Trying to understand if my iBook give all the juice it have

[vorob]

Guys, I'm currently trying different games on my iBook G4 (1.33, ATI 9550, OSX Tiger), wanna check its capabilities. So far I was running ancient stuff like Alice, Unreal, Diablo II and they played well, but recently I’ve tried few games which performance unpleasantly surprised me. For example Neverwinter Nights, a game from 2002, gave me stable 6 fps on city streets 🙂 I’ve tried super low settings and it only gave me 20 fps. It's expected on such hardware?

The other game is Deus Ex. I’m running in via Classic environment. First location - 12 fps.

Is there a general way to test my equipment if it’s running correctly? On windows it would be smth like 3dmark to just run well-known benchmark and compare my numbers with other results, but here i’ve got no idea what to try.

UPD

Tried this https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-ppc-openmark-benchmarks.1848060/ got the same result as author Radeon 9550 Mobility ----------2765 (1.42ghz 14" iBook)

 

[Amethyst1]

If you want to test and compare CPU and memory performance, there’s Geekbench.

The other game is Deus Ex. I’m running in via Classic environment. First location - 12 fps.

Tiger’s Classic is no good for games. If you want the best “retro gaming” experience, get a Mac with a powerful GPU that can run OS 9 natively.

 

[Project Alice]

Star Wars knights of the old republic would run decent on there, probably at low/mid settings and disabling grass.
The Jedi Knight series will run beautifully on it. UT 2004 should also run really good on it.

As Amythest1 said, Deus EX won’t run very well under OS X unfortunately. I ended up playing it on my 1GHz eMac under native OS 9 before it stopped booting.

 

[fra9000]

Neverwinter Nights performances seems weird to me. I am able to play it on my iMac G3 700 with the Ati Rage 128 16MB VRAM.

Just 2 questions:
- Are you running on an SSD drive or mechanical?
- When the frame rate drops are there many fire/smoke related effects visible on screen?

Regards
Francesco

 

[vorob]

Its mechanical. On this even on this video i can see that fps is not high. Can you do it with "trace fps" command in game console? It will show current fps. These start locations work okay on ibook, but the streets are just pain.

Smoke and fire drop fps if they are close to the screen, streets are laggy even without these effects.

 

[vorob]

Did some testing and looks like CPU is the bottleneck here. What a surprise. Both UT2004 and Quake 3 won't benefit from GPU overclock. Even if downclock it a bit i'm having the same FPS. I thought Power CPU is a beast, but looks like it's not 🙁

This is also proved by me previous observation where resolution change doesn't give me more fps.

I've checked and i'm sure i'm runnin it at full speed. Found some benchmark results from geekbench and i have the same score.

 

[vorob]

I don't understand and accept it. I've launched Quake 3, an ancient game compared to iBook G4, and if i play with lots of bots I'm getting horribly low fps. In a game from 1999 on a computer from 2005. Take a look:

It's not GPU since i've tried setting lowest possible graphics and still had low fps.

Maybe there is a way to see current CPU clock?

 

[vorob]

Moved from 1.32 to 1.36 and looks like it gave me some boost, but 1.36 is a fan made patch, not official.