Unreal Tournament 2003 Mac OS X

[Sedulous]

Meaning, we'll receive very little speed boost from IBM's new chip, over the current crop of G4's.

Clearly this guy doesn't understand what importantance BUS speed has (among a dozen other benefits the 970 has)!

Unreal Tournament is not dual processor aware

Um, doesn't matter. If you are running it on OS X (is UNIX based) the programs draw on whatever processors are available.

 

[ExoticFish]

confusion

that is something i don't understand. i know OS X is dual processor aware but then i hear about how program (photoshop) and games (quake 3) are also. where do the two come into play? if the operating system is using two cpu's then why would the program running on to of the operating system need to be able to use two cpu's?

 

[trose]

Sedoulous,I may not be a complete CPU genius,but I know for a fact that not every program that runs natively in X is dual proc aware,infact,most arent. You probably will get some speed boost playing a game that is singe proc only under X,because since the OS itself is dual processor aware calls to system recources or OpenGL might be faster. Although I doubt it makes much of a difference. Here is an example...

If I play WWIIOL(Does not recognize multi-processor) on my Dual G4 867 and get 25fps with nothing running in the backround,then launch Teamspeak under VirtualPC,I see NO drop in FPS. Why? Because the 2nd CPU was idle while WWIIOL ran,and instead of hogging the active CPU,VPC runs on the 2nd G4.

If I run Quake 3 (Recognizes multi-processor) and get 25fps with nothing running in the backround,then launch VirtualPC and Teamspeak I see a signifigant drop in framerate. Why? Because BOTH CPU's were running to give me 25fps in Quake 3,and when I opened VPC,it had to get its CPU power from somewhere, and since both CPU's were already in use,some power had to be taken from Quake 3.

I dont understand why any company who is seriously into Mac gaming doesnt write their programs both Alti-vec and MP aware. It might take a bit of extra coding,but the performance gain is extreme. Right now basicaly every game is running without taking advantage of any of the G4's abilities,effectively giving it about the same amount of power as a single proc P3 of the same clockspeed,which would be considered quite outdated.

Apple's claim that the G4 is atleast twice as fast as Pentium at the same clockspeed isnt that far off,its just that its not being utilized enough.

 

[Sedulous]

Well, CPU genious or not, you've managed to confuse the issue. I really don't know how VirtualPC would behave in regards to emulated OS and programs run in an emulated environment. Seems to me, a program in an emulated environment doesn't know it is in this environment and thus might not take advantage of the multi-threaded nature of UNIX.

In any case (and back to the topic), unless you plan on running UT2K3 in an emulator, it will probably run more smoothly on a dual processor system. This is true of any other program run in UNIX/OS X.

 

[bousozoku]

Applications which take advantage of multiple (dual) processors have to be written in a certain way.

You must break down certain pieces of it into separate threads for the operating system to assign those pieces to different processors. For example, you could create one thread for each bot because it works fairly independently. It still needs to communicate and coordinate with the main programme. If you take a game such as UT which wasn't written for threads of any kind, it's difficult to re-design the thing after it's all done. Mac OS 9.x didn't support threads well but you could write applications that way. Even Java applications can take advantage of multiple processors on Mac OS X because Java threads are Mach threads. The only other operating system I know where the Java Virtual Machine does this is on IBM's OS/400 midrange machine, iSeries.

The Quake III engine used by id software is written in such a way that it takes advantage of multiple threads, and therefore, multiple processors. There's nothing to say that, if Apple introduced 4 (or even 32) processor machines, that Quake III wouldn't take advantage of all of them.

I'm certain that newer games will be written to take advantage of the multithreading capabilities before they use AltiVec simply because the design will be easier to port from Windows.

 

[trose]

Sed,VirtualPC was just an example,because it is a very demanding program yet It didnt cause a performance hit while playing a non-MP game because there was an idle processor just sitting there. I could have just as easily said I was running any other program in the backround.

Anyway,bousozoku explained it exaclty like it is.

 

[Dunepilot]

With all of this talk about UT vs Q3 and the standard of coding in UT, I feel the need to chime in with another angle. At the time of release, you had to have a reasonable G3 to get anything like a good game out of Quake 3, and ideally you'd have a good graphics card as well. With UT, it would run not only on a pre-G3 PowerPC, but would also do so WITHOUT the need for GRAPHICS ACCELERATION!

That meant that Westlake gave themselves a potentially massive audience for the UT game at the time of release, far greater than Quake 3 had then.

Even if there were some flaws in the coding (I haven't tried UT on my new G4 yet), it was a far more playable game on the hardware of the day, and for my money, i still find it to be subjectively a much more enjoyable game. Quite what they did to the game to make it drag when the engine was used to power Deus Ex is beyond me.

I'd like to raise a toast to all programmers who bear in mind users of older machines

 

[trose]

UT Never ran better on my iMacDV and only slightly better than Q3 on my Beige 266 because it had a Voodoo3 and UT used über Glide. Damn I miss 3dfx Atleast ATI are getting better lately.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by Dunepilot
With all of this talk about UT vs Q3 and the standard of coding in UT, I feel the need to chime in with another angle. At the time of release, you had to have a reasonable G3 to get anything like a good game out of Quake 3, and ideally you'd have a good graphics card as well. With UT, it would run not only on a pre-G3 PowerPC, but would also do so WITHOUT the need for GRAPHICS ACCELERATION!

That meant that Westlake gave themselves a potentially massive audience for the UT game at the time of release, far greater than Quake 3 had then.

Even if there were some flaws in the coding (I haven't tried UT on my new G4 yet), it was a far more playable game on the hardware of the day, and for my money, i still find it to be subjectively a much more enjoyable game. Quite what they did to the game to make it drag when the engine was used to power Deus Ex is beyond me.

I'd like to raise a toast to all programmers who bear in mind users of older machines

I don't know where your coming from but UT has never ran as well on old hardware as Quake III in my oppinion.

UT on my B/WG3 400 with an ATI Radeon card would eek out 36FPS average at any screen resolution or setting. I always thoughtthe limiting was the processor. On the other hand with Quake III I could get nearly 50FPS with the right settings.

Now on my Dual/GHz/DDR Powermac I see 112FPS with a G4MX card in Quake III and in UT 36FPS. Doesn't really look like like the G3 was processor limited. It's the poor coding of the game that limited it's playability. The 36FPS average really left you vulnerable in an outside tournament against multiple players. In this situation the only G3 would drop into the teens making it nearly unplayable.

 

[trose]

Glide

UT Didnt even have OpenGL support when it first was released did it? Was just Glide and RAVE. Im betting thats why ATI-Nvidia cards have always run the game so poor. They seem to have optimized the game for Glide.