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gururafiki · Mar 25, 2005, 12:53 AM

I dont know much about game developement, but I am curious about something. If a game was built to take advantage of power pc architecture, and used 64 bit processing, how cool could it be? Xbox uses power pc archicture (right?), so a game built right could look better than Doom 3 while keeping a very good framerate. Add support for 64 bit prrocessing, and it could look amazing...right?

entrox · Mar 25, 2005, 06:58 AM

Originally posted by gururafiki:
Add support for 64 bit prrocessing, and it could look amazing...right?

No. Support for more than 4GB of main memory and 64Bit wide registers does absolutely nothing for the games of this decade.

blizzard · Mar 25, 2005, 11:36 AM

Also, just for reference' sake, Xbox uses modified Pentium 3s. Xbox 2 will use modified PowerPC G5s.

gururafiki · Mar 25, 2005, 07:04 PM

ok, well what about a game built for a PowerPC? Most games are ported to the PowerPC, so it seems they cannot take full advantage of PowerPC architecture. This is why we are seeing framerates that are not equal to Intel/AMD machines, correct? What happens when the games are built for PowerPC's? Is this something we will not know until Xbox 2 comes out?

Cadaver · Mar 25, 2005, 08:14 PM

Originally posted by gururafiki:
ok, well what about a game built for a PowerPC? Most games are ported to the PowerPC, so it seems they cannot take full advantage of PowerPC architecture. This is why we are seeing framerates that are not equal to Intel/AMD machines, correct? What happens when the games are built for PowerPC's? Is this something we will not know until Xbox 2 comes out?

We don't have to wait for the Xbox 2... there are games that are heavily PowerPC optimized. Quake 3 Arena comes to mind as an amazingly well-done Mac/PowerPC game, including dual processor support. On similar hardware, the Mac version gets notibly better frame rates than on Windows. Granted this is an older game, but it still demonstrates the Mac's potential.

The main issue is as you've stated, most games do not start as Mac-native applications. They start as a PC app and are ported. Sometimes the port goes well. Sometimes, depending on the techniques used to program the original PC code, the port doesn't go so well.

Now, there are things that can be done to improve the Mac's performance on certain games. The Doom 3 port, so I've read, suffers from a less-than-optimal OpenGL implementation (in terms of efficiency) on the MacOS. This is something Apple perhaps can improve as time goes on, bringing some increased performance to almost anything OpenGL based.

However, given the relative marketshares, I don't expect the PC-to-Mac direction of most cross platform games to change. But, on that note, many of the Mac-only games have very good performance (such as games by Ambrosia).