That's what I was thinking. But hell if the GeForce4 MX PCI cards are around the same price as that Radeon 7000 Mac or even cheaper than I might as well try it in my G3. Then I'd just use it in a new machine later.
<strong>Percentage of those technologies to be implemented into the Mac? 20% TOPS.
I had an 867 with a GeForce3. Loaded up Giants and half of the graphics options are shaded. Why? Cause even though that game was made to play like a dream on the GeForce3 Apple has yet to implement most of the advatnages of that card into OSX. We never saw FSAA on the Radeon, never saw it on the GeForce3 and I doubt we will see half of the cool technologies that the PC users will enjoy on these cards cause Apple just is not interested in implementing the technology.
Even at its best, Giants: Citizen Kabuto for Macintosh is not quite as feature-rich as the PC version. Certain graphics and audio options that exist for the PC are simply not available for Mac OS X; particularly the special bump-mapping graphics options of the Geforce 3 card and positional 3d audio. No matter what kind of Mac you're running, you will not be able to exploit the same Geforce 3-specific graphics options that the PC can, nor will you be able to enjoy audio features such as occlusion or reverb. {end}
It's poor GeForce 3 support has nothing to do with Apple or Nvidia. It is the fault of the porting house.
How can the GeForce 4 use the PCI bus? I thought that the current Radeon PCI card had already just about hit the ceiling. Will the GeForce 4 work in a PCI slot, or will it have to just drop down its performance?
This seems like the 24x USB CD-RWs. You can connect to the drive using USB, but you can't actually burn at 24x.
<strong>It's poor GeForce 3 support has nothing to do with Apple or Nvidia. It is the fault of the porting house.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The porting house couldn't do it even if they wanted to.
Apple has not allowed nVidia to port the nVidia OpenGL extensions to the Mac (or at least asked them not to). Without out these features no developer can take advantage of the advanced nVidia hardware. The biggest of these features are on the way, and hopefully all of them are coming (I'm only specifically aware of a couple). Both nVidia and ATI will be able to support them in the same way. Developers will write code once that will work on all the hardware, unlike the current state of affairs on the PC under OpenGL where developers have to code to each company's specific extensions (DirectX doesn't suffer this exact problem, although it does have issues of its own).
all that power and we will still be playing Unreal Tournament at 30fps @ 800x600.
Westlake, and namely Glenda Adams (or whatever his/her name is today) have no idea how to port games with good performance. I've always been embrassed to show UT on Mac to my PC hugging friends. Yeeesh, 6 months to 'try' and port UT to OS X and s/he still doesnt have a clue and is FINALLY asking help to Apple engineers.
<strong>all that power and we will still be playing Unreal Tournament at 30fps @ 800x600.
Westlake, and namely Glenda Adams (or whatever his/her name is today) have no idea how to port games with good performance. I've always been embrassed to show UT on Mac to my PC hugging friends. Yeeesh, 6 months to 'try' and port UT to OS X and s/he still doesnt have a clue and is FINALLY asking help to Apple engineers.
Sorry, thats been on my chest for a long time.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its not entirely their fault you know -- there are performance problems which inhibit games on the Mac. The PowerPC is only slightly faster than the various Pentiums at the same clock rate (and not faster than the Athlon/Duron), and up until the 7450 there was no write-gathering which hurt the interactions with the 3D accelerators. The memory subsystems on the Mac are usually behind the PC as well -- the current SDRAM system is very efficient, but current PCs have moved to DDR or RDRAM. The OpenGL drivers on the Mac haven't been great, and OSX is so new that it undoubtably has performance issues.
Westlake isn't perfect, but its unfair to lay the blame completely at their feet.
<strong>One good question : when we should able to see this new graphics macs for the mac. And not the new powermac only.
For the moment in France the only better card that i can buy for my G4 533 is :
a radeon (not interesting compared to a geforce 2 mx) for 280 $
a geforce 3 for 600 $. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Remember that you can go to an ordinary cheap PC store and buy an off the shelf GeForce 2 MX or GeForce 3 card and make it work with a mac. Some brand name cards will workd without needing a firmware update/flash, and others you will need to follow instructions from various sites to do. Go to google and type "geforce mac flash" or something like that. You ll find many sites that explain in detail what you will need and what to do.
Ici en Belgique tu peut trouve un GeForce 3 pour 250-300euro et un GeForce 2 MX pour 100euro.
[quote]Apple has not allowed nVidia to port the nVidia OpenGL extensions to the Mac (or at least asked them not to).<hr></blockquote>
Why would Apple not allow nVidia to port those extensions? Why wouldn't it be in their interest to have better gaming performance/features? Is it because they want a common API, and discourage a proprietary one, as you said?
