[Elderloc]

Ok someone withthis card what are we looing at for frames rates?? Lets say UT at 800 x 600 what are the frames rates??

Does the voodoo for mac compare with the PC one?

[Misha]

Transferring to Games forum.

[blizaine]

Here is a quote taken from an article on Inside Mac Games. It gives 3 main reasons why macs will be unable to reach the frame rates that PC users get (in most games):

1) Power Macintosh systems are extremely bus-limited, compared to recent PC systems; the benchmarks show this clearly. Many of the systems used to benchmark these cards on the PC side are using 133 MHz buses and faster RAM technologies; Macs are still using 100 MHz RAM and buses, and many G3-based Macs are limited to a 66 MHz bus. This is a very serious restriction.

2) Mac busses do not support write combining. For whatever reason, Apple’s implementation of the PCI bus does not support a feature commonly used on the PC side to increase the amount of data sent across the bus. PC programmers are able to send data in both directions across the bus (from the CPU to the graphics card) simultaneously, allowing for a dramatic increase in overall bandwidth. Macs simply cannot do this, or can’t do it in a way that is practical for those porting PC games to Mac to implement.

3) The games used to benchmark this card are ports of PC titles. While Westlake Interactive clearly accomplished amazing things with their port of Unreal Tournament to the Mac OS, and id Software definitely worked to make Quake 3 Arena a speedy game on the Mac, these game are still ports from PC versions. Even though code is designed to be much more cross-platform in this day and age, the Mac versions of these games are still missing critical x86 (Intel) optimizations that use the specific tricks and instructions native to that processor. Often these low-level optimizations are written in assembler, making them impossible to port across. In addition, the port of Q3A runs on Apple’s OpenGL drivers, which have been criticized for a lack of speed optimization.

hope this helps.

the full artical is here:
http://www.imgmagazine.com/previews/00/voodoo5/

Blizaine

I am now "dissecting" the Voodoo 5500, putting it against everything I have in my drawer. The performance in terms of frame rates you can expect is, like it is for any mac 3D cards, inferior to its PC counterpart in most cases. This doesn't mean though that you can't have fun :-)

There are quite a few reasons that explains why Macs are slower than PC in 3D games. The most important factor is the lack of write-combining. This feature is missing on the mac platform and is used extensively by 3Dfx cards to push data in the PCI bus as fast as possible. The differences in how the RISC cpu performs data alignment also affects frame rate. Other factors like the lack of a dedicated sound card, type of compilers used, etc. can also explain the differences.

So to answer your question directly, I think you'll be able to play at a frame rate higher than 24 fps on a constant basis with the V5 at 800x600. On average, you'll get fps higher than that though. In the condition you are talking, I was getting 60 fps in the fly-by using the 2 VSA-100 chips, way better than what you get with 3D cards that still come in every macs.

I hope that helps,

Frank