NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Apple Forums › Apple Notebooks › Doom 3 for Mac slower than PC equivalent
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

Doom 3 for Mac slower than PC equivalent

post #1 of 17
3/21/05 at 12:30pm
Thread Starter 
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21988

Quote:
Doom 3 for Mac slower than PC equivalent

Monsters tarmacadmised

By Wil Harris: Monday 21 March 2005, 10:56
DOOM 3 for the Macintosh can run 30% slower than its PC equivalent on similar hardware, according to benchmarks published by Bare Feats.

Testing a PowerMac G5 2.5GHz system with a GeForce 6800 Ultra, Timedemo 1 in the game came out at 53FPS. With an Athlon FX55 (at native 2.6GHz) and similar GeForce 6800 Ultra, the score was 76FPS, with a resolution of 1600x1200 at High Quality.

Mac users are understandably a little miffed about the differences in speed, especially given the huge amount of money that a tricked-out G5 can cost. Aspyr Media, who handled the conversion of the game to OSX, had some interesting comments about the performance.

According to the firm, the PowerPC architecture includes a high performance penalty for floating point to integer conversion, a technique commonly used on PC games. However, the biggest bottleneck appears to be OpenGL. The Mac uses OpenGL system wide, and uses it for many standard operations - but this sharing leads to a performance hit in games. The amount of time ATI and Nvidia have had to optimize their drivers for OpenGL Doom 3 on Mac also appears to be minimal, especially considering the enormous amount of work both companies put into the PC version last year.

Handily, the Bare Feats chaps suggest disabling Shadows in the game to get a better frame rate. Of course, anyone who knows Doom 3 will know that this does rather kill the atmosphere.

Aspyr is quoted as saying that it hopes the fact that Doom 3 is such a 'visible benchmark' will lead to graphics companies spending more time tweaking the performance on the Mac platform. We hope that the poor performance will send a message to Cappuccino that more needs to be done to encourage and aid game development on the Mac. ยต
So if those are the results on a G5 machine what are the chances of being to play Doom 3 on a Powerbook with decent settings?
Reply
Reply
post #2 of 17
3/21/05 at 1:16pm
min requirement islisted as a g5 isn't it?
Reply
Reply
post #3 of 17
3/21/05 at 1:40pm
I'm getting 27 FPS on my PB at 800x600 with medium settings, no shadows, bi linear filtering instead of trilinear, and anisotrophic rendering and AA off.

There's an explanation of why it's slower here: http://www.barefeats.com/doom3.html#why

Hopefully with the release of Tiger and with further tweaks by Apple and Aspyr the performance will increase.
Reply
Reply
post #4 of 17
3/21/05 at 3:04pm
Wait until Tiger is released about mid April. I've read that Doom 3 and other games run mutch faster due to how Tiger uses the graphic card without using the CPU. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right but it's supposed to be much faster.
Reply
Reply
post #5 of 17
3/21/05 at 4:02pm
it is called a very badly done port over.
Reply
Reply
post #6 of 17
3/21/05 at 4:09pm
Rustican,

Nice avatar.
Reply
Reply
post #7 of 17
3/21/05 at 4:09pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rocketman
Wait until Tiger is released about mid April. I've read that Doom 3 and other games run mutch faster due to how Tiger uses the graphic card without using the CPU. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right but it's supposed to be much faster.
only certain games will use the coreimage system to accelerate the graphic, if the company writing the game is to lazy to even optimize it properly i dont think you will see them adding support for core-image.

