[rambo47]

Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, StarWars, MOHAA, etc. Frist person shooters mainly. Would I be better served by a singel processor for gaming on a Mac, or are some of these games optimized for dual processors?

[Truepop]

Quake 3 has a dual processor opt'd version. with UT you will have a problem because games running in classic are crap and G5s will not boot to OS 9.

I have dual 1GHz G4 that runs all those games almost flawlessly and you won't be disappointed with a dual 1.8

[gururafiki]

Originally posted by Truepop:
with UT you will have a problem because games running in classic are crap and G5s will not boot to OS 9.

My version(s) of unreal tournament (2003 & 2004) run fine in OSX. I don't have classic on my computer. It is also my understanding (I may be wrong) that Unreal does not support dual processing.

[Lateralus]

Unreal Tournament does not support Duals, and I do not believe 2003 does either. But 2004 does.

[Don Pickett]

FWIW, Ghost Recon fan great on a single 1.6 with all options maxed out.

[Leonard]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
Unreal Tournament does not support Duals, and I do not believe 2003 does either. But 2004 does.

One clarification to this. The only benefit that UT 2003 or UT 2004 get from dual processors is that the sound runs on the second processor.

By the way Truepop is referring to the original UT. There is a half-decent patch to the original UT to allow it to run in MacOS X. The original UT has no support for dual processors.

[Lateralus]

Originally posted by Leonard:
One clarification to this. The only benefit that UT 2003 or UT 2004 get from dual processors is that the sound runs on the second processor.

Still makes a huge difference in performance.

[Commodus]

I would hold off until WWDC (June 28) before grabbing a PowerMac, but if you had to get one now a dual 1.8 would be fine - just be sure to upgrade the order to include at least a Radeon 9600 Pro. There's a dramatic difference in performance between that and the FX 5200 Ultra.

[Link]

One big thing to note about the powermac is there's a 99% chance of expected updates between the 26th and 28th, but dual vs single?

The dual will be a better machine in every way -- and even if the game doesn't support DP, the machine will be able to allocate more of that one processor to the game

Remember though that singles are dirt cheap, on the other hand the torque provided by the 2nd processor is still almost worth it.

[traktimino]

a dual processor really owns a single in every aspect

[itai195]

Originally posted by Link:
The dual will be a better machine in every way -- and even if the game doesn't support DP, the machine will be able to allocate more of that one processor to the game

While that's true, most Mac games don't seem to gain much from dual processors.

[rambo47]

Thanks for all the replies! I'll definitely wait for WWDC to see if the boys in Cupertino give us some new bells and whistles, but it looks like a DP 1.8 will be joining the network. Of course, if a DP 1.8 kicks gaming butt, then a DP 2.6 or 3.0 .....