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Questions about powerbooks and games and speed

post #1 of 20
3/8/05 at 4:16pm
Thread Starter 
I am thinking about making the switch to apple. This will be my first apple however I have used a couple of my friends G4 desktops. I am an avid gamer however I normally don't use my laptop for games, however I would want to play Doom 3 and Halo on the powerbook. What is everyones experience with these games on their Powerbook. One other quick question how would the speed of a 1.5Ghz G4 compare to a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook if both were configured the same way.

Thank you
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post #2 of 20
3/8/05 at 4:42pm
Well, I've been playing Halo recently on my 15" 1.5 Powerbook. Granted I'm not a big gamer, but I've found no drawbacks for the game on this system. Haven't played Doom, so I'm not sure on that one.

As far as the Centrino and Powerbook...

I went from a 1.3 Centrino to my Powerbook. While the Pentium was crisp on doing singlle tasks, it would always get upset if I tried doing much more than that on it. On the Powerbook, I ran a test awhile back to see how well it holds up. I played some music in Itunes, burned a dvd, had a browser, Photoshop, Mail, Ichat, Font book, and bit torrent open, plus two seperate AVI files open at the same time. There was NO slowdown in the system. I even used the f9 key in Expose to show all files and skipped around to each application running. It went perfectly smooth. I never encountered any bogging later on after closing files.

So, the question is really whether you like one fast program running at a time, but a system slowdown if you do more than that, or whether you don't like system slowdown at all. And the Powerbook is quite fast, too. Also, I'm using 512 megs of ram to do this.
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post #3 of 20
3/8/05 at 4:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by snake12
I am thinking about making the switch to apple. This will be my first apple however I have used a couple of my friends G4 desktops. I am an avid gamer however I normally don't use my laptop for games, however I would want to play Doom 3 and Halo on the powerbook. What is everyones experience with these games on their Powerbook. One other quick question how would the speed of a 1.5Ghz G4 compare to a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook if both were configured the same way.

Thank you
i cant speak to games, but i'd say the 1.5 g4 is faster at most mundane tasks.. opening apps, copying stuff.. and also it's multitaskale.

the performance you compare is a push.
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post #4 of 20
3/8/05 at 7:31pm
According to IGN ( http://mac.ign.com/articles/573/573270p1.html )
DOOM 3 preliminary system requirements:


* Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.6 or later
* CPU Processor: PowerPC G5 or later
* CPU Speed: 1.5GHz or faster
* Memory: 384 MB or higher
* Hard Disk Space: 2.2GB free disk space
* Video Card (ATI): Radeon 8500 or better
* Video Card (NVidia): GeForce FX 5200 or better
* Video Memory (VRam): 64 MB or higher
* Media Required: DVD Drive

I dont think a powerbook will play doom 3 then. Since I dont have a mac i am not 100% sure though. It seems like is should thought since the graphics card is a 9700. Hummm...
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post #5 of 20
3/8/05 at 9:36pm
well all know those min requirements are useless, they assume that you have no other apps running in the background and will play the game w/o any eye candy
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post #6 of 20
3/9/05 at 12:11am
That's why it's MINIMUM requirement.
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post #7 of 20
3/9/05 at 2:46am
wow - requires a g5 ouch
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post #8 of 20
3/9/05 at 2:55am

Doom3 Benchmarks on a Mac

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/02/doom3/index.php
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post #9 of 20
3/9/05 at 9:35am
and the macworld says the minimum reqs are a 1.5 G4...so go figure...

maybe we'll see those mythical G5 lappies from Asus this summer eh?
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post #10 of 20
3/9/05 at 3:44pm
maybe 4 a christmas present!
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post #11 of 20
3/9/05 at 5:28pm
A cool thing about gaming on a Mac is that, because of the way OpenGL is integrated into the OS, you don't get any penalties for gaming in a window, unlike when gaming in a window on Windows.
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post #12 of 20
3/10/05 at 8:39pm
doom 3 is a joke of a port over, it got horrible rates on a top g5, but other games do run well on a powerbook, halo and ut2004 will get god frames rates and have MUCH lower specs.

sadly because most games are ported from windows to mac it leads to the game still depending on the windows os and hardware hence leading to horrible mac performance.

on the other hand some are ported very well (look at omni) and run well on macs, but if your a hardcore gamer get a pc.
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post #13 of 20
3/10/05 at 8:55pm
why would u be b playing anything besides ut2k4 & halo/2 anyway? personally i wouldn't make a laptop purchase based on doom3, that's just me. it's a neat flashlight demo. but after u r done w/ it, well, u'll b done w/ it. i haven't touched it since i beat it. just my 2 cents.
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post #14 of 20
3/10/05 at 9:37pm
Doom3 got pretty good frame rates. It's not as fast as it would be in Windows, but it's almost impossible to make OS X devote it's sole attention to one programme at a time like you can do in Windows. On the bad side, that means you don't get games as fast as possible, on the plus side it means you can burn cds and photoshop in the middle of your games.
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post #15 of 20
3/11/05 at 3:58pm
It seems to me that an apple is a great "work" machine. But if you want to play games you really are better off with a PC (or I'd be typing this on a mac now...)
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post #16 of 20
3/11/05 at 4:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by eskimo_socks
It seems to me that an apple is a great "work" machine. But if you want to play games you really are better off with a PC (or I'd be typing this on a mac now...)

well some games do run well on mac (the ones that are ported well) but other do not.

yeha but a hardcore gamer should not look into getting a mac.
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post #17 of 20
3/11/05 at 5:39pm
Just ordererd mine, get in on Tuesday. But one question, does it play World of Warcraft good?
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post #18 of 20
3/11/05 at 6:39pm
i can't imagine it wouldn't play it well. you bought hte one in your sig? 1.67?
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post #19 of 20
3/12/05 at 11:27am
h00ligan; I bought the Combodrive, not the superdrive => 1.5ghz not 1.67.. The only difference of those two computers is the drive and the CPU right?

The 1.67 doesn't have a longer battery or something like that?
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post #20 of 20
3/12/05 at 4:09pm
no, if anything it would be a tiny amount shorter. It's the same machines aside from video ram and optical drive.

You should be all set man!
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