[V]

System: G5 Dual 2,5 GHz Radeon 9800

10.3.8:

- 800x600 sans Aniso sans Ombres : 50.9 FPS
- 800x600 sans Aniso avec Ombres : 38.3 FPS
- 800x600 avec Aniso 4x sans Ombres : 47.7 FPS
- 800x600 avec Aniso 4x avec Ombres : 37.1 FPS
- 1024x768 sans Aniso sans Ombres : 41.7 FPS
- 1024x768 sans Aniso avec Ombres : 29.6 FPS
- 1024x768 avec Aniso 4x sans Ombres : 38.2 FPS
- 1024x768 avec Aniso 4x avec Ombres : 28.1 FPS

Most recent Tiger build:

- 800x600 sans Aniso sans Ombres : 52.2 FPS
- 800x600 sans Aniso avec Ombres : 40.2 FPS
- 800x600 avec Aniso 4x sans Ombres : 46.4 FPS
- 800x600 avec Aniso 4x avec Ombres : 35.4 FPS
- 1024x768 sans Aniso sans Ombres : 44.2 FPS
- 1024x768 sans Aniso avec Ombres : 31.6 FPS
- 1024x768 avec Aniso 4x sans Ombres : 37.4 FPS
- 1024x768 avec Aniso 4x avec Ombres : 27.9 FPS

Source: MacBidouille

[Cadaver]

Not much different, really.
At least its not worse, given all the new stuff Tiger must be doing in the background.

[videian28]

so much for the drastic improvement I was hoping for

Apple really needs to get on the ball for those of us that like to game

[Weyland-Yutani]

How does this compare to a similarly configured Wintel?

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by Weyland-Yutani:
How does this compare to a similarly configured Wintel?

It tends to run up to 100% faster on similarly equiped Windows boxes.

DP2.5GHz G5, x800XT, 1600x1200 HQ: 36 fps
DP2.5GHz G5, GeForce 6800 Ultra, 1600x1200 HQ: 35 fps
Intel Xeon 3.4GHz, x850XT*, 1600x1200 HQ: 58 fps
Athlon FX-55 (2.6GHz), GeForce 6800 Ultra, 1600x1200 HQ: 76 fps

*The PC's ATI Radeon x850XT used on the Xeon is only ~10% faster than the x800XT according to most PC game sites.

Source of benchmarks (barefeats.com)

[demograph68]

The G5 got owned!

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally posted by demograph68:
The G5 got owned!

Big time.

There is no excuse for this:

Athlon FX-55 (2.6GHz), GeForce 6800 Ultra, 1600x1200 HQ: 76 fps

Doom3 is a 100% OpenGL game designed in-house by the iD for the Mac and PC (Aspyr is just the publisher AFAIK.. regardless it uses no PC/Windows specific tech and relies on exactly the same graphics cards)

The G5 just got owned.

I see no reason why, really. But there it is. (25%-10% slower than an equivalent PC would have been acceptable)

[MilkmanDan]

Originally posted by demograph68:
The G5 got owned!

Man, it totally got served. Its soooo on now.

[exca1ibur]

Originally posted by Weyland-Yutani:
Big time.

There is no excuse for this:

Athlon FX-55 (2.6GHz), GeForce 6800 Ultra, 1600x1200 HQ: 76 fps

Doom3 is a 100% OpenGL game designed in-house by the iD for the Mac and PC (Aspyr is just the publisher AFAIK.. regardless it uses no PC/Windows specific tech and relies on exactly the same graphics cards)

The G5 just got owned.

