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Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Released
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whooleytoo
macrumors 604
That's funny, I'm convinced it's due to current Macs having pitiful memory throughput, meaning neither CPUs or graphics card can be fully taxed. Plus, bear in mind, in OSX a game can't grab all the CPU cycles, like it could on OS9 - though a similar feature to this was requested recently by Glenda Adams. Bring on the 970!
This game is far more complex than previous gen games like UT or QuakeIII, the polygon complexity has risen, the lighting effects, transparencies.. foliage in the outdoor levels. I don't know how people can expect all this extra candy without an FPS hit.
Plus, I think people are being a little hard on the original UT as well, it was written very much with Glide in mind, and on my G3/350 with a Voodoo3 card it ran beautifully, without any of the artifacts I'm still seeing on newer h/w like my current GF4MX. Having to port to RAVE/OpenGL wouldn't have helped much.
"IMO"
Mike.
ExoticFish
macrumors 6502a
I love the original as well. My friends and I still play it to this day and just although we'll play a few rounds of UT2K3, we always go back to UT.
MacBandit
macrumors 604
Yes, it does have way more eye candy but you can turn it all off and when you do the graphics are pitiful worse then most games 10 years ago. Shock of all horrors when you turn it all off it still runs like a dog why?
Well on a Mac if the game or program is written correctly the video card very rarely has to gather any data from the cpu except for coordinates and vector calculations. So that effectively illiminates the bottleneck which is the FSB since the system bus can pump all that dat you want throug from the hard drive to the ram to the video card as fast as the DDR ram can move it.
I played it at CompUSA on a gf4 mx... runs good on the system, especially with that retarted vid card.
whooleytoo
macrumors 604
But in a previous post, you asked why the CPUs aren't being saturated, whereas now you seem to be suggesting the CPUs wouldn't be used much at all. I'm not sure I follow you.
I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, but where do you think the inefficiency lies? The data is being thrown from the RAM to the GPU, and misses?? 🙂
Mike.
MacBandit
macrumors 604
I think that the data due to bastard coding is poorly optimized for cpu and for video card. Yes I think a lot of it is making it to the video card the way it should but it then proceeds to bog down any video card given it no matter how small the textures are made through the video preferences. I don't know exactly what is happening on the CPU side and am quite suprised as many other are that it is in no way utilizing the system cpus anywhere near there fullest capacity. So to sum it up it is not MHz or CPU power slowing the whole process down but is like I said all along due to very poor coding. I am in no way saying I can do it better but more intelligent people then I believe the same thing for PCs and Macs. Also all you have to do to prove it to yourself is the start up 'stat fps' and then turn off all the graphics options and reduce the screen resolution to the minimum and then go play and see how much faster it performs. I can tell you right now it doesn't perform all that much better especially considering the quality of graphics that are being presented. With the type of graphics you are getting with all the options off you should be getting 300FPS plus with nearly any system built in the last year.