[Chimpmaster]

Hi guys, please help me with the following enquiry.
Currently I have a HP 6616 - 566mhz celeron cpu, 128mb ram, voodoo 3 card.
I use it for uni, business and gaming. I play half-life counterstrike a lot and use 800x600x16 res and get around 60fps. Im happy witht his performance. BUT
I hate windows. Its so instable and crashes regularly. Lately ive been browsing apple's website, and to be honest I really like what I see. The imacs seem good value for money, as do the ibooks. I do have a few questions however, before I seriously consider buying one.

1) Im looking closely at the new Imac DVSE - 500mhz, 128mb ram version. It looks great. Is it good enough for high speed gaming? I realise you cant get half life on the mac, but I like the look of Quake 3 and Deus Ex and I would need to be able to play those games at good frame rates at about 1024x768 on the Imac.
2) Im also looking at the Ibook SE - 466mhz w/128mb ram. Is this notebook fast enough for gaming? Quake 3 etc.
3) These Rage 128 pro 8mb video cards. How good are they in real terms? Depsite only 8mb of ram ive been advised that peformance is comparable to a voodoo 3 or tnt2 card. Is this true?
4) With an Imac, can I stick in a pci video card like the voodoo 4 or 5?

I have also looked at the g4's and g4 cubes. They look fantastic but are a little out of my price range. In australia, the Imac DVSE is around $2995 which is about what I am willing to pay for a desktop. thats about $1500 US i spose. a g4 is going to cost me $3095 entry level + monitor, which is another $1000 for a good one. Too much in other words. The cube is around $3495 + $1000 once again for a monitor. I spose though if the G4 is that much better I could save my pennies.

Sorry about the length of this but I had to ask in depth and I would really appreciate ALL of your comments and suggestions.

BTW, how good is mac? Is it as stable as everyone says, or am i just buying a different barrel of problems.

[sordid]

Buying a computer is like buying a car, you get it to suit your purpose. If you want a strictly games only computer, get a PC. You'd be crazy to get a mac, because you can't play counterstrike etc etc..

If you get a mac for graphics or os x or whatever reason and want to play a few games, like quake or whatever, you are balancing what you need.

Personally, I think for the average computer nerd like me, you need a Mac and a PC.

A mac with a 19" monitor, and G4 preferably. and a very fast pc with about a p3 800 or athlon 1 gig. The PC should also have a sony flat screen monitor.. about 17" will do. Get a v.nice graphics card for the PC. Run windows 2000 pro on it. And the mac, dual with os9 and osx.

If you cant afford that, and you are trying to justify getting a Mac, get it if you are really into graphics and love the speed of the GUI and can do without the games (as what I did a few months ago).

I must admit, OS9 apps crash constantly if pushed too hard compared to windows apps. It *will* drive you nuts for the first few months (as it did myself and other people I know). But the speed of the user interface over windows and the "unbloatedness" of the operating system is amazing.

A G4/400 with a decent video card will run most games about as fast as a decent P3 in OS9. I play quake 1 TF on my imac dv 400 with ati rage 128, and it runs smooth. But biger games get chewier either on the processor, operating system or video card compared to an equiv. PC.

OSX is completely the opposite, its dog slow, and majorly powerfull, ths may change when the final relase comes out.. but the PB is a wet dream for unix heads, imo, its the best operating system ever made for powerusers.

Have the best of both worlds and get some cheap PC that works okay with games and a nice G4/450 or so and you will really appreciate it.

[sordid]

oh.. btw.. ATI rage 128 video cards are sh*t slow.

[Chimpmaster]

Thanks for your reply.
It sounds like the G4 is the go. Ive just got to get together the finances for it now.
Maybe with a bit of luck theyll release future imacs with a radeon video card.
I spose I could always buy a mac dedicated for business and uni and buy a dreamcast or playstation 2 for gaming. That would keep my work time separate from my play time (which is probably a good thing knowing me LOL).
Well - lets say i was to get the imac. What kind of frame rates would i expect on it. Will an imac dvse run q3a acceptably compared to my pc? and what about an ibook.
From what i can see the ibook is one of the best value laptops on the market.
Anyeay thanks again, and anyone elses input would be greatly appreciated!

[seanyepez]

I love both my Mac and my PC. I built the PC by myself - getting a PC from HP, Compaq, Dell, eMachines ("barf"), or any major name-brand is stupid and for the uninformed.

The "name-brand computers" usually have sucky components. The average consumer doesn't know that the Dell he's buying for five thousand dollars cannot match the Quake performance of my $2,000 screamer.

