Originally posted by bikertwin
>> put a 599$ pc next to hi-end eMac/iMac and watch how PC is 2.5+ times faster
Well that 599 PC is $1000 when you add a quality 19" CRT or 15" LCD. So that's a fairer comparison, no?
Yes, the PC is much faster but other than games what do you need the speed for? Why not buy an iMac and an XBox? 
My WinXP machine does the blue screen of death when I do something simple like try to log out so someone else can log in. Probably a bad hardware driver somewhere. Much less frequent problem with Macs.
LOL!
Nice to know that your computer is "trustworty" enough to BSOD you regularly. So dependable...
And excuse my total ignorance here (I'll admit it--I'm no gamer) but what's the point of 50fps gaming, and at what fps does it not matter anymore? I mean, US TV is at 29.97 fps and movies/film are 24 fps. I can see that a game at 5fps would be stupid, but what does 50fps buy you over, say, 30fps? Other than maybe epileptic seizures?
I'm going to chime in and agree that 50FPS looks better. While it *is* true that US television is at 30 fps, it's actually 60
fields per second. it makes a huge difference. And while it *is* true that film is 24 fps, each of those 24 frames is flashed 3 times, so it's actually 72
framelets(yes I made that word up for lack of a better one) per second. I used to work projection at a movie theatre....
My experience with gaming framerates is this... over 40 or 50 fps or so... it all looks the same. so what *I* do is set all the fanciness as high as the game will go and still run at 40-50 fps. These days, my PC with a GeForce4Ti4400 gives me 45fps in Return To Castle Wolfenstein at 1280x1024x32bit with 4x FSAA and 4x aniostropic filtering. Looks *very* nice.
Now... what most people don't think about, though, is that if you're getting framerates in your games *over* the refresh rate of the screen (75hz-85hz typically) you really are just throwing those frames away since the monitor can't get them out of the buffer before it's cleared again.
Besides, I think Apple is going in the right direction with gaming... as more and more work of the game is off-loaded to the graphics card (and more and more work *will* be as hardware becomes better), the speed of the CPU matters less. For example... What's the single most expensive component of a modern computer?
Well... a few years ago, it was the CPU. Buy the fastest and the best and you'd have to put out a few hundred dollars for the single item. These days, if you're building a game rig, your money is much better off spent on a fancy GPU. If you built an AMD box to play games, you'd spend *way* less on the CPU and the motherboard than on the Radeon 9700 PRO you put in there to whoop up some RTCW!
I think that a lot of this faw-faw mines faster crap about CPU speeds is going to become pointless in the next few years. How much faster than "instantaneous" does something have to be?
No, I think the next items that "drive" pc competitive sales will be other features like connectivity, bandwidth, video, storage, etc... And I think Apple sees that, since they're choosing to concentrate on smooth integration of those features into OS X. Windows is much more of a "strap-on" kind of mentality. You can get Windows XP, but you have to get the USB2.0 driver pack to extend it. You can get Winxp, but you have to get the blueTooth pack to get it to work in a separate app. really un-elegant.
Just my gazillion cents worth?
Binky
