[RooneyX]

I was just going through some benchmarks on barefeats.com when I came across some Unreal 2003 benchmarks in which an Athlon 3400+ (running at 2.2Ghz) scored 137FPS versus the Dual G5 2Ghz's 67FPS.

Now that's a HUGE difference. Barefeats mentioned that the sound processing on the Athlon is handled by the Soundblaster Live card. The G5s, all Macs, handle sound on the CPU.

Now how lame is this? I was always aware that we lack dedicated sound chips but when they are making our systems crawl in multimedia apps and games then it's just not right. When we buy 2Ghz, for example, of power it should be dedicated to number crunching and handling work loads. Graphics and sound should be handled by their own processors. We surely deserve a good sound chip for once in Power Macs and Powerbooks. There are Mac users out there running Unreal or Halo with the sound turned off just so they can get playable frame rates.

This doesn't apply only to games of course. Decoding and editing video is far smoother when the same applies.

[moreno]

life sucks
get a pc, some ppl don't get it.

[Squozen]

The lack of sound hardware on a Mac is not the reason that games run slower than on a PC. The actual reasons have been stated many times on these and other forums, I'm not going to go into them myself.

[lenox]

Originally posted by Squozen:
The lack of sound hardware on a Mac is not the reason that games run slower than on a PC. The actual reasons have been stated many times on these and other forums, I'm not going to go into them myself.

In this case, it is the problem. If you don't agree, try benchmarking UT2k4 both with the sound on and the sound off, on both a pc with a sblive, and a mac.

In fact, I might do just that (with the demo at least)

[olePigeon]

Could have something to do with hacked-up ports of PC games written specifically to use DirectX and SoundBlaster, with no original intention of the game ever running on any other platform anyway. There is no optimization for the Macintosh. The game is going to run like crap unless it was written specifically to be compiled for multiple targets.

That's my theory, anyway.

[RooneyX]

It's a wrong theory. Sound is handled by the CPU on the Mac. Now imagine trying to process multi-channel sound, booming sound effects, voice over IP and other effects while trying to run a game or even video editing app. It's always better to have dedicated sound chips to take the stress off the CPU.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
It's a wrong theory. Sound is handled by the CPU on the Mac. Now imagine trying to process multi-channel sound, booming sound effects, voice over IP and other effects while trying to run a game or even video editing app. It's always better to have dedicated sound chips to take the stress off the CPU.

What if you stuck one of these in your Mac? Supports Ensaura, EAX, DirectSound, and A3D over 8 channels.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by olePigeon:
What if you stuck one of these in your Mac? Supports Ensaura, EAX, DirectSound, and A3D over 8 channels.

Oh, and if it does work, I'd be REALLY interested in the performance gains (if any) on the game. The card's only $120 too. Midiman Revolution 7.1, by the way.