[maximage]

Any ideas on spec requirements? As I said in another post, Im looking to trade my iBook and Dual 800 (125GB, 1536MB, GeForce4, etc) with Cinema Display for a 17" AluBook, but also want to be able to play the next generation of games when they finally arrive. I know my current rig (tower, not the iBook) should be ok, but will the AluBook stand up to the task? Does anyone know where the game requirements can be found?

[SwarmyCurve]

The 1 ghz 15 and 17 inch PowerBooks should handle at least Unreal 2003. One thing you must do though, is take the RAM up to the limit of 1 gb.

If Doom 3 requires more than a gigahertz g4 and 1 gb of ram, there will be a huge amount of Mac users out of luck - not good for sales of the game!

[Riemann Zeta]

Doom III will probably require a Pentium III 1 GHz with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 video card minimum on the PC side. On the Mac side, I could see a 733 G4 with a Radeon 8500 card as the minimum. In other words, there will be a large number of users unable to even play. I think Carmack might be going too far with this one.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Note that I doubt UT 2k3 will be handled too easy either.

PC requirements are a 733 MHZ, recommend a 1 GHz...but in order to get some decent FPS in combat, you should really have at least a 1.5 GHz machine...

How that will translate over to the Mac port remains to be seen....

greg

[xyber233]

Right now they are saying at least an 800mHz processor and a radeon 7500 would be the system requirements for UT2k3. They aren't sure yet because it isn't finished.


http://www.macgamer.com/news/item.php?id=6313

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Yeah, although their requirements are sometimes on the low side. I'd think the 1 GHz Powerbooks would be the minimum you'd want in order to get competitive frames out of it.

greg

[seanyepez]

A GeForce4 Go, derived from the GeForce4 MX, will not run Doom III at all. It does not feature the programmable pixel shaders found on GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, RADEON 8500/9000, and RADEON 9500/9700 cards.

The GeForce4 Ti 4600, about six to eight times faster than the GeForce4 Go, only gets about twenty frames per second on a 3.06-gigahertz Pentium 4 according to Anandtech. Even if it does run, it'll chop like crazy.

[seanyepez]

The GeForce4 MX doesn't feature per-pixel shading. Even if it does run, it'll look just like Quake III or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (just a lot less fluid).

[mousehouse]

my educated guess would be that the whole rig of 'books will suck at Doom3... if you just look at the demo's and footage floating around on the net you can see it takes top of the line performance to make it playable.

Carmack does that all the time, he builds the games for current technology (speed and graphics wise) and you need to de-activate those features to make it playable on older hardware. the game will run on you Mac but ...

and be honest... a GForce Go and 1GHz G4 are yesterdays tech (speed wise). if you're into Doom3, get a decent PC when the game comes out. if you want a real machine, stick to your Mac(s).

[seanyepez]

I agree. As hard as it is to admit, the GeForce4 Go 440 and Motorola's older G4's are by no means feats of engineering themselves. The whole 17-inch PowerBook, though, is definitely remarkable.

[Riemann Zeta]

Technically, Doom III will be faster on a G4 chip than a similar speed P6 class chip. In fact, due to the G4's ability to do floating-point matrix arithmetic (I think the G4 can store a 4-item matrix of 32-bit floating point numbers), it should quite a bit faster. However, this architecture advantage is a moot point, considering that the P6 architecture chips will be running at 4 GHz by the time Doom III is released. Thus, the most important thing is having a GPU with per-pixel and per-vertex shading capability (e.g. a Radeon 8500/9000/9700 or GeForce 4 Ti/GeForce 5 FX class GPU).

[seanyepez]

Obviously, the G4's going to be faster than a Pentium 4 chip at a comparable clock speed.

