PowerMac G5 performance, and games

Eh?

What does PCI-X have to do with gaming performance?

 

i agree pci-x will have no effect on gaming
since games are centered around the video card on AGP 8x and CPU and Ram.

it should do well

but PCI-X will be used in specialty cards in video editing/compression/cature and storage and other niche market cards that need the bandwidth

 

exaclty waiting for the same thing here !
Hoping someone will EVEr install a game on his G5

 

Re: Re: Eh?

My Aluminium behemoth is still nowhere to be seen arrrghh! Apple I'm ready now, you can bring it now, you did after all charge me almost 2 months ago..

 

I played WarCraft III on a dual 2.0 G5 with a 23" LCD back at WWDC, and it totally freaking ruled. Completely smooth scrolling even during huge battles. We also tried stunts like opening six different ~100 MB movie trailers, starting them all playing, and then dragging around a semi-transparent terminal window running "top -u". Not a stutter...

 

the answer to the original question is all g5's will be great gamers,but i would go for the 9800 in the machines. fx5200 isnt bad but hardcore gamers will want those extra frame rates & goodies. and if you cant afford it the 9600 for 50 more bucks is a step up from the fx5200.

 

Okay, let's make this clear: Almost no one has even gotten their G5 yet, much less have access or the privilege to install a game on it (the only ones who have gotten it are universities, so of course no games on those machines).



irmongoose

 

The G5's have been shipping slowly for a good few weeks now. Many have gone to regular consumers. Many University ones will have games installed on them too

 

Wait a minute, are we talking about now? As in 9/11/2003? Sorry, it's just that I was stuck at two years ago... oh, so very very tragic. Hmm...

Did I miss something?



irmongoose

 

Re: PowerMac G5 performance, and games

Dang1 How big is this thing? I'm at 150 MB now and it still doesn't know how far I have to go!

P-Worm

 

Re: Re: PowerMac G5 performance, and games

Around 600MBs

 

It's good to note that it has that much power, but in reality I can't see where a home user needs that much power. Don't get me wrong, I love all the power as much as the next guy, but I can't understand, why a person would spend $1200 more for a dual G5 when a dual G4 would suffice for CPU power and upgrade their video card.

And, most games will remain 32-bit, because 64-bit isn't at the desktop in enough quantities to justify that game developers start producing 64-bit games. Even still, the OS isn't fully 64-bit and until that happens, there definitely won't be any 64-bit software for it.

 

...as well as the fact that 64-bit games would be no faster, and probably slower.

...oh, so no-one made PPC native Apps before the OS was? As I recall, it took a long time before even the majority of the system was PPC code, and I think some of OS 9 is still in 680x0 code.

OS 10.2.7 has the enhancements required to address more than 4GB RAM, and that is the only major thing that 64-bits do for us at the moment, until there is a requirement for 64-bit integer calculations in desktop apps.

Optimising for other achetectural changes (e.g. altivec) will give big boosts, though this has nothing to do with the G5 being 64-bit.

 

Unreal Tounament 2004 is a 64Bit game, though Im not exactly sure when the mac release will be.
---------------------------
Well, actually, the G5 has, I believe, a 42bit memory address, so it is not true that the G5, being 64 bit, can theoretically address the huge amount (up into the exabyte amounts) of RAM( though 42 bit goes up way into the terabytes, so I dont think it is a problem right now)

 

42-bit??

42?

Steve's trying to tell us something!

The answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything..." is, of course, 42...

 

It's all about the bus speed.

An 800Mhz bus will be far more beneficial than the anemic 167Mhz bus found on all current G4s. Games will finally be able to utilize the maximum bandwidth of the DDR SDRAM. Sure, the CPU and GPU of a G4 tower may be fine, but it doesn't matter as long as it is constrained by a slow bus.

 

I will post FPS for games such as X-Plane, Elite Force, Elite Force 2, Medal of Honor, Medal of Honor: Spearhead, Unreal Tournament 2003, Sim City 4, F/A-18 Hornet: Opertion Iraqi Freedom, Master of Orion 3, WarBirds, Wolfenstein, Ghost Recon, and Max Payne.

THAT IS, when I get my 1.8 GHz G5 with a Radeon 9800 Pro.

WHICH I ORDERED IN EARLY JULY THROUGH THE EDUCATION STORE.

My ORIGINAL ship date was 09/02/03

BUT, for no apparent reason, they DELAYED it a whole month to 09/29/03.

 

My brother just got his G5 earlier today. It's a 1.8 GHz model with 512 MB RAM.

I forgot to check which video card it has, but I'll check it tomorrow when I go to set up his net connection. I'm assuming it's the fx5200 though.

If you want though, give me a list of things to do, and I'll test em out.

Games are pretty much a no go though, unless I download America's Army. The only games I own are the original Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament.

But any other apps or actions you want me to test, just let me know, and I'll do my best to test it all.

enoch

 

This website has info on different Macs that people have done gaming benchmarks on. http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/fpsdb/fpsdb.lasso