applications such as apple motion already use core-image technology have a look into them.
Reply
Reply
post #8 of 17
3/21/05 at 5:33pm
Motion uses it's own way of accessing the GPU that's similar to core image, but it's not core image. Core image will be much more robust and should speed up any 3d application regardless of whether or not it accesses the core image api directly because core image is integrated directly into the os and it's working the entire time you're on the computer.
Reply
Reply
post #9 of 17
3/21/05 at 9:12pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobx2001
it is called a very badly done port over.
That's the only kind we get with 3% of the market. A good port would require a lot more resources than the porting houses have. There's also a few things that Apple could do to help, but gaming is at the bottom of their list. With Quake 3, the only game which is actually optimized for the PowerPC, Altivec, and SMP that same 2.5ghz G5 is neck and neck with comparable PCs.
Reply
Reply
post #10 of 17
3/21/05 at 9:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by benroethig
That's the only kind we get with 3% of the market. A good port would require a lot more resources than the porting houses have. There's also a few things that Apple could do to help, but gaming is at the bottom of their list. With Quake 3, the only game which is actually optimized for the PowerPC, Altivec, and SMP that same 2.5ghz G5 is neck and neck with comparable PCs.
Quake 3 on a DUAL G5 is actually as fast as almost anything out there with the right GPU. Q3 Linux is the shiznit! Ever see a water cooled G4? I have, bada$$, look here... http://www.water-cooling.com/gallery...teve/Steve.php
I would pit a DUAL G5 Water-cooled/GPU Water cooled machine against almost anything made on the PC side playing Quake 3.
Mac rules and I am an Alienware guy...
Reply
Reply
post #11 of 17
3/21/05 at 11:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Codename_47
Quake 3 on a DUAL G5 is actually as fast as almost anything out there with the right GPU. Q3 Linux is the shiznit! Ever see a water cooled G4? I have, bada$$, look here... http://www.water-cooling.com/gallery...teve/Steve.php
I would pit a DUAL G5 Water-cooled/GPU Water cooled machine against almost anything made on the PC side playing Quake 3.
Mac rules and I am an Alienware guy...
Ah, the MDD El-Capitain G4 case. Of all the cases Apple put out, that one's my favorite. Too bad they didn't stick a SP G5 in their and sell it as a consumer Tower. Alienware makes some really cool gaming rigs, but I've become more partial to Cyberpower on the PC side. More options and their prices are a bit more reasonable.
Reply
Reply
post #12 of 17
3/22/05 at 2:24am
Doom 3 Mac is on its way to me so I'll test it on my new PowerBook 15-inch with 1.67GHz.
Reply
Reply
post #13 of 17
3/22/05 at 1:23pm
if they wanted a good port they would have giving a decent amount of funding to this company ( http://www.omnigroup.com/ ) and gotten good performace, but the devlopers of this game only care for money.
Reply
Reply
post #14 of 17
3/22/05 at 3:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobx2001
if they wanted a good port they would have giving a decent amount of funding to this company ( http://www.omnigroup.com/ ) and gotten good performace, but the devlopers of this game only care for money.
Omni decided to concentrate on its own applications and stop doing ports about two years ago. They pretty much left MacPlay high and dry refusing to do any patches or port the expansion to AVP2 which had been previously agreeded to. It caused MacPlay to effectively stop publishing Mac games.
Reply
Reply
post #15 of 17
3/22/05 at 5:27pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by benroethig
Omni decided to concentrate on its own applications and stop doing ports about two years ago. They pretty much left MacPlay high and dry refusing to do any patches or port the expansion to AVP2 which had been previously agreeded to. It caused MacPlay to effectively stop publishing Mac games.
with a VERY generous amount of funding they might consider reopening it.
Reply
Reply
post #16 of 17
3/23/05 at 9:54am
MacPlay paid them quite well. They just didn't want to do games anymore.
Reply
Reply
post #17 of 17
5/29/05 at 5:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobx2001
it is called a very badly done port over.
Even Aspyr will admit that. They chose to do a port instead of building a version of the engine from the ground up for the Mac. If they had the resources the results would be very close to what you see on the PC.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Codename_47
Quake 3 on a DUAL G5 is actually as fast as almost anything out there with the right GPU.
Quake 3 was built from the ground up for the Mac. Altivec optimization, SMP, PPC optimization, it's all there. Most Mac games are finished at the point where they run bug free.
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: Apple Notebooks
NotebookForums.com › Forums › Notebook Manufacturers › Apple Forums › Apple Notebooks › Doom 3 for Mac slower than PC equivalent