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Goofas · 06:38 AM

I am a long time pc gamer. Since my switch to the eMac I have not touched a game. i tried the Tony Hawk game that came with my new eMac and it sucks. Will I be able to play BF1942 at a fast frame rate with my 1.25 G4 and 1GB ram? Are there any really good games out there for online play like cs?

- - e r i k - - · Jul 23, 2004, 05:07 AM

Battlefield 1984?

What graphics card do your eMac have?

- - e r i k - - · Jul 23, 2004, 05:08 AM

I highly recommend Medal of Honor, it ran great on my 400 Mhz G4 with a Radeon 8500.

Goofas · Jul 23, 2004, 06:40 AM

Sorry about the typo. The new eMacs have ATI 9200.

KrazyEvilGoat · Jul 23, 2004, 11:59 AM

My eMac only has a radeon 7500 and it runs BF1942 admirably. Strangely enough tony hawk works well enough as well except for when loading. I've run NWN, Tron 2.0, even Halo on medium settings quite well with no noticeable slowness.

KrazyEvilGoat · Jul 23, 2004, 12:00 PM

Oh, I'd Call of Duty works perfectly. Great game

Goofas · Jul 23, 2004, 06:47 PM

I tried the UT 2004 demo and COD. If I turn everything off at lowest res...it is very slow and choppy with alot af fire. Is this normal? I guess FPS's are not really for the mac. Are there any video settings on the eMac itself I can tweak?

Lateralus · Jul 23, 2004, 07:12 PM

Your problem is video RAM. 32MBs is simply not enough to run any modern video game at a decent speed. If you had 64MBs you'd probably be set.

Grrr · Jul 23, 2004, 07:39 PM

UT2004 runs perfectly well on my eMac 1gz (Overclocked to 1.2ghz) However, I kept my eMac on 10.3.3, as the 10.3.4 update crippled graphics performance on my 1ghz pb, and I didn't want to risk the same thing happening to my eMac.
Personally, I cant tell the difference between 10.3.3 and 10.3.4 anyway, besides the graphics issue.

sideus · Jul 23, 2004, 07:45 PM

Originally posted by Grrr:
UT2004 runs perfectly well on my eMac 1gz (Overclocked to 1.2ghz) However, I kept my eMac on 10.3.3, as the 10.3.4 update crippled graphics performance on my 1ghz pb, and I didn't want to risk the same thing happening to my eMac.
Personally, I cant tell the difference between 10.3.3 and 10.3.4 anyway, besides the graphics issue.

I just read one of the Mac game publishers tested out 10.3.3 and 10.3.4 and notice no difference in frame rates. I'll see if I can find the site.

sideus · Jul 23, 2004, 07:51 PM

Here it is. IMG did an interview with Al Schilling of Macsoft. IMG asked about Halo under 10.3.4 but I would assume that would apply to other games as well.

IMG: We've been getting lots of reports from users who say that Halo is slower under Mac OS X 10.3.4 than 10.3.3. Have you seen this and are they any plans to patch Halo again?

Schilling: We've done a bit of checking into this and we really aren't seeing any significant change in framerate under 10.3.4. I just asked our QA department to run the test again and it shows an increase of about 1/2fps under 10.3.4. If there are particular cases in which users are seeing verifiable performance drops under 10.3.4, I would encourage them to send machine specs and frame rate info to support@macsoftgames.com. That will help us to identify any real problems, and to determine whether they are being caused by something in our code or, something in the OS.

I play all my FPS games on my PB 12 inch just fine under 10.3.4, but who knows.

Grrr · Jul 23, 2004, 08:41 PM

It depends very much on the game. I don't play many at all, but of course UT happened to be the one that came worse off. Some games saw an improvement, and some no change.
Whats more, it doesn't seem to affect all Macs either. UT2004 went from being perfectly playable on my pb, to pretty useless after the 10.3.4 update. So somthing definitely got screwed, im in no doubt. It might be that my eMac would be unaffected after the update, but seeing as it works perfectly well as it is, i'll leave it alone for now.