I see no reason why, really. But there it is. (25%-10% slower than an equivalent PC would have been acceptable)

It was made by iD and dumped off to Aspyr for the port. Not done in house, like Quake3 was. It was a 'Halo' project this time. It uses a lot of windows specific stuff like, optimization for x86 architecture. All this stuff has to be ported over to the Mac as best it can. Proof is nVidia basically designed the 6800 for Doom3 yet on the Mac its slower than the X800 in most of the tests out there. On Windows its the opposite. Over time things will get better I'd assume. I expected the tests to be lower than they are to be honest

[handras]

2.5 Dual Geforce G6800 Ultra, 4 GB ram:

1600*1200 High Quality:
Panther: 36 fps
Tiger: 42 fps

1600*1200 High +tweaked config file:
Panther: 42 fps
Tiger: 49.8 fps

[discotronic]

I am surprised that Doom 3 plays as well as it does on my machine. I can't help but be a little pissed with it though. The Mac platform is being screwed every time a new game is released. I have no doubt that the porting houses do the best they can. The Quake 3 engine is great. I don't think I ever had a game that I considered a bad port when it was used. Games like Doom 3 and Halo make Macs the laughing stock of the game world. I'm glad that there are companies like Blizzard but unfortunately I really don't like the games they produce.

Gaming on a Mac is like being the red headed step child in the world of gaming. The companies don't take our platform seriously. Producing bad ports isn't going to help get people over to the Mac side. I know this has been said so many times that even I am tired of hearing it. Unfortunately it is the truth and I really don't see it changing anytime soon.


Looks like if I want to play some of the better games at decent settings I will just have to upgrade my PC. I don't want to do a console because I love my keyboard and mouse. A controller just isn't the same.

[Olorin]

Of course that is a pre-release version of tiger. Apple may not have done a few things etc who knows. I have heard a lot of different information on this subject. My impression is that tiger should make about 5-10fps difference on average though. I really hope apple gets their **** together on the openGL performance either way...

[jamil5454]

John Carmack is known for his optimization skills on the x86 architecture, not ppc.

[bmedina]

Originally posted by Weyland-Yutani:
There is no excuse for this:

Of course there is: money.

[demograph68]

Originally posted by handras:
tweaked config file

What did you change exactly?

[nforcer]

Originally posted by demograph68:
The G5 got owned!

I believe the correct word is "pwned"

[Dimethyltrypt]

More like the programmers didn't feel like optimizing. Same thing on Apple's end.

[fleaplus]

I wonder if Tiger will help improve low end performance? I haven't even tried Doom 3 yet on PC or Mac, but for people like me who have older hardware like the Radeon 9600 Mobility it would be nice to have a chance at running the game.

Back when UT2004 was released they eventually brought the performace from the 5-10FPS I would get on my powerbook up to the 35-40FPS that it gets now. Hopefully Doom 3 will progress the same way.

[V]

Glenda Adams, Director of Development at Aspyr Media on "Why does Doom 3 run so slow on the Mac compared to the PCs?"

From Barefeats

"Why does Doom 3 run so slow on the Mac compared to the PCs?"

MAC GAME PERFORMANCE BRIEFING FROM THE DOOM 3 DEVELOPERS
Glenda Adams, Director of Development at Aspyr Media, has been involved in Mac game development for over 20 years. I asked her to share a few thoughts on what attempts they had made to optimize Doom 3 on the Mac and what barriers prevented them from getting it to run as fast on the Mac as in comparable Windows PCs. Here's what she wrote:

"Just like the PC version, timedemos should be run twice to get accurate results. The first run the game is caching textures and other data into RAM, so the timedemo will stutter more. Running it immediately a second time and recording that result will give more accurate results.

The performance differences you see between Doom 3 Mac and Windows, especially on high end cards, is due to a lot of factors (in general order from smallest impact to largest):

1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed. It requires re-engineering much of the game's math code to keep data in native formats more often. This isn't 'bad' coding on the PC -- they don't have the performance penalty, and converting results to ints saves memory and can be faster in many algorithms on that platform. It would only be a few percentage points that could be gained on the Mac, so its one of those optimizations that just isn't feasible to do for the speed increase.

2. Compiler differences. gcc, the compiler used on the Mac, currently can't do some of the more complex optimizations that Visual Studio can on the PC. Especially when inlining small functions, the PC has an advantage. Add to this that the PowerPC has a higher overhead for functional calls, and not having as much inlining drops frame rates another few percentage points.