Why would Apple not allow nVidia to port those extensions? Why wouldn't it be in their interest to have better gaming performance/features? Is it because they want a common API, and discourage a proprietary one, as you said?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes. If it is an ARB approved extension, then all graphics card makers can add it to their drivers. If it is vendor-specific then nobody else could add it without infringing on patents and copyrights.
Up until now there have been very few cards out there which support these advanced features. Now that many more will be selling (Radeon2, geForce4) it has become much more critical to get these advanced features into the API. I would have prefered it to happen faster, but these things take time to do right -- especially when a committee like the ARB is involved in approving it.
Did some digging around. I remembered seeing some stories when Giants came out about some features being disabled. For those that think it's nVidia's fault, take a gander at this:
[quote]Subject: Re: Giants
From: "Timothy J. Wood" (omnigroup)
To: Ben Hines
As we've mentioned in several forums, we need Apple to update their drivers before we support all the options that Giants supplies. Once Apple does this, we'll almost certainly patch Giants. You can get a fps meter by entering the game and sending the message 'fr' in the chat window.-tim
Ben -- in addition to my previous response, here is a response addressing this issue from the publisher.
-tim
From: "Mark Dochtermann" [udgames.com]
I have been asked this question a lot and the best way I can answer it is to say that Giants has the potential to take advantage of a lot of GeForce 3 unique features but unfortunately these features cannot be accessed until Apple's OpenGL driver has been modified. On the PC, video card manufacturers are free to write their own OpenGL extensions and publish them for developers to use. This is good in terms of getting a vendor specific piece of hardware up and running in a hurry. This is bad in that every vendor writes their own extensions and it makes our job as developers that much harder to get a consistent feature set across all hardware. Apple takes a different approach, Apple controls everything that is added to their OpenGL drive. By doing this, they can ensure that only those extensions that would have maximum benefit are added to the driver but this also means that it often takes a bit longer to get extensions into the driver.
Right now the GeForce 3's stellar features are off limits until OpenGL catches up. I know that Apple is in the process of adding these extensions, so it shouldn't be long before we see the results which you can use for your comparison. "
Here is some info on approximateprices for the cards:
GeForce 4 Ti 4600-$399
GeForce4 MX460- $199
GeForce4 MX440-$149
GeForce4 MX420- $69-99
I think the MX460 looks like a sick card for the price and features. How much are Radeon 8500s selling for? $200-$250? Would this card give it a run for it's money?
Still trying to post the pics of some GeForce 4 boxes. Any help would be appreciated. They are on my desktop.
<strong>Here is some info on approximateprices for the cards:
GeForce 4 Ti 4600-$399
GeForce4 MX460- $199
GeForce4 MX440-$149
GeForce4 MX420- $69-99
I think the MX460 looks like a sick card for the price and features. How much are Radeon 8500s selling for? $200-$250? Would this card give it a run for it's money?
Still trying to post the pics of some GeForce 4 boxes. Any help would be appreciated. They are on my desktop.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Again, I will offer to post them if you want to email them to me [email protected]
Comments
<strong>Percentage of those technologies to be implemented into the Mac? 20% TOPS.
I had an 867 with a GeForce3. Loaded up Giants and half of the graphics options are shaded. Why? Cause even though that game was made to play like a dream on the GeForce3 Apple has yet to implement most of the advatnages of that card into OSX. We never saw FSAA on the Radeon, never saw it on the GeForce3 and I doubt we will see half of the cool technologies that the PC users will enjoy on these cards cause Apple just is not interested in implementing the technology.
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
This was taken from
<a href="http://www.macgamer.com/features/publish.php?id=344&page=2"; target="_blank">MacGamer.com</a>:
Even at its best, Giants: Citizen Kabuto for Macintosh is not quite as feature-rich as the PC version. Certain graphics and audio options that exist for the PC are simply not available for Mac OS X; particularly the special bump-mapping graphics options of the Geforce 3 card and positional 3d audio. No matter what kind of Mac you're running, you will not be able to exploit the same Geforce 3-specific graphics options that the PC can, nor will you be able to enjoy audio features such as occlusion or reverb. {end}
It's poor GeForce 3 support has nothing to do with Apple or Nvidia. It is the fault of the porting house.
[ 01-25-2002: Message edited by: neovirusnine ]</p>
This seems like the 24x USB CD-RWs. You can connect to the drive using USB, but you can't actually burn at 24x.
<strong>It's poor GeForce 3 support has nothing to do with Apple or Nvidia. It is the fault of the porting house.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The porting house couldn't do it even if they wanted to.
