Good evening, everyone. I have a short story to tell, for those who are interested.
I just recently visited a compusa near me, mostly in the interest of seeing what's new, interesting and wonderful (wasteful, overcomplicated, nonsensical, dumb, ergonomic, retarded, f***ed up and lame) in a few of our modern technology sectors, particularly digital cameras and mac products.
I only briefly examined the digicams. Smaller, Cuter, and defective by design. That is, in a few especially overt instances like the Canon Digital Rebel, they are purposefully limited in performance, not by the capacity of the design itself, but by the company's (and most other companies in the world) unflagging desire to give less than one's money's worth.
Anyway. This is really about the mac. The power mac g5, dual 2ghz system, currently the mid-level with 512mb of ram and the GEforceFX5200 64mb graphics card, on a new metallic apple monitor.
After looking casually around most of the apple area, I finally stopped and checked this comp out. The first thing I noticed was...why did the mouse cursor seem to move with such rough motion? It was as if it was only capable of refreshing about 10 or 20 times per second. I was noticing huge skips, and the overall feeling was, to me, quite slow. Was this the monitor, the resolution (it was on the highest available, somewhere around 1600pixels on the wide) or some other aspect of the graphics card?
I discovered a Homeworld 2 app in the Dock. I'd never seen it before, and I was curious what it was like, and especially, how it performed on the second best mac available. So I opened it, and immediately I checked the options for the video. Every single setting was off or low, except for one, the bottom right selector in the video options menu, was on. The first thing this made me wonder was, why would it be like that? Did someone do this purposefully to make the computer seem to perform better? Is it possible this (supposedly) extremely fast system would have a hard time with extra features? Or maybe it was just the default setting. I wanted to believe the latter.
Just for curiosity's sake, I turn on and max all of the features except the check-box in the top middle of the video menu. I click apply, and I start a single player game. I've never played this game before, so I have no idea how to control anything, of course. However, I noticed something before I got to that point: The cursor was moving like the wc3 cursor in the menu section when running on my Yosemite g3 400mhz! That's somewhere between 4 and 8 frames per second. I looked, but I was in doubt. Any other programs running? I checked. No! Nothing else running. Odd.
I didn't know how to go back to the options menu without quitting the application, so I did that. Esc is handy. At that point, I wonder if the game would perform better at a lower screen resolution, so i decide to check out the other options for that in monitors. I go to the 800xsomeodd resolution for widescreen displays, and when the screen shows up again, all the text and many other objects seem..almost as if they've been painted in watercolor. There's something called Eagle-SAI mode in a few things like old game emulators; it closely resembles that effect. But this is by no means high quality.
So I switch to the next resolution up. Same thing. I continue all the way back up to the original, highest resolution available. Well, everything looks nice and sharp and clear again, but still that mouse is slow. Anyway, might as well just leave it this way and check Homeworld 2 with all those settings off instead.
So I go change the settings back to minimums again, and when I play Single Player Game, the cursor movement and camera scroll is much more smooth. But this still disturbs me. Why should I have to have minimum settings on such a fast computer?
I have read in some places like XLR8yourmac, that many mac games are CPU-Bound. Is this possible in the case of a dual 2ghz g5? If so, that would truly be sad. A modern, near top-of-the-line system still has to have bare minimum settings on a modern game in order to run it very well. But they still cost $2,499, with no monitor.
Is mac not supposed to be capable of handling games? If they aren't, then why are games being released for mac at all? This entire experience was disturbing, and disillusioning. Any consideration I had of buying a new g5 went straight out the window by this poor performance. The graphics card may have been unable to handle the high resolutions, but the apple flat panel was unable to make the low resolutions tolerable. The happy medium turned out to be settling for low quality one way or another. That's not right for such a highly touted, high-price product.
But at least it was neat checking out those cute little digicams in person.
I just recently visited a compusa near me, mostly in the interest of seeing what's new, interesting and wonderful (wasteful, overcomplicated, nonsensical, dumb, ergonomic, retarded, f***ed up and lame) in a few of our modern technology sectors, particularly digital cameras and mac products.
I only briefly examined the digicams. Smaller, Cuter, and defective by design. That is, in a few especially overt instances like the Canon Digital Rebel, they are purposefully limited in performance, not by the capacity of the design itself, but by the company's (and most other companies in the world) unflagging desire to give less than one's money's worth.
Anyway. This is really about the mac. The power mac g5, dual 2ghz system, currently the mid-level with 512mb of ram and the GEforceFX5200 64mb graphics card, on a new metallic apple monitor.
After looking casually around most of the apple area, I finally stopped and checked this comp out. The first thing I noticed was...why did the mouse cursor seem to move with such rough motion? It was as if it was only capable of refreshing about 10 or 20 times per second. I was noticing huge skips, and the overall feeling was, to me, quite slow. Was this the monitor, the resolution (it was on the highest available, somewhere around 1600pixels on the wide) or some other aspect of the graphics card?
I discovered a Homeworld 2 app in the Dock. I'd never seen it before, and I was curious what it was like, and especially, how it performed on the second best mac available. So I opened it, and immediately I checked the options for the video. Every single setting was off or low, except for one, the bottom right selector in the video options menu, was on. The first thing this made me wonder was, why would it be like that? Did someone do this purposefully to make the computer seem to perform better? Is it possible this (supposedly) extremely fast system would have a hard time with extra features? Or maybe it was just the default setting. I wanted to believe the latter.
Just for curiosity's sake, I turn on and max all of the features except the check-box in the top middle of the video menu. I click apply, and I start a single player game. I've never played this game before, so I have no idea how to control anything, of course. However, I noticed something before I got to that point: The cursor was moving like the wc3 cursor in the menu section when running on my Yosemite g3 400mhz! That's somewhere between 4 and 8 frames per second. I looked, but I was in doubt. Any other programs running? I checked. No! Nothing else running. Odd.
I didn't know how to go back to the options menu without quitting the application, so I did that. Esc is handy. At that point, I wonder if the game would perform better at a lower screen resolution, so i decide to check out the other options for that in monitors. I go to the 800xsomeodd resolution for widescreen displays, and when the screen shows up again, all the text and many other objects seem..almost as if they've been painted in watercolor. There's something called Eagle-SAI mode in a few things like old game emulators; it closely resembles that effect. But this is by no means high quality.
So I switch to the next resolution up. Same thing. I continue all the way back up to the original, highest resolution available. Well, everything looks nice and sharp and clear again, but still that mouse is slow. Anyway, might as well just leave it this way and check Homeworld 2 with all those settings off instead.
So I go change the settings back to minimums again, and when I play Single Player Game, the cursor movement and camera scroll is much more smooth. But this still disturbs me. Why should I have to have minimum settings on such a fast computer?
I have read in some places like XLR8yourmac, that many mac games are CPU-Bound. Is this possible in the case of a dual 2ghz g5? If so, that would truly be sad. A modern, near top-of-the-line system still has to have bare minimum settings on a modern game in order to run it very well. But they still cost $2,499, with no monitor.
Is mac not supposed to be capable of handling games? If they aren't, then why are games being released for mac at all? This entire experience was disturbing, and disillusioning. Any consideration I had of buying a new g5 went straight out the window by this poor performance. The graphics card may have been unable to handle the high resolutions, but the apple flat panel was unable to make the low resolutions tolerable. The happy medium turned out to be settling for low quality one way or another. That's not right for such a highly touted, high-price product.
But at least it was neat checking out those cute little digicams in person.