Screw the name-brand PC manufacturers. Build it yourself. If you don't have the time or are afraid you might break something, get it from a local dealer. Their support is better than name-brand companies (usually), and they care more about their customers. Also, you can specify which component!

I'd get a dual 450-megahertz G4 Power Mac with a RADEON if I really wanted a Mac. My $2,200 PC gets 243.9 frames per second in the "timedemo".

The iMac sucks for games. Get a G4 if you are planning to do any serious gaming.

Before you even think about getting an iBook, test out the Mac first. If you like it, you might want to consider an Apple portable. If you don't, cut your losses. The iBook will play Quake fairly well for a notebook, but any Dell Inspiron 8000 series notebook will kick its ass! The Dell Inspiron 8000 has 32 megabytes of video RAM. I'd bet you could see upwards of thirty frames per second at a resolution of 800 by 600. I wouldn't play at 640 by 480 - it looks plain ugly. The proportions get messed up.

Good luck!

[dawaves]

Dude, get a PC so you can play 'Counterstrike'-the best game of the year. There is no MAC version (and there will never be) so in my opinion build yourself a bad-ass PC gaming machine for less than a G4. I have a G4 and love it, BUT am disappointed in the lack of game support by the major game vendors. Plus everything comes out 4 months behind the PC versions!!!!! What the F**k is that all about? Again, I'm a die hard MAC ADDICT and was at peace with myself when I first got it, but now seeing things how they really are in MAC-LAND, it's not all that great for gaming!!!!

Games are being released for Mac same-day or within a few weeks of the PC games. Diablo-2 and Dues Ex are good examples. This is a growing trend.

Halo and Oni will both be released simultaneously, and those will be the best games of 2001. Microsoft itself is forming a Mac game porting division to port all of their future games to Mac. It was announced in July at Macworld.

I play Diablo 2 on my Powerbook and it plays very well, even with a full 8 players. And let's not forget that the Powerbook only has 8mb of VRAM.

For games with a value system, a G4 tower with Radeon would do just fine. You can find a few older G4 400s for sale for US$1200. Get that -make sure it is AGP- and upgrade to a Radeon or Voodoo 4-6. The processor can be upgraded in the future to keep up with performance. You'll have a very upgradable box to carry the value of your purchase for years.

Personally, I only have time for 1 or 2 games if at all. As long as the best titles appear on Mac, I'm more than content. Halo will be it for me next year.

The Mac game situation will improve with OS X, I believe. Hopefully, because of a growing market share, but also because an OS X port will also be a Linux port (more or less) and so porting to mac will be more cost effective because one port can be sold to mac and linux, a much larger market than either one alone.

Also, nVidia 3D cards are coming to Mac very soon. So we'll have GeForce and all to boot, not to mention we already have the Radeon and Voodoo 4-6.

Your best bet in buying dual systems, a Mac and a Wintel, is to share components with a switch box. Get a great 19 inch monitor and USB keyboard and mouse. That way you will save yourself some money on the systems.

Just to throw in my $.02...

I have a an original beige g3/233 (overclocked to a whopping 266!) with 192(?) meg of ram, a voodoo3 2000 pci vid card running b9 drivers, and an Iiyama 17" monitor. I play Unreal Tournament quite regularly, and get ~30 - 35 fps on the average. I've been experiencing lag on occasion playing the Infiltration 2.8 mod, but that's when there's 16 guys on screen, all firing at the same time, or if I'm on a huge map. I'm really tempted to go get one of the new voodoo4s, but that's an expense I can't absorb with the holidays coming up.

I recently have been monkeying with the 4x4 EVO demo on this box, as well as the rev B iMac that I bought for my wife and kids. It just plain sucks on the iMac, but I'm not sure if it's because the built-in video sucks, or because the machine's running virtual memory. It's smooth as silk on the G3, and kinda makes me dizzy at times when you come off the top of one of those big hills and there's nothing underneath... takes me back to the days off off-roading with my dad

The only real downside to gaming on the Mac is the lack of games ported over (Half-Life being a prime example). However, I have UT, I have Diablo 2... and that's all I really have time to play these days. When you have the best, who needs the rest?

[Xaqtly]

One thing nobody has mentioned so far is the UMA-2 logic board. This will be out fairly soon (well, maybe a few months from now) and games will run MUCH faster on this board than on the current UMA board in the G4. Currently, the Radeon card (or the Voodoo 5) is more powerful than the Mac can handle... everything moves too slowly through the UMA architecture. UMA-2 will address a lot of this, with 4x AGP, support for DDR memory, etc. We will start seeing framerates above 60 fps even at a decent screen rez.

