Doom 3 for Mac... Still Coming

[o1b2]

doom 3 oh boo hoo...

doom yes was a fun game but in its dos days .As games go I am more peed off that sims 2 is not be released to the mac anytime soon. EA emailed me back and said "some time 2005." oh well. That is not anything new the pc platform seems to get all the releases first.

 

[Jimong5]

I think ill be ready for doom 3, at least at minimum settings-
Dual 867 G4, 1 GB RAM
ATI 9700 (I actually found one with ADC on Ebay, i was so excited)

Unless its more CPU Bound that I would like...

 

[macsrus]

As games go I am more peed off that sims 2 is not be released to the mac anytime soon. EA emailed me back and said "some time 2005." oh well. That is not anything new the pc platform seems to get all the releases first.

I feel the same way...
You cant even get a decent chess program for the MAC...

OH YEA.. thats right you can get ChessPatzer(Chessmaster) 9.0 finally... Now that version 10 is out on the PC...
But it is nothing like the real Chess software... Like FRITZ, JUNIOR, HIARCS, SHREDDER and CHESSBASE...

 

[puckhead193]

anyone know the min. requiments for doom 3 on a mac? I hope i can run it well..if not, i'm stealing my brother's dual 2.5 G5 (if it ever ships)

 

[Frobozz]

I think ill be ready for doom 3, at least at minimum settings-
Dual 867 G4, 1 GB RAM
ATI 9700 (I actually found one with ADC on Ebay, i was so excited)

Unless its more CPU Bound that I would like...

I'm worried the dual 1GHz G4 is going to be the minium CPU specs. The scary thing is that a couple games already have dual 1GHz specs as the _minimum_. Ahhhh! That's what I have. Now I need to upgrade... and I don't think $650 to squeeze an extra 33% CPU performance will be worth the money. (dual 1.33 upgrade).

What I'd like to do is hold out until the dual 2.5's are available as refurbs, or until the dual core 3GHz Macs are available next feb/mar.

 

[Frobozz]

anyone know the min. requiments for doom 3 on a mac? I hope i can run it well..if not, i'm stealing my brother's dual 2.5 G5 (if it ever ships)

If the PB in your sig is what you'd like to run it on... no. It probably won't play it. You might be able to load it and run it in 640 x 480, but I wouldn't call that "playing" it.

I was looking through specs of some recent games. The following have a 1GHz processor listed as the minimum. Not sure how duals equate, but here they are:

• Republic
• James Bond 007: NightFire
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

... so it looks like the days of the 1GHz chip are coming to an end. :-( I seriously doubt Doom3 will have any less specs. The GPU should scale down nicely to a GF4mx, though not look as good. The CPU on the PC Side is a 1.5GHz or equivalent chip.... this might be the first Mac game to require a 1.25 or greater G4/G5.

 

[Frobozz]

More than hates, he is completly AGAINST it. He feels that openGL is much more robust and compatible than DX, which is half right. DX has surpassed openGL for gaming purposes for speed, features, and ease of use. Of course even Carmack can't escape the ease of using the other DirectX technologies like DirectInput and DirectSound.

OpenGL 2.0 was recently finalized, which incorporates a lot of extensions to the 1.x API, and includes a lot of enhancements:

http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2004/august/opengl.html

 

[Mord]

UT2k4 and Doom 3 are completly different animals engine wise (and I wouldn't call 40fps playable for a fast paced game like UT, that framerate would get you destroyed online). Your post said you were pulling down 20 fps at 1600x1200 on a Geforce 2mx on a P3 800 with 128 megs of ram. This is nonsense. Your frame buffer would be completly taxed before you even saw your first polygon. Not to mention that 128 is not even close to enough ram for Windows let alone Windows with the game running too. That is what I was responding to. I'm sure Doom 3 will run on your PB. Much in the same way that UT2K4 runs on my PB 12"; poorly. I'm not trying to start a flame or anything, but be realistic; ID software is THE company responsible for pushing PC speeds. I hardly think that a G4 is the target machine for actual playability.

getting destroyed at 40fps thats utter crap i play halo on my dual 450MHz cube with a radeon 7500 at 20-30fps and i certainly dont get destroyed i generally come out top. you cant tell the difference above 30fps

 

[slughead]

too bad about 2% of the people here have systems that can run that game....

Especially with Apple's stupid choice in video cards for their ieMacs.

Good luck running d3 on that 5200 imac users! But don't worry, I'm sure the iMac G5 will have something better... oh wait.

 

[Jordan Merle]

great

great

 

[dviant]

The CPU on the PC Side is a 1.5GHz or equivalent chip.... this might be the first Mac game to require a 1.25 or greater G4/G5.

Yes and considering that framerates (maybe I'm picky) are still lacking on my PC's AMD 2ghz (xp2400+) with a GF FX5600 Ultra card, I'm guessing that a 1.25 G4 (regardless of vid card) is not going to be very good at all. Min requirements these days seem like bare minimums... not playable minimums.

 

[jhu]

Yes and considering that framerates (maybe I'm picky) are still lacking on my PC's AMD 2ghz (xp2400+) with a GF FX5600 Ultra card, I'm guessing that a 1.25 G4 (regardless of vid card) is not going to be very good at all. Min requirements these days seem like bare minimums... not playable minimums.

many review sites claim that 640x480 is quite playable and actually still visually impressive. perhaps your standards are too high? the minimum cpu requirement is 1.5ghz pentium 4. this should be about equivalent to a 1 ghz ppc7400.