[mousehouse]

but a lot of this chip comparison foregoes the fact that bus-speed is also more and more important... it's where the PC has lacked until recently, and non-PC's generally excelled.

the G4 is still stuck at 133-SDR. even my old amd900 does 100-ddr. that's an effective 50% more. getting data between the CPU, core memory and the graphics subset is going to be key to game-playability in the future i think. Doom3 will be just the start.

hey, who cares your new 17" pb doesn't run Doom3. just get the playstation3 to go with it (negligable cost anyway )

[rm199]

obviously I will not be waiting until 2005 to play Doom III (PS3 release). If my best mac wont run it when available I'm sure it will be worth buying a cheap but fast PC that just boots into Doom III

RM

[CatOne]

Originally posted by maximage:
Any ideas on spec requirements? As I said in another post, Im looking to trade my iBook and Dual 800 (125GB, 1536MB, GeForce4, etc) with Cinema Display for a 17" AluBook, but also want to be able to play the next generation of games when they finally arrive. I know my current rig (tower, not the iBook) should be ok, but will the AluBook stand up to the task? Does anyone know where the game requirements can be found?

I just doubt it. I have a dual 733 P3 with a Radeon 9700, and it's not gonna be fast enough for Unreal 2 or Doom 3.

For those games I'd want a 2.5 GHz P4 with a 9700, MINIMUM. I think the top of the line Power Macs would still be a bit slow -- the graphics cards on the Mac are just way behind. Though the Radeon 9700 should be out for the Mac in 4 or 5 months -- at least that's what ATI was saying at MacWorld.

[Eug]

Remember, at Macworld people were saying that UT2003 was only getting around 80 fps at "reasonable" resolutions. That's on dual 1.25 GHz G4s and I'm guessing a Geforce4 Titanium or something like that.

In other words, the current PowerBook will be able to play UT2003, but I'd guess that it's not going to be the greatest gaming experience by any stretch of the imagination.

And to the people who say that the G4 is faster than a P4 clock for clock: While that's true, as seanyepez says alludes, we are not comparing 1 GHz G4s with 1 GHz P4s. We are comparing 1 GHz G4s with 2.2 GHz P4s.

Plus games historically run more slowly on the Mac side even with the same video card and the same MHz. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if a 1 GHz G4 with Radeon 9700 Pro ran UT2003 more slowly than a 1 GHz PIII with Radeon 9700 Pro.

[Hawkeye]

Yes, these games have demanding requirements, but would you really expect the Macintosh port to have any LESS demanding requirements than the PC version? The problem is, machines built before Quartz Extreme was introduced to Mac OS X are significantly underpowered in terms of their GPU in respect to their Windows counterparts.

That's not Apple bashing, that's the truth. But please, let's not say that the companies doing these fantastic ports are setting the requirements too high. Our expectations are too high.

In my opinion, todays Macs are underpowered in terms of hardware. However, their usability in terms of user experience, in my mind, make them just as powerful if not more so than any machine in the Windows world. But usability does not boost FPS.

[PoisonTooth]

Handle them, yes. With good speed, no.

[PoisonTooth]

Originally posted by Riemann Zeta:
Doom III will probably require a Pentium III 1 GHz with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 video card minimum on the PC side. On the Mac side, I could see a 733 G4 with a Radeon 8500 card as the minimum. In other words, there will be a large number of users unable to even play. I think Carmack might be going too far with this one.

Actually, Doom III is rumored to require even more HP than that. Carmack is gunning for the high-end, period.

[PoisonTooth]

Originally posted by Riemann Zeta:
Technically, Doom III will be faster on a G4 chip than a similar speed P6 class chip. In fact, due to the G4's ability to do floating-point matrix arithmetic (I think the G4 can store a 4-item matrix of 32-bit floating point numbers), it should quite a bit faster. However, this architecture advantage is a moot point, considering that the P6 architecture chips will be running at 4 GHz by the time Doom III is released. Thus, the most important thing is having a GPU with per-pixel and per-vertex shading capability (e.g. a Radeon 8500/9000/9700 or GeForce 4 Ti/GeForce 5 FX class GPU).

Oh God man, please. That's all paper theoretical BS. My 1GHz G4 with Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB runs Quake 3 at about 70 - 85 FPS, 1024x768, 32 bpp, high detail. My now-decommissioned PIII 933 Mhz running a GeForce2 GTS 64MB got over 120 FPS with the same settings.

Macs and OSX -- at this stage -- are merely OK for games. If you're looking for a gaming rig, Macs aren't the way to go.