It's possible that any new iMacs that come out in the future with a G4 chip will have the UMA-2 board and a Radeon, so maybe that would be a good gaming system but not for now.

Of course games like Starcraft don't need 3D acceleration and run really well on just about anything. If you buy a G4 now you can get a Radeon for it, and that will run games like Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, etc. at a pretty decent framerate. It may not be 100fps, but it will certainly be playable.

The human eye can only see about 24 FPS so anything above that is really pointless.........

That did NOT stop me from buying a VooDoo 5 5500 card though (very sweet card!!!) Why did I buy it then? you may ask. Because it is faster of course. (also love that 19" full screen 1280X1024 smooottthhhhh video!)

[blizzard]

OK, you asked about expected frames per second using different Apple machines:

At 640x480, the iBook can do around 20-25 fps, at best. It is limited by its 66 mHz system bus, and the monitor, apparently, is very ugly at anything below its 800x600 native resolution. If you buy an iBook, it will not be for games. Sorry.

At 800x600, the iMac DV SE you are looking at can supposedly do 35 fps, highest detail levels for everything. That's pretty good, in the Mac world. Well...maybe reasonable is a better word. You COULD pump the rez up to 1024x768, but that's where you really start feeling the effects of the skimpy 8 megs of VRAM. Expect around 20 fps at this resolution. Basically, expect to run it at 800x600 for the best performance/look compromise.

Now we start having fun...the G4 with a Radeon can realistically do 50 fps at 1024x768...maybe even 1280! Not too sure about that, but the obstacle that you run into on the Mac, as stated above, is the motherboard not being able to feed the new video cards enough info to really stretch their limits. The result is that you will notice the performance, in terms of fps, remains pretty much identical from 640 all the way on up to 1280. Above that, the video card starts to run out of VRAM...and poof! performance barrier. Why you'd want to game at anything above that is beyond me, so the upshot is that the G4 will be able to pretty closely match your current PC in terms of performance.

In terms of stability, it really depends on what you run. My computer crashes about two to three times a week, under fairly heavy workload. When it does crash, the cleanup is trillions of times easier than on any PC I know. I love the Mac for its stability and ease of use, not its game potential. Simply put, it doesn't really have any game potential. It can do the same stuff a PC does, but not as fast or as beautifully. Your call should depend on how important it is to you to have a.) games and b.) everything I just mentioned above. I'd say, keep the PC for the games and get a Mac, should you deem it a good thing to do, for actual work.

Concerning the statement made about UMA-2 in an above post, it's really too early to make a call on how much existing games will be sped up, if at all. So, I wouldn't make any decisions based upon what SHOULD happen.

[Ruddigger]

Leslie, the human eye can see WAY more then 24 fps. Video is shown at 30fps...


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-Ruddigger
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Have you had your
gigaflop today?

About fps, those rates don't reflect the low end during gaming. Frame rates bottom out when the action gets heavy and you really need high frame rates. Whle playing some UT maps on a PMG4 400 with Rage 128 pro, I get under 10 fps at 800x600. That's with 200MB RAM allocated to UT. Detail set at medium. It sucks. Maybe with Radeon that will improve, but who knows when that will be released?

For my uses, the PMG4 is great, i wouldn't get a PC just because I get low fps in UT. But if I were an avid gamer, no way would I blow so much cash on a sub-performance computer. Macs are just too slow for their price.

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[Chimpmaster]

Well, you guys have almost turned me off buying a mac altogether.
I was under the impression and ibook or imac would do what i want it to do. Obviously im wrong. Thanks for the advice.
I think the g4s are a little exy for me too.

Now i feel lost and stupid.
I get 60fps+ on my celeron 566 with 128mb ram and voodoo 3 card. Thats a pc that cost me under $1000 US.
Why the hell cant apple put better video cards in imacs. Surely an imac with a radeon card would rock for all purposes.
Anyway enough of my whinging. I still think Ibooks/Imacs are pretty cute and being the stubborn fool that I am I will probably buy one anyways.
Maybe Ill get the new Icube with a radeon card. Who knows.

[seanyepez]

The human eye can see only 24 frames per second? Hell no!

I can tell the difference between eighty and 120 frames per second. I can't play with 30 FPS effectively. I have to get 40+ frames per second, otherwise my railgun is way off. Seriously, though - if you're a gamer like me, you need upwards of sixty frames per second to be effective. You'll need those extra frames per second when you engage in a massive firefight.

Why do you think Makaveli (one of the best gamers ever) has his system running 300+ frames per second?

That fact has been said - and bashed - many times over.