 

[puckhead193]

all i hope is that my powerbook can run it well!

 

[JohnnyCash]

From Macgamer:
Apparently there is no current time for the release of a port. The game runs, but there is a lot of optimization, and currently they feel the Mac platform can not yet offer the same experience as the PC. Activision will not publish the Mac version of Doom 3. There is no publisher set currently.

I got a feeling its going to be a very long wait...what gets me is that couple of years ago John Carmack got up at a Mac Expo and showed Doom3 to the world for the first time. It certainly looked as if it was being developed on a Mac...that was the impression anyway....this sucks.

 

[jhu]

From Macgamer:
Apparently there is no current time for the release of a port. The game runs, but there is a lot of optimization, and currently they feel the Mac platform can not yet offer the same experience as the PC. Activision will not publish the Mac version of Doom 3. There is no publisher set currently.

I got a feeling its going to be a very long wait...what gets me is that couple of years ago John Carmack got up at a Mac Expo and showed Doom3 to the world for the first time. It certainly looked as if it was being developed on a Mac...that was the impression anyway....this sucks.

perhaps they'll make a mac download available on their site.

 

[neoelectronaut]

Remember when Unreal (original, not the Tournament) came out?

WOW.. that game wasn't playable at max settings until the Voodoo 5 grfx card came along for in the G3 B&W.... a couple of years later.

And I wish I could find a copy of the Mac version just to see how much it would scream on my eMac's dinky Radeon 7500.

 

[MacsRgr8]

And I wish I could find a copy of the Mac version just to see how much it would scream on my eMac's dinky Radeon 7500.

I have tried the game on an eMac 700 Mhz (512 MB RAM) with a GeForce 2 MX.
Damn, couldn't say the game was screaming at all! Around 30 fps (lowest < 24 fps) at max settings, 32 bits, 1024 x 768 (the intro fly by).
A 500 MHz G4 with Radeon 8500 DID make it scream, though! > 50 fps at same settings.
Seems like the GeForce 2 MX doesn't perform well in Rage 3D rendering....

I bet your eMac with Radeon 7500 will make it fly!
You must be able to get hold of a copy somewhere?

 

[neoelectronaut]

Unreal Tournament runs rather so-so on my Mac, actually.

But I attribute that to the horrible OS X update that was, well, never really finished. It's still in beta.

 

[isgoed]

Speculation on performance of doom3 on Macs

I have a PC that is in specs similar to powerbooks/imacs. I bought doom3 a week ago and at first it ran poorly. I then went to do some tweaking and here are the results of the timedemo demo1 benchmark I ran. The first score is of the first run and the 2nd score of the 2nd run. These differ because doom3 caches openGL states. Between each scores. I only note the changes I made to the system/setup.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
PC: AMD athlon 1200mhz, geforce 4200ti 128mb, 256mb SDRAM133, AGP4X, Windows2000Pro, desktop 640x480x32bit, no tray icons, no background
Drivers: nVidia 42.80, DirectX 9.0b
Doom3: low quality, 640x480x32bit, no shadows, 22kHz sounds, preload images, maxImage 256, noCompressedTextures, lodBias 0.7

344.6s = 6.2FPS ][ 177.3s = 12.1FPS

Quite poor performance: barely playable
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
nVidia 61.77

151.8s = 14.3FPS ][ 80.8s = 26.6FPS

Great performance gain. The new drivers doubled the performance!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
512mb DDR266

93.3s = 23FPS ][ 77s = 27.9FPS

The better ram shows two effects. The previous 256mb ram was below minimum spec (384mb), while with 512mb we are above it. It clearly shows that in the first run, caching OpenGL-states goes much faster when you have 512mb available. FPS where up to 23FPS from 14.3FPS. In the second run you can see the advantage of DDR266 over SDRAM133. In the second run the states are already cached so the only advantage comes from the speed of the RAM. This is a benefit of a slight 1.3FPS.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Doom3: 800x600x32bit, reset all settings to medium quality (shadows on, no high quality effects)

111.4s = 19.3FPS ][ 98.8s = 21.7FPS

I consider this the best trade-off between quality and playability
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
AA4x

184.2s = 11.7FPS ][ -

No, this is too heavy
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

CONCLUSION:

How doom3 will run on Macs primarily depends on how well the videocard drivers are. Since the quality of the drivers on the Mac have always lagged behind PC-drivers this may be a realy important issue. Second thing is that the speed of the memory on G4 machines is not that good, but as long as you have plenty of ram (which most macs have) this is not a real big issue. Keep in mind that the geforce 4200ti is faster than a Radeon 9200 or a geforce FX5200, so iMac and eMac users might have to run in 640x480mode. Powerbook Users (Radeon 9600m & Radeon 9700m) can probably turn high quality effects on (DirectX9/PixelShaders) and run in (1024x768). A problem is however that a lot of macs have 64mb videocards, which means that they are forced to run in low quality mode (resolution can remain at 1024x768 though). This is especially true, because G4-systems have a slow bus speed (133mhz/166mhz) and only have an AGP4X interface so you can't pump large quantities of texture data over the system bus.

 

[alastairh]

Unreal Tournament runs rather so-so on my Mac, actually.

But I attribute that to the horrible OS X update that was, well, never really finished. It's still in beta.

Actually it's probably down to the fact that the Unreal series of games was designed to use DirectX, and not OpenGL. It was only when the Linux port was done that OpenGL support was added, and because the engine is geared-up for Direct3D, OpenGL was always less well supported.