Quote:
Originally posted by Ti Fighter
It will be intresting to see what cards from ati and nvidia we will get with these machenes. If apple says on top of them to alwase have the bleeding edge cards avalible for mac, that will bring more game developers to the mac. Cuz guys, gamers are not gonna come over if there are no games.
Half life 2 and doom 3 available for mac same time as pc, then were in business.
I think you nailed it. It will only take Doom 3 and Half Life (or maybe just Doom 3
), and the rest amounts to, "if you build it, they will come". If half life and doom 3 both perform significantly faster on Powermac, then gamers will begin migrating to the Mac. At first only a trickle of hard-core gamers will start complimenting their Wintel rigs with Powermacs. But once the hard-core gamers dip their toes in the Mac computing experience, that's when the dam breaks.
Hardware Performance-->Hard-core gamers-->Game Developers-->Hardware driver Optimization-->Serious gamers-->Mass influx of Mac Games-->Casual Gamers-->Return to Hardware Performance
Hopefully this makes sense, but in a nutshell, once the number of Mac gamers reaches a critical mass, it will drive both game AND hardware development. This has always been the catch 22 for Apple, they don't have the performance to attract gamers, and they don't have the gamers to drive performance. In the Wintel world, it's mainly games that drive hardware development. Amazingly, Jobs has used high end digital video, 3d animation and effects, and high end audio to drive performance to insane levels (if rumors are to be believed
).
But no matter if your into games or think they're a waste of time, in the end everyone benefits from the Mac being a thriving game platform. We've got high end video and audio to thank for spurring G5 development, but I also think that when Doom 3 is running fastest on Macs drawing a market segment to Macs, we're going to have to thank John Carmack for giving the Mac platform the support and props that it needed.
A very interesting development just occurred at Id: QUAKE III is now optimized for ALTIVEC! AFAIK this is the only game optimized for Altivec. People are seeing ~10% improvement in FPS, which is nice but not amazing, and in the past Carmack said that Id tried optimizing Quake for Altivec, but the improvements weren't worth the effort. But I suspect this update isn't really for current Macs, but the new Powermacs. How much would Altivec be able to speed up Quake after the FSB bottleneck is removed? Id also used GCC 3.3 to compile this new version of Quake, and if I remember right, it's GCC 3.3 that's getting optimized for the 970. Based on this recent Quake update, Doom 3 will probably have heavy altivec optimizations that make it scream on Powermacs, and droves of Wintel drones are going to start lusting after Macs! The future of Apple is blazing bright now, the best it's been since before Windows.
Eh, I'm probably babbling now, pretty loaded, so I'll sign off.
My brain is going numb!
) poster with the respect he deserves.