After COMDEX, I will build myself a new gaming PC that will get me over 300 frames per second in the timedemo. These are the components I will use:

• AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" CPU rated at 1 gigahertz (which will probably be overclocked to 1.2 (or more) gigahertz
• ASUS motherboard that supports DDR SDRAM
• Two 256-megabyte PC2100 DDR SDRAM DIMM's
• 100-gigabyte (or whatever IBM releases at that time) hard drive
• nVidia GeForce^2 GTS (and not the Ultra because it's way overpriced for a 15-20% speed gain) AGP graphics card
  
  Note: I might switch to the RADEON because of FSAA. nVidia currently doesn't support FSAA, and I intend to get nVidia's NV20 that will be released in the spring of 2001.
  
• Creative SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1 PCI sound card

That machine will most likely have a 12x/10x/32x CD burner, a slot-loading DVD drive by Pioneer (hopefully 32x DVD - keep dreaming, Sean), an Iomega Zip drive (internal), and a few bells and whistles. I will buy another Razer Boomslang 2000 mouse for my next PC.

Without the monitor, speakers, and input devices, my system will likely cost somewhere in the $2,500 range.

Show me a Mac that can boast that same gaming performance and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

You're beat (sorry for the bad pun ).

I didn't capitalize COMDEX.

[This message has been edited by seanyepez (edited 11-07-2000).]

[blizzard]

Well, Chimp, as I said, if I were you I'd keep the PC around for your games. The true strength of Mac doesn't lie in their gaming ability, it lies in the simplicity and beauty of the OS. Anyone who tells you Macs are superfast game systems is lying - but anyone who says they're useless is lying even more.

It all depends on what you're used to...for me, 40 fps is more than playable. For you, it probably would be a little slow.

There was/is a guy in here named Dragonlance who bought an iMac a while back with the expectation that it would be a capable gamer (this is back even when the iMacs had Rage Pros in them). He wound up quite bitter, and railed against Apple for a while before going to buy a PC. We didn't hear from him for a while, and then he came back - with a new iMac. So, without paraphrasing the guy, or putting words in his mouth - you gotta assume there's something to a computer that can keep people comin' back like that =).

[Chimpmaster]

Yes blizzard you certainly have a point.
I went to an applecentre today to have a peek. THey only had the older imac there (dv model).

Even so it was pretty nice - the gui and all. THe full screen video didnt run well on it though, it was a little jerky. However Ive heard that the newer imacs have corrected this problem.

I think it all boils down to usage for me. What am i going to use it for etc. Right now, im thinking of buying a laptop as I need something I can cart from work - uni and home. I probably cant afford to keep my desktop as well, but I might sell that, buy a notebook and buy a sega dreamcast or playstation 2 for gaming (lets not open up a can of worms on this issue - ive seen what the dreamcast can do and it more than satisfies my gaming needs).

So now its just which notebook. I can get a p3 700mhz with 128mb ram, ati rage pro 8meg video, etx etc for under $4000 AUS. An imac with the same ram and hd will cost me $4800 AUS. What do yuo reckon? In all honesty, i wont be using it for graphics/movie editing. Ill be using it for office applications, a little programming, internet browsing and watching dvds. I will also play some games on it, but I dont expect lightning fast performance - as long as it handles im happy.

What do you reckon. Ibook or Pc Notebook?

(I really do think desktop macs are out for me. I like the imacdvse but id need a better video card, and I love the g4's but they are a little pricy for me). Then again, I seem to change my mind every day right now and despite the fact I am right into computers, I love the cute appearance of the imacs, as sad as that may be. oh well.

[Cipher13]

Hm... the fact that the iBook runs the MacOS would decide it for me.
However, if you're a PC person, go for that laptop.
Unless you can afford a PowerBook.
If you are comfortable with Windows, get the PC. Else, get the iBook.
By the way, where in Australia can you get a P3 700 laptop for under 4000 of our (almost) worthless dollars?!?

Cipher13

[This message has been edited by Cipher13 (edited 11-08-2000).]

[Chimpmaster]

I saw an ad in the back of APC for that notebook i mentioned for only $3799. Pretty impressive hey!

[blizzard]

OK, you're pretty familiar with the iBook's game potential. I imagine the PC's will be similar or perhaps a little better - PC notebooks tend to perform a lot slower than do Mac notebooks, especially at gaming. Someone kick me if I'm wrong. Both can do DVDs, but the iBook can output the DVD to a TV screen with no additional expense. There's something to keep in mind. Try to find out whether the PC notebook can do that or not. And for such a cheap price, make sure you know what you're getting. Besides all that, notebooks are not my area of strength so I'll let someone more knowledgeable fill in the rest of the blanks.

