Check this out, from MacNN:

id Software's Graeme Devine has announced that the company has added Velocity Engine (AltiVec) support to Quake III: Arena. The company is running the new AltiVec-enhanced version of the game on a 533 MHz G4 with an Nvidia GeForce2 MX, and Devine notes, "I think this safely puts the G4 ahead of the PC." The new version is expected to be released tomorrow. (Post a comment)

Now mac are not just keeping up with PCs...they are ahead! And this is only on a 533MHz G4. Probably due to a combination of Altivec support, write combining, and 4x AGP w/GeForce 2 MX. I'd imagine that a 733MHz G4 would seriously whup some PC ASS. This is exactly what Apple needs to boost sales, since most consumers think (wrongly) that games are the true benchmark for performance. When gamers learn that a 533MHz G4 offers a superior Quake experience compared to the Wintel boxes, they will start talking and word will spread: MHz are not the final determinant of performance!

This is a great time to be a mac user. I think Apple has made up for their 500MHz slackin' period--at least for now. Let's hope those hardware updates keep coming!

[gorefan68]

Numbers speak louder than words, in my opinion. My frankenimac is AHEAD of a PC.

Ah. You figured it out. I didn't specify WHICH PC it was ahead of. If the 533mhz G4/nvidea combo is only ahead of a 600mhz P3 with an nvidea, we still suck.

Ca$h

[blizzard]

Well said.

I think we should wait to see what sort of results come from Apple's new hardware before we start tooting our horns again. We've all been burned by this sort of thing before.

That said, I am quite happy with what Apple has done. I only wish they hadn't raised their prices by $100 over their previous one. That's a little hard to swallow for a high school student with no budget.

Here's to some good results....when we see them.

Blizzard.

Good point, but still, I'm totally stoked about it. Must be Steve's RDF at work on me.

He did say "the PC" (which sounds like the platform as a whole). I kind of interpeted that to mean any PC, but I could be wrong. But if it is any PC then Macs are now pushing 200fps+ since P4's are like 190. I hope this is true!!!

[druber]

MacLedge (http://macledge.com/NEWS.chtml) has some early Radeon vs GeForce numbers that are worth a look. Looks like good news for the new G4s..

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Note that those are copied directly off the IMG site, which I think got those framerates................from NVIDIA.

Yeaaaaaaap. People are sayin' now that those are from the GeForce2 MX in the NEW macs as compared to the Radeon in the OLD G4s, straight from your local biased representative.

If they don't give you the specifics, don't trust the benchmarks.

Also note that those don't include HQ settings, ie. 1024*768 at 32-bit colour. The MX SUCKS ASSE in HQ on the PC side, while the Radeon holds its own very well.

I have trouble believing that the MX can actually beat the Radeon at any decent-quality setting - even the Radeon's tech specs beat the MX's. The only thing it comes down to is drivers, basically.

I'd go with the Radeon, personally, but waiting is always best.......

greg

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

http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum21/HTML/000913.html

The folks at Id (Graeme) have decided to totally overhaul MacQuake for Altivec, instead of just "sprinkling" it with Altivec code. This could mean that the preliminary results have been very compelling! (or it could mean that Steve worked 'em over with the promise of personal jets if they can make Quake rock harder on macs than PCs )

Yes, Ca$H, it looks like Quake 3A is going to be slower on macs than PCs, doesn't it? Hmmm?




[This message has been edited by Phaedrus (edited 01-12-2001).]

Another post from Greame Devine of id:
"
I took an interest in the Altivec because Motorola has defined a really nice interface to it for C programmers. If Intel had defined such a complete interface for SIMD under the Pentium III, Quake 3 and other products would probably take advantage of it. We're not in the business of writing asm code to support complex math libraries.

I like the Macintosh, and I love OS X. I work on Q3A under it in the evenings mostly (although all day today on it because this is really interesting). If that means the Macintosh version becomes superior to the PC version, then I'm fine with that. I learn SIMD code from this, I learn what it takes to make it go fast. This will do us all good, Intel or PPC, down the road and perhaps on DOOM.
"

Jophiel dude...the P4 performs so poorly it aint even funny man OMF

200 fps..******** hehe.

I have used Macs and PC's (933 mhz pc, and the 733 mhz macs at macwrold) and as far as quake goes, both had GF2 MX's and both performed similarly.

anyways, 200 fps is only when they look at a wall. Hell withy my gamewizard I can pull 120 fps looking at a wall so what does that say?

The 190 thing I got off some tech page: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=16

Maybe the guy cheated somehow in his benchmark, but I was just looking at some other p4 reviews and they seem back it up. I think from what I've heard the P4's tremendous memory bandwidth really helps Q3A. But anyway, hopefully we'll be leaving them in our collective dusts when the altivec patch comes out.

[exa]

Hey, I can get over 1200fps in myth 2 staring at the ground at full zoom on a v3

Hehe, nice! I don't think I've ever seen a frame rate over 250 or so, and I think that was in some application, not a game. If I can find my copy of myth 2 I'll try zooming the ground just so I can experience 1000+ fps for myself ;p.

