future PB owners are in my category--going to play 3D games with their PB. Let us assume there are 1,000,000 possible future PB owners of which 100,000 would play 3D games with their PB.
Let us assume that you are Steve Jobs.
You can:
A) Make the PB with an old GPU and sell 900,000 units.
B) Make the PB with a good GPU and sell 1,000,000 units.
What do you do?
You're comments so far makes me think you'll pick (A)--but that doesn't make much sense right? Apple hasn't been designing for just one segement of the potential population--for, well a long time.
Look at the current chip the 9700 it can drive the 30" display. Almost no PB owners have 30" displays. By your logic Apple shouldn't put it in the PB--might as well have stayed with the MR 9600 or MR 9000.
My point--you design a computer like the PB so that it has the broadest range of uses possible--at the moment of its release (within the price-point). For the 1% that are going to use the 30" screen--it's in there. For people who are going to play World of Warcraft--that's in there too. For people who are going to use it for graphic design....surfing...linking to a network (wired or wireless)...etc
Well you get the picture.
In fact the single best argument for buying a PB over a windows notebook--which is CONSTANTLY pointed out by mac fans everyone--so you must have read it here or elsewhere--is that Apple does this better than everyone else with the PB. They put everything but the kitchen sink into the PB so that it appeals to the widest possible audience.
I'm not going to argue this anymore and waste Macrumors bandwidth. If you don't get it now, you're never going to get it.
Children?
The average age of a game is currently 28. Most people who play games ARE adults. Plus, 60% of the US population has played a video game in the last month. These were statistics given at the recent Game Developers Conference is San Francisco. Another thing to point out, is that a very large percentage of the people there were carrying around powerbooks.
TheGimp said:
The average age of a game is currently 28. Most people who play games ARE adults. Plus, 60% of the US population has played a video game in the last month. These were statistics given at the recent Game Developers Conference is San Francisco. Another thing to point out, is that a very large percentage of the people there were carrying around powerbooks.
tdewey said:
Regardless of your itemized "set theory"-based argument (sure worked you into a creamy froth), I'll maintain that most PB owners (most of which are adults) do not play games, nor do most call one another "dude". Of your hypothetical 10% who may very well play games, 90% would rather play solitaire or the Sims than graphically violent first person shooters, for which tasks the current PB's are well suited. I would reckon that most Mac users find even Nanosaur 2 too violent. My GF nearly wept she saw an innocent brontosaurus collapse in a heap after I nailed it in the can with a torpedo.
Your not suppose to shoot the Bronto's vern,save your ammo for the guys that need it the Rex's.TheGimp said:
mandis said:Is it Shipping?? hmm....
So, where is the demo??
I mean there is a demo right??
They can't possibly expect us to go out and buy it just like that... do they??
No demo for you.
Sunrunner said:
Here's another simple question: why do a few people post messages like this, when it is so obviously not true? I mean, where does this notion come from? It's really, really, really not true at all. Trust me. Heck, don't trust me, just look at something running at 100fps (with a CRT monitor that refreshes at 100Hz, LCDs are too slow), then look at something running at 30fps (a modern console game on an NTSC TV for example). It's very easy to see the difference.
When I had a 9600XT, and was running a game that could vsync to a 100Hz refresh rate some of the time, but not all the time, it was blindingly, glaringly obvious when it cut from 100fps to 50fps at those times. Now that I have an X800, and that same game stays at 100fps all the time, it's nicer.
Mind you! 30fps is actually fine, so your question is semi-valid. After all, modern consoles max out at that, or even 25fps in PAL countries, and millions of people play those without constantly whining about the frame rates. (Older consoles ran double that because of not using interlace mode of course.) The first Doom was hard-coded to max out at 30fps no matter how fast your computer was, and nobody complained about that either. Keeping a steady fps is more important than a fps that is sometimes high but fluctuates all over the place.
...However, claiming that people can't see anything over 30fps is just unutterably silly.
--Eric
Eric5h5 said:
I agree that we can probably see over 30fps... Isn't it 8-10fps that allows us to see motion that we can easily follow (I think original anime shows were at this fps). Then 24fps lets us see fluid motion, and since we can see monitors refreshing at up to 85hz (for most people), I'd say that the eye can see more than 30 [On a side note for monitors just remember that even if your brain can't detect the flicker at over 85hz, your eyes still can and therefore any crt causes eye strain]. Also, you have to realize that unless a game avgs way more than 30 you can't lock it at 30. If it avgs 30 you are probably gonna drop to 10-15fps fairly often.
Picked it up at CompUSA a couple of days ago. This game takes a lot of juice. I'm running a DPG5-2(RevA) w/ OEM 9800Pro-128 and so far I've dropped to 10x7 on a 23"ACD and only Hi-res. May drop more, still seems a little choppy. This game wants a 512MB card and mine is ONLY 128. pffft.
How do I display framerate? Old Doom had a "console" access but this version doesn't seem to.
BTW, I'm 50 and love shooters. Games in the Dock are: Snood, Klondike, Dungeon Siege, BF1942, Diablo 1,2 etc, Doom3, Myst Revelation and Jedi Knight - Outcast and Academy.
Z
edit: Found it at IMG - ctrl-alt-tilde; now I can hit god mode and KILL!!!
How do I display framerate? Old Doom had a "console" access but this version doesn't seem to.
BTW, I'm 50 and love shooters. Games in the Dock are: Snood, Klondike, Dungeon Siege, BF1942, Diablo 1,2 etc, Doom3, Myst Revelation and Jedi Knight - Outcast and Academy.
Z
edit: Found it at IMG - ctrl-alt-tilde; now I can hit god mode and KILL!!!
jeffbax said:
I'm sure Starcraft is much better on PC than on a console, so if switching to PC solved your problem, there's no problem with Macs being sub-par game machines.