Apple has not allowed nVidia to port the nVidia OpenGL extensions to the Mac (or at least asked them not to). Without out these features no developer can take advantage of the advanced nVidia hardware. The biggest of these features are on the way, and hopefully all of them are coming (I'm only specifically aware of a couple). Both nVidia and ATI will be able to support them in the same way. Developers will write code once that will work on all the hardware, unlike the current state of affairs on the PC under OpenGL where developers have to code to each company's specific extensions (DirectX doesn't suffer this exact problem, although it does have issues of its own).
Westlake, and namely Glenda Adams (or whatever his/her name is today) have no idea how to port games with good performance. I've always been embrassed to show UT on Mac to my PC hugging friends. Yeeesh, 6 months to 'try' and port UT to OS X and s/he still doesnt have a clue and is FINALLY asking help to Apple engineers.
Sorry, thats been on my chest for a long time.
<strong>What are some free image hosting sites?</strong><hr></blockquote>
You can't link from free hosts, it's concidered hot-linking and they don't want wasted bandwidth.
If you want, email them to me, and I'll up them somewhere. [email protected]
<strong>all that power and we will still be playing Unreal Tournament at 30fps @ 800x600.
Westlake, and namely Glenda Adams (or whatever his/her name is today) have no idea how to port games with good performance. I've always been embrassed to show UT on Mac to my PC hugging friends. Yeeesh, 6 months to 'try' and port UT to OS X and s/he still doesnt have a clue and is FINALLY asking help to Apple engineers.
Sorry, thats been on my chest for a long time.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its not entirely their fault you know -- there are performance problems which inhibit games on the Mac. The PowerPC is only slightly faster than the various Pentiums at the same clock rate (and not faster than the Athlon/Duron), and up until the 7450 there was no write-gathering which hurt the interactions with the 3D accelerators. The memory subsystems on the Mac are usually behind the PC as well -- the current SDRAM system is very efficient, but current PCs have moved to DDR or RDRAM. The OpenGL drivers on the Mac haven't been great, and OSX is so new that it undoubtably has performance issues.
Westlake isn't perfect, but its unfair to lay the blame completely at their feet.
For the moment in France the only better card that i can buy for my G4 533 is :
a radeon (not interesting compared to a geforce 2 mx) for 280 $
a geforce 3 for 600 $.
When you see this stuff , it's not a big surprise if i said to you that i am not ready to upgrade my graphic card for the moment ...
<strong>One good question : when we should able to see this new graphics macs for the mac. And not the new powermac only.
For the moment in France the only better card that i can buy for my G4 533 is :
a radeon (not interesting compared to a geforce 2 mx) for 280 $
a geforce 3 for 600 $. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Remember that you can go to an ordinary cheap PC store and buy an off the shelf GeForce 2 MX or GeForce 3 card and make it work with a mac. Some brand name cards will workd without needing a firmware update/flash, and others you will need to follow instructions from various sites to do. Go to google and type "geforce mac flash" or something like that. You ll find many sites that explain in detail what you will need and what to do.
Ici en Belgique tu peut trouve un GeForce 3 pour 250-300euro et un GeForce 2 MX pour 100euro.
Happy hunting
ZO
Why would Apple not allow nVidia to port those extensions? Why wouldn't it be in their interest to have better gaming performance/features? Is it because they want a common API, and discourage a proprietary one, as you said?
<strong>
Why would Apple not allow nVidia to port those extensions? Why wouldn't it be in their interest to have better gaming performance/features? Is it because they want a common API, and discourage a proprietary one, as you said?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes. If it is an ARB approved extension, then all graphics card makers can add it to their drivers. If it is vendor-specific then nobody else could add it without infringing on patents and copyrights.
Up until now there have been very few cards out there which support these advanced features. Now that many more will be selling (Radeon2, geForce4) it has become much more critical to get these advanced features into the API. I would have prefered it to happen faster, but these things take time to do right -- especially when a committee like the ARB is involved in approving it.
[quote]Subject: Re: Giants
From: "Timothy J. Wood" (omnigroup)
To: Ben Hines
As we've mentioned in several forums, we need Apple to update their drivers before we support all the options that Giants supplies. Once Apple does this, we'll almost certainly patch Giants. You can get a fps meter by entering the game and sending the message 'fr' in the chat window.-tim
Ben -- in addition to my previous response, here is a response addressing this issue from the publisher.
-tim
From: "Mark Dochtermann" [udgames.com]
I have been asked this question a lot and the best way I can answer it is to say that Giants has the potential to take advantage of a lot of GeForce 3 unique features but unfortunately these features cannot be accessed until Apple's OpenGL