SubPar Performance from Mobility 9700!!

[Nermal]

A friend of a friend of a friend of a previous friend of mine told me this game is downloadable at www.suprnova.org using bit torrent, this along with a few other games. They apparently sprout up sporadically, so check once in a while.

It'd make more sense to go to a Mac-specific BitTorrent site, rather than a Windows-centric one. But we're not supposed to talk about that sort of thing, so I'll say no more.

 

[Maxx Power]

What is your exact defintion of sound acceleration? Most of these cards I mentioned are designed for both platforms and include the same hardware capabilities as similar cards that you may have used with Windows. In fact, in some ways they may exceed them. Yes, the sound is routed a bit differently than under Windows and you are stuck with stereo unless you use some kind of additional sound processing hardware such as those I mentioned. Using Core Audio and by changing output devices it is possible to produce superior sound on a Mac. There are many different ways this could be accomplished, actually. Just ask professional musicians who use Macs. Whether or not a game supports this under Mac versions is a matter to take up with the game developers. Some do, while others have problems with such setups. I don't know which category U2k4 falls in as I haven't tried it with this particular game.

You obviously didn't read what CoreAudio does that makes it supposedly better than windows alternatives. CoreAudio has one potential advantage, which is storing samples as 32bit floating point formats. This is needed, since all calculations and mixing and normalizing, and all subsequent operations are done by the CPU using software, a 32bit sample reserve a lot of accuracy when you manipulate your fourier transforms and reverse transforms. CoreAudio lacks the ability to communicate directly to any DSP, which is designed to do the above list of things in real time or faster than real time in hardware, THAT is hardware accelerated audio. Just think about hardware graphics, your computational horsepower comes from the GPU not the CPU, which frees up the CPU to do more general tasks such as AI. Typical products that support both windows and mac os may include a DSP in the mac version, but unless they include application specific drivers such as CakeWalk Sonar or in this case, UT2004, you won't benefit from using that hardware DSP. This is one of the many reasons why the OS9 and prior audio mode is being phased out, developers had to develop a driver for every software the client wanted to have hardware acceleration in, and this was a big hassle. With OS X, OpenAL (which is used in ut, ut2004, halo, and in the future, most games for mac), is still not hardware accelerated, although since now the audio subsystem is changed in the OS X, it may be a lot easier for Mac to push for a unified standard with hardware acceleration with OpenAL for an API. Only big problem with that is that only two major consumer manufacturors today support the Mac graphics, how many do you think will jump on the Sound card for mac market, which is a lot less lucrative.

 

[Mac_Max]

And HOW i ask, are you going to be able to take advantage of this so called HARDWARE sound card ? Does Unreal 2004 uses a sound API that supports hardware acceleration ? NO. Does mac have a API that uses hardware sound acceleration ? NO. NO hardware sound solution exists for the MAC because of the fact there is no standardized API that supports hardware sound for the MAC.

The G5 has a hardware accelerated surround sound IC. UT2K4 will take advantage of it. What are your settings & what are your expectations of the game? Try running it at 800x600. I run most of my games at that resolution & I have no problem what so ever even on antiquated hardware like mine (Overclocked 867MHz G3, Radeon 9100 card in a PCI slot). You can't notice a difference between two frame rates higher than 60-80FPS anyway. If you can then I'd also like to see you walk on water .

 

[Maxx Power]

The G5 has a hardware accelerated surround sound IC. UT2K4 will take advantage of it. What are your settings & what are your expectations of the game? Try running it at 800x600. I run most of my games at that resolution & I have no problem what so ever even on antiquated hardware like mine (Overclocked 867MHz G3, Radeon 9100 card in a PCI slot). You can't notice a difference between two frame rates higher than 60-80FPS anyway. If you can then I'd also like to see you walk on water .

My expectations of the game is high considering this computer costed me 3000 bucks. And regarding to the IC, UT2K4 will not take advantage of it. Refer to an article at barefeats for their tests on dual vs. single and sound on vs. sound off, you'll see that the dual gets the same frame rate as the single with the sound off. This means the processing is done entirely in software. If you go to your OpenAL audio section of the preferences in ut2004.ini (or .int, forgot which one), it clearly has audio channels and other capabilities set to a minimum compared to a hardware audio equipped PC. And at any rate, just to show you what i mean, the GPU isn't holding the system back, when i ran the game at 1280 by 1024, i see minimal performance drop with everything turned to the max, same occurs at 1024 x 768, all the way down to 640 by 480, with a abyssmal frame rate of around 20 on a medium map, there is NO way for this G5 1.6 to get frame rate higher than that unless you turn off the sound, where the frame rate suddenly shoots into the high 50's and occasionally the 70's. The so-called hardware IC is not a DSP, and doesn't support game audio, maybe it supports dolby digital out via the optical, but in UT2004, with the latest patch, there is no surround options avaliable other than just the stereo, on my PC however, I have two different surround modes, but I like stereo anyway.

 

[alxths]

Don't condone warez, retard.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

The sound issue is well-known with the UT engine. I read they were working on some fixes, but I'm not sure if they were released in the latest update or not. Dual processor Macs don't see the hit because the inefficient sound code is handled by the second processor.

That sound issue's been fixed in the latest update. I don't know about the demo, and a Google search turned up nothing Mac-specific.

 

[jeffbax]

Its not the video card, the Mobility 9700 is the best mobile card you can get PC or Mac, its just a fact that the Mac Port isn't as efficient as the PC version and its CPU limited.

I have just about given up in my hopes to get a Mac laptop that can game UT2004 or World of Warcraft. Its simply not there yet, maybe in a newer PB with a better CPU than the G4, I'm not sure.

The fact that Mac is sound handicapped doesn't help either.

As for nVidia being > ATi, that thing in the beginning of UT is nothing but $$$ spent by nVidia. ATi plays just as well, often better than nVidia. Its the Mac platform that is the root of the problems, unfortunately.

I wish apple would get it together and start courting game companies and gamers more, because that is really the only thing Windows has going for it.... but its not a good sign when the game that Steve Jobs shows off at the dev conference is freaking Myst 4. Myst 4, give me a break, nobody wants to see that game! Oh, its so breath-taking... yeah.. because there is nothing going on at all that requires any power.

Sorry, I'm just frustrated that I can't get a PB because of gaming

Turning off sound, is just rediculous, as is saying to get a game console.

And you can tell 60 and 80 FPS apart. That "The eye can only see..." is a bunch of bollocks. It is easy to see framerate differences until you hit about 120.

 

[yamabushi]

I really wish they would release an updated demo that fixed the performance bug. The retail version is much faster since it includes the patch but most people don't realize this. That means most PC to Mac comparisons are really unfair since they usually only compare the demo. It also hurts sales of the Mac version of the game since many people try out the demo first to see if it is really playable on their hardware.