3. More robust and modern OpenGL implementation on OS X. The fact that OpenGL is engineered from the ground up on OS X to be accessible from many applications at once is wonderful for the rest of the world, but does have a performance hit for games. Sharing GL with the rest of the system invokes a small overhead that Windows doesn't have, since Windows can basically assume GL is just in use for one application.

4. OpenGL framework/drivers split on OS X. On Windows, ATI and nVidia are responsible for the OpenGL code all the way from the hardware to the game. On the Mac, Apple handles the top layers of OpenGL and then hands data off to the video card drivers. On Windows this allows the video card manufacturers to do some more direct optimizations that make sure data gets passed to the card as fast as possible. The Mac can't short circuit that process, since there is a fairly well defined boundary between GL and the video card drivers. This is complicated by the more modern GL implementation on OS X as well- Apple can't just put in a bunch of hacks to shove data around the wall and into the cards, just for the game.

5. And the last, but definitely most important factor: Amount of time Apple/ATI/nVidia have had to optimize specifically for Doom 3. On Windows, ATI/NVIDIA spent multiple programmer years tuning their OpenGL implementations for Doom 3, starting back over a year ago while the game was still in development. Apple/ATi/NVIDIA have done an immense amount of work on OS X's GL in the last 3-4 months, but there is no way they could get as much done as the dozens of Windows engineers working on the problem for over a year. 10.3.8 includes a huge number of GL optimizations that make a big difference in Doom 3, and the game wouldn't have been in any shape to ship without these. One of the biggest things ATi & nVidia do on the PC for Doom 3 is have application specific OpenGL optimizations just for the game. They can detect Doom3 is the application using GL, and even which shaders it is downloading -- then they can shift to a mode that is highly optimized just for those cases.

The good news on all of these fronts, especially the last one, is that Doom 3 is such a highly visible benchmarking application, Apple/ATI/NVIDIA/Aspyr are all going to be continuing to work on increasing performance over the coming months/years. Just like what happened with Quake 3, the Mac OS matured, video card drivers got more optimized, and the game was tweaked so that eventually Mac performance is now as good or better than comparable PC hardware (I'd be really interested to see benchmarks with Quake 3 with the original shipping Mac app & version of OS X versus the latest app & current OS on the same hardware). Games drive hardware and the OS, and Doom 3 will likely push Apple to upgrade consumer video cards and continue to spend engineering time in the future to speed up OpenGL."

[- - e r i k - -]

The interesting bit is if these "tweaks" will benefit other games (not based on the Doom3-engine) as well or just D3 because it's such a "high-profile benchmarking app". Which would make benchmarks even more useless if they only apply to specific optimizations for a specific app.

[CincyGamer]

WoW and Tiger... Blizzard just released a special Mac OS X only patch and i am seeing much better rates with this patch and running on Tiger. So, its just not the OS, the game patch make a big difference.. The fps have been up to 47 fps with all options on high except Terrain distance on lowest and anti filetering on half. On a 1 GHZ G4 Tibook
Supercomputer on a chip is right buddy!

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by discotronic:
I am surprised that Doom 3 plays as well as it does on my machine. I can't help but be a little pissed with it though. The Mac platform is being screwed every time a new game is released. I have no doubt that the porting houses do the best they can. The Quake 3 engine is great. I don't think I ever had a game that I considered a bad port when it was used. Games like Doom 3 and Halo make Macs the laughing stock of the game world. I'm glad that there are companies like Blizzard but unfortunately I really don't like the games they produce.

Gaming on a Mac is like being the red headed step child in the world of gaming. The companies don't take our platform seriously. Producing bad ports isn't going to help get people over to the Mac side. I know this has been said so many times that even I am tired of hearing it. Unfortunately it is the truth and I really don't see it changing anytime soon.


Looks like if I want to play some of the better games at decent settings I will just have to upgrade my PC. I don't want to do a console because I love my keyboard and mouse. A controller just isn't the same.