[blizzard]

The Pentium 4 is indeed quite powerful at Quake 3. It shines in areas like multimedia, but is quite weak in areas like word processing or other business tests. As well, it has a number of new features which are not yet being taken advantage of by the programmers - remember back when the G4 was released and everyone said 'oh sure, it's only as fast as a G3 NOW, but just wait until people start releasing software especially for it!'. Same situation. Basically, no matter how you put, a 1.5 gHz anything will beat the pants off a 733 mHz anything (well, besides portable phones). I assume we'll see some speed up from having Q3 Altivec optimized, but I would be surprised to see it exceed 15 to 20 frames per second. I would actually be thrilled to see it even be that much. So, while the situation is getting better, we're still not going to be creaming a Pentium 4 1.5 gHz with our G4/733s. When Devine said something about 'now we're all going to see Macs beating PCs', I would think he meant that a Mac 733 would be able to beat a Pentium 733. But, as with all things, we will see.

Blizzard.

By MWNY, we may have 1GHz G4s. It is entirely plausable that altivec-optimized Quake would run faster on a 1GHz G4 than a 1.5GHz pentium 4.

The reason is that Motorola's microprocessor forum presentation claimed that the V'Ger would start at 700MHz and rapidly scale to over 1GHz. All they have to do is move it to SOI to get the GHz speeds. And since Moto is working in conjunction with AMD on the SOI technology, I think it's more likely that we'll see some results.

Also note that by MWNY, the G4 processor will not be handling sound. That will be up to the Soundblaster card, and since UT is already patched for Open AL, Quake will surely follow soon. (the patch won't be released until Soundblaster is available).

It's a very good time for macheads. By the end of 2001, Macs will reign as the fastest home computers. They won't have the highest MHz, but they will run the fastest. The pentium 4 is gonna get bitch-slapped by the Apollo (aka, G5) maybe as soon as MWSF 2002.

[Gee4orce]

Hey guys, considering your monitor probably can't refresh faster them 70 or 80 fps, what the hell is the point of framerates faster than that ?

It's like hearing a Porche driver boast to a BMW driver that his car's top speed is 180mph instead of 140mph. So what ? Anything over 70 (in the UK at least) is going to get you a flashing blue escort !

I was going to respond something about how timedemo scores are an avg of fps over a given period of time and that having a really high fps helps when the action gets fierce and gibs are exploding everywhere to make sure the lowest your fps ever goes isn't too low. But then I got to thinking, maybe you're right but probably not in the way you were thinking.

Once the altivec enhanced Q3A comes out I'm guessing most people who have decent monitors will play at 1024x768x32. At the resolution the Geforce2mx should be completely fillrate bound with the new version of Quake -- so maybe there won't be that much of a difference between a G4+733 with or without the altivec enhanced patch since I assume it's easily powerful enough to max out the GF2mx's fillrate on its own. Then again the altivec quake3arena version will help with fps bragging rights at 640x480, which is important too , and it should help those of us with older systems to play nearly as fast as the G4+ ones.

I just noticed there was a new Greame Devine post yesterday. Looks like we may be getting the altivec patch today!

A lot of you have been asking about the status of the Altivec build of Mac Quake 3 Arena.
I've run into a small hitch, and it's hard to get around. The Metrowerks 6.0 compiler does not generate something called the "VSRAVE" instruction correctly when generating Altivec code. This leads to a crash in the product whenever an Alitvec register is loaded (in certain situations). Metrowerks is aware of the problem and promises a fix, however, no time frame was available from them.

I had previously used the Altivec for optimized versions of the memory copies and sets. Moving 16bytes at a time compared to the 8 on the MMX. John was interested in this, and so I started to look a little more at how much we could push the Altivec by converting our floating point code to use the "vector float" data type.

This leaves OS X as the only platform available that correctly compiles Altivec code. OS X PB of course has it's own set of issues, so it takes a little longer to get everything together here. OS X Q3A and ongoing id products will certainly be G4 and above only builds.

Considering Apple's pride in the Altivec, it's somewhat frustrating to not be able to show it off!

I'll see what comes up tomorrow and go from there on releasing what I have so far.

Graeme.

Hey guys, considering your monitor probably can't refresh faster them 70 or 80 fps, what the hell is the point of framerates faster than that ?

It sounds like maybe you don't play Quake? 'Cause if you did then you would know the important distinction between "average framerates" and "minimum framerate". It is quite true that a minium framerate need not exceed 70 fps or so. But to achieve a 70 fps minium framerate, you need a system that can handle the worst-case action sequences. These systems put out ridiculously high average fps, but their minimum fps is the key number.

Another advantage of having ultra-high framerates is that it opens up the possibility for more "eye-candy". Mapmakers can jack up the polygon count on maps if they know that the audience has boxes capable of 500 fps on stock maps. High polycounts allow for more exquisite detail and grandiose architechture, and for wide-open arenas. After all, first person shooters are about more than just fraggin' and bloody guts!

Also, framerate relates to the user input. You may not see all frames due to restrictions in the monitor, but the general responsiveness will be better with higher framerates than lower.

/U