[G4ME]

In OS X what kind of fram rates do you think will be availible on a dual 533, or 733 with 512 ram geforce 3 and a cabonized copy of quake 3 with altivec and every thing pegged? I know that the barefeets says over 100 fps with a radeon. Just your opinion

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I Have a Super Computer

Well its not going to be that much faster than the Radeon. It will benefit from having a higher clock speed for the GPU, the Radeon on the Mac is very underclocked which is why the MX can keep up with it in some apps. But aside from that you wont see too much since Quake 3 isn't going to make use of any of the new features on the GeForce 3 so people are not going to be blown away right of the bat with that card. FSAA will probably run well but I have never seen the point in that feature, high resolution looks just as good. I think that its just something that was thrown down everyone's throat by 3dfx as a "cool" feature because other than that their card really sucked which is born out in the fact that there is no longer a 3dfx but people still cry for them. As for Ram, people always go so crazy with ram. Yes for some things it helps to have a lot but as far as Quake 3 is concerned once you have 128 megs, more does very little. But this is typical of the misinformed bigger is better mentality that perpetuates society. It will be a year before any apps come along that can push the GeForce 3, its cool that its going to be available but for the time being its overkill at crazy price. Just my 2 cents.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Having said that, remember that "minimum framerates" is a VERY important part of first-person gaming. QuakeIII might not tax the card, but you definitely should see your "minimums" jumping up...which is an AWESOME thing when three guys gang up on ya.....

As well...FSAA looks really, REALLY good. High-res gaming makes up for it, but you still don't get that smoothness that FSAA provides.

Now that FSAA can be on AT high-res, things should look just incredible.......

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

No frame rates will not jump by much because Quake 3 is CPU bound for the most part so until CPU's get much faster the card is just going to be sitting idle waiting for information from the main CPU which is what both the Radeon and the MX are already doing a lot!!! 733MHz is not going to cut it folks. Until Motorola churns out some faster CPU's it won't matter what card you have in the machine. A machine is only as fast as its slowest part and right now in a Mac that would be the tired CPU. No one is going to put Altivec code into their games. Yeah Quake 3 might finally get some but don't expect too many more so what that means is that all you have is a 733 which can get smoked by a Celeron! No I am not a PC lover but I am realistic. When it comes to games MHz count!!! This isn't photoshop its games which require a ludicrously fast CPU clock. 733 is an entry level game machine. Hopefully this will change but until it does a GeForce 3 in a mac is nothing but a status symbol and proof of Apples hype machine to cover up their weak CPU's. Let's hope for a miracle from Motorola.

[cschmelz]

Originally posted by notjustsomeguy:
No frame rates will not jump by much because Quake 3 is CPU bound for the most part so until CPU's get much faster the card is just going to be sitting idle waiting for information from the main CPU which is what both the Radeon and the MX are already doing a lot!!! 733MHz is not going to cut it folks. Until Motorola churns out some faster CPU's it won't matter what card you have in the machine. A machine is only as fast as its slowest part and right now in a Mac that would be the tired CPU. No one is going to put Altivec code into their games. Yeah Quake 3 might finally get some but don't expect too many more so what that means is that all you have is a 733 which can get smoked by a Celeron! No I am not a PC lover but I am realistic. When it comes to games MHz count!!! This isn't photoshop its games which require a ludicrously fast CPU clock. 733 is an entry level game machine. Hopefully this will change but until it does a GeForce 3 in a mac is nothing but a status symbol and proof of Apples hype machine to cover up their weak CPU's. Let's hope for a miracle from Motorola.

Bash bash bash...Have you read Carmack's comments on AltiVec and the GF3 on the mac? He basically said as T&L becomes more common (and written for) the AltiVec enhancements for gaming becomes a moot issue. 733 is NOT an entry level machine for the G4, quit trying to directly compare it to a 733 PIII or Athlon because, as everyone who has taken the time to really educate themselves knows, it is not a great way of measuring performance.

As games take greater advantage of the GF3 T&L features, the CPU becomes even LESS important. I really believe that I am going to be VERY happy with my G4/533DP GF3 when it arrives in a few weeks..Kick ass Halo machine!