I have to honestly wonder aloud, do you have a life? You're taking this subject far too seriously. Wake up and smell reality. If you really want to get belligerent over something, try learning about a real world concern - something that actually matters. Or, wait, perhaps you should not do that, since you'd probably end up on the wrong side of a given issue anyway, worsening the situation in the process.

[discotronic]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
I have to honestly wonder aloud, do you have a life? You're taking this subject far too seriously. Wake up and smell reality. If you really want to get belligerent over something, try learning about a real world concern - something that actually matters. Or, wait, perhaps you should not do that, since you'd probably end up on the wrong side of a given issue anyway, worsening the situation in the process.

Why are you flaming me? Is that really necessary especially considering the post that I made wasn't a flame but a fact? It wasn't even directed toward you or anybody else here. It wasn't saying that Aspyr sucks or that they didn't work hard on the port. I was merely stating the facts. Doom 3 isn't that great of a port. It makes the Mac platform in respect to gaming look really bad.

My comments are the truth and I can't see where I was being belligerent at all in any part of my posting. If you like the current state of gaming on the Mac that is great for you. For most people gaming on the Mac is seriously lacking.

I am not sure what your issue is but your comments are uncalled for, childish and very rude. It looks like you are the one taking something far to seriously.

[himself]

Originally posted by discotronic:
Why are you flaming me? Is that really necessary especially considering the post that I made wasn't a flame but a fact? It wasn't even directed toward you or anybody else here. It wasn't saying that Aspyr sucks or that they didn't work hard on the port. I was merely stating the facts. Doom 3 isn't that great of a port. It makes the Mac platform in respect to gaming look really bad.

My comments are the truth and I can't see where I was being belligerent at all in any part of my posting. If you like the current state of gaming on the Mac that is great for you. For most people gaming on the Mac is seriously lacking.

I am not sure what your issue is but your comments are uncalled for, childish and very rude. It looks like you are the one taking something far to seriously.

Daaaayuuumn!

PWNED

[a2daj]

From my perspective I didn't think Halo was a bad port at all. But that's mainly because I had a card and system that could handle higher graphic quality and never cared about gamepad support. Saying Doom 3 is a bad port isn't fact, it's an opinion. There has been a lot of technical discussions regarding Doom 3 and even the people that didn't believe Glenda ended up agreeing with her in the end in regards to OSX's OpenGL and drivers looking to be the biggest bottleneck. I think that once Tiger ships, and the various parties have more time to work on optimizations there will be steady improvements as new OS updates are released.

[bbpoint20]

Hey cincygamer, where did you find the WoW OS X patch from 4/6/2005? I also have a 1 ghz PB G4 and get no where near the performance you are stating. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[UnixMac]

1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed. It requires re-engineering much of the game's math code to keep data in native formats more often. This isn't 'bad' coding on the PC -- they don't have the performance penalty, and converting results to ints saves memory and can be faster in many algorithms on that platform. It would only be a few percentage points that could be gained on the Mac, so its one of those optimizations that just isn't feasible to do for the speed increase.



The above quote from Glenda Adams tells it all.... the coding is done on a PC, for a PC, and the ports are done with the per unit sale budget of $50 per game... basically guaranteeing that the port will not be done right, but rather be done cheaply.

As a diehard mac fan, it pains me to say it, but if you want to game .. get a pc, if you want to do anything else, get a mac.

[riotge@r]

^^ Yep, get PC. Ports of PS2 games run like crap on high end PCs... the majority of the time a ported game is sub-par. If it isn't made by Blizzard I do my gaming on my PC.

[PBG4 User]

The major thing that hasn't been mentioned is that video is done inside the kernel in Windows. This was a change they made going from NT3.51 to NT4 and it was specifically to address video responsiveness (or lack thereof) in NT3.51. It started as a win for 3D software and quickly spread to games as NT had a better TCP/IP stack and much better memory management when compared to Win9X. The drawback to this approach of course is bad video drivers can cause BSODs. This is much less prevalent now than it was when NT4 came out.

[trip]

buy an xbox for gaming. that's what I do. just not worth frikin around on a mac for gaming.
if wow was on xbox I'd never use my mac for any gaming at all.