[MezzanineKid]

My advice? Get an iMac. In terms of gaming, it will run new games REAL decent. Not spectacular, but it'll knock the living ***** out of a iBook. I hate iBooks. Because of the graphics card. And the iMac is pretty portable. it buckles into most cars, and it takes under 2 minutes to get going. I bring mine everywhere, even on weekend trips.

Ca$h

[Misha]

The FireWire iBooks utilize the same graphics card (just shrunk down) as the iMacs... they're both 8 MB Rage 128 AGP 2x, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about, Cash, unless you were referring to the older iBooks.

The iMacs do have a 100 MHz bus, versus the iBook's 66 MHz, so the will do a bit better with games, but you'll only be able to play at your desk.

I think an iBook would suit your needs well... oh, and when playing games, having the screen scaled down to 640x480 doesn't really matter. It's when your using text and such that it becomes annoying.

[seanyepez]

Screw 40 frames per second! It's hell of choppy!

Actually, fourty to fifty is more than playable. I just get a bit thrown off when I get into the low twenties or thirties.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Well, remember that the Soundblaster Live is coming out soon (perhaps before Xmas, if yer optimistic).

I'm interested in knowing if we'll see any frame rate increases with this, since now all sound will be done on the card itself....

greg

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

[blizzard]

Unfortunately for poor Chimp, the Soundblaster news will not affect him unless he splurges on a G4 tower. Any of the computers he's looking at will not accept a PCI expansion card, so unless the Soundblaster comes built-in, OEM-style, on the motherboard, he won't be able to use it.

The rest of us, the ones with free PCI slots, should be quite thrilled with the Soundblaster, I should imagine.

[Chimpmaster]

Well Ive finally made my decision.

Im going to stick with my current pc for now. Its quite well featured, and it looks like I am going to have to take a substantial performance hit with mac (for gaming) at quite a high cost.

The imac i read has been reported to have a lot of display problems in this and other forums. People question the ibooks speed and The Power books and g4s are too expensive for me.

In another 12-18 months Ill be looking for a new computer and I will take a second look at macs then.

I cant help but feel a little disappointed but after seeing an imac dvse running a game demo I was suprised at just how poor the ati rage 128 video is. Compared to my voodoo 3 anyway.

Also, a g4 mac with a voodoo 5 or radeon video card seems to only be able to manage 50fps.

Im getting higer than that with my celeron 567 pc with a voodoo 3 card.

I know macs arent designed for gaming, but I need a pc to suit all my needs.

Thanks for all your help and support, it was appreciated. I imagine that when I do buy a new computer, it will be a laptop and quite possibly an ibook as I am impressed with them. Ill probably get a sega dreamcast as well for the games, so my computer can be used solely for business.

Regards,

Chimpmaster.

[MoBius]

Yeah macs are good but if your a pc user stick pc i prefer macs cause the easy ness and i game ALOT. But if you cant afford a G4 and wanna play 3d games like Quake III and Unreal Tourney don't get an imac or whatever else just a g4 is the best bet but if you cant afford it your stuck

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m0b

Why is a G4 expensive? The low-end G4 costs $1,400 US. It is fully upgradable and expandable. nVidia is coming to Mac too.

Of course, compared to a PC, the G4 could be better priced. But it looks great, so how do you exactly price that? =) Plus, it will have OS X in a few months, and that's a real Windows killer.

I wouldn't buy a Mac right now. I would wait until after Jan 9,2001Expo for the new macs to be released. Then you could buy the same G4 for $1,200 probably.

I've come to realize that the Mhz gap is bogus. 1Ghz P3s and Athalons have been out for 9 months, and their speed has NOT improved since, nor are they affordable or widely available.

The G4 will start gaining speed soon, while the P4 & Athalon will still lag. You will be able to get a dual-G4 500Mhz for $2,200 this january, and two chips will be faster than one, always.

[Dr Evil]

Phaedrus:

I dont know what is wrong with your g4, but my 350Mhz B&W G3 with the stock Rage 128 and 130mb of ram allocated to UT at 800x600 with all of the textures on high gives me 28-32 fps! I hope you get your fps up. =)

I've got an iMac DV+/450 with 192M RAM here at work. I've been running UT, Quake III, and Deus Ex on it.

In UT, it averages about 32FPS in 640x480 32b. In Quake III, with 640x480 32b it averages around 45FPS. Don't know how to measure Deus Ex.

So it's not horrible, but not great. If you are a hard core gamer, I wouldn't recommend an iMac. Otherwise, it's a good second machine.