No 733 is not entry level for a G4 but for a gaming machine it is! It doesn't matter how much of a load the GPU can take off of the CPU if the CPU is to slow to tell it to take that work and do it. When it comes to gaming performance MHz are for the most part equal across platforms. Educated people know that! What Carmack said was that he doesn't think Altivec will make a difference because there won't be a single clear path of code to optimize due to the amount and types of tasks that the GPU will be performing. I am not trying to bash, I am merely stating that people are being mislead to believe that they are going to see a quantum leap forward with this new card and they simply aren't. This card is going to need apps written specifically for it and CPU's to drive it that are a year or so away. If the current machines can't saturate the current cards what makes you think a newer, faster, bigger card will fair any better. Just because the GPU can do more doesn't mean that it automatically will!! It needs information that has to come from the CPU!! On this field 733 is 733 whether its a PPC, Athlon, or PIII. Its simply too slow. Will this card work great? Hell yeah! Is it going to be worth the initial cost to me? Hell no! Especially considering the 2D and overall video quality of Nvidia, yeah they are fast but it doesn't always look good. I simply meant that there aren't going to be any immediate benefits of this card. The initial reviews of the reference boards already show this to be the case. That's all. By the way a dual 533 with any card is a very nice machine, when OS X hits its stride around September and more apps are carbonized you are going to be very happy. Enjoy!! Really : )

[Daishi]

I believe Carmac's comments were more the affect that AltiVec doesn't bring it up, enough. The PowerPC line is more efficient than any x86 regardless of the type of work employed, but in this case, the efficiency only brings the 733 up to par with ~900 PIII.

Of course, on the other hand, Grame Devine is showing off doubled framerates with AltiVec enhancements, so I'm not too sure where it's at. Carmac is an Intel junky, and Devine is PPC junky, so I don't know who to believe until I see it. (Please note that I referred to both of them as junkies and not flunkies. Very important distinction.)

[a2daj]

Where did you get the idea that the Mac Radeon is underclocked? It's the same speed as the PC Radeon DDR 32, 166 MHz. The DDR 64 is 183 MHz.
It's the Mac Radeon drivers that need improvement.

The Radeon is underclocked when compared to the Geforce MX. The MX is clocked at 200Mhz which is up considerably from its PC brother, while the Radeon is still at 166. I would think by now that ATI's yeilds are up so they could increase the clock much like Nvidia did. I seriously doubt all this nonsense about the Radeon drivers being slow cosidering the fact that the card either matches or beats the performance of the higher clocked MX. I am sure if the clock was upped that it would signifigantly increase the performance. Inside mac games recently commented in their review of the Radeon PCI card that they don't believe all the talk of slow ATII drivers. Why does everybody always say that? I guess its just the thing to say when you don't know what the heck you are talking about.

[a2daj]

ATI admits that the Mac Radeon drivers doesn't take advantage of 4xAGP. The engineers admit that there's a lot of room for optimization. And you can't really call the Radeon underclocked just because a different card by a different manufacturer is clocked higher. Well, you could, but it's just comparing megahertz on two differet chips with different architectures... (like PPC vs x86)...
I personally take anything written by IMG with a grain of salt. Eilers use to claim that you wouldn't need a hacked version of ADP to use with the PCI Radeon card.
Many tests have shown Radeon Q3 scores are higher in OS X than in OS 9, so that would at least point to software issues.

[osiris]

There should be an amazing increase in frame rates with OS X & Geforce 3 ( The very design of this card was to ELIMINATE the need to go to CPU)

There's a huge review of this chipset at http://www.tomshardware.com/

[a2daj]

That's assuming the games are written to take advantage of the card.

[G4ME]

True true it will be about 6 moths befor tehy will come out with a game that will actualy push the GeFoce 3 I think that the new DOOM will be the first

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I Have a Super Computer

[cschmelz]

Originally posted by G4ME:
True true it will be about 6 moths befor tehy will come out with a game that will actualy push the GeFoce 3 I think that the new DOOM will be the first

If they'd just ship my GF3, I'd be happy! I want my new machine! NEED MORE FPS!

I also ordered a DP/533 with GF3 and I CAN'T WAIT!! when do you expect that they begin to ship these machines? And why is the expected time to ship still 45 days???

i can't wait!!!!!

[cschmelz]

Originally posted by hippiie:
I also ordered a DP/533 with GF3 and I CAN'T WAIT!! when do you expect that they begin to ship these machines? And why is the expected time to ship still 45 days???

i can't wait!!!!!

I ordered mine on Feb 20th, so we are currently at day 24. Remember that the PC versions of the GF3 isn't shipping yet either (estimates vary from 3/24 to 4/5 for PC variants), given apple's promise of first on the mac, I would expect the Macs with the GF3 to start shipping along the same lines...

[G4ME]

All I want to know is what kind of framrates will we get with a kick ass system not which card is the best.

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I Have a Super Computer

[olePigeon]

Here you guys are talking about Quake III, and I can't even get Diablo II to run at a decent frame rate on my DP 533. I'm about ready to just return the damn computer. Geeze. >

[G4ME]

That is bad if you can't get a simple non frame per sec game playing smooth then something must be really wrong

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I Have a Super Computer

[juanvaldes]

Originally posted by olePigeon:

Here you guys are talking about Quake III, and I can't even get Diablo II to run at a decent frame rate on my DP 533. I'm about ready to just return the damn computer. Geeze. >

Return it!!!! Something is seriously wrong there!!!! I have a DP 450 with a Rage 128 Pro and I have never even had so much as a hichup in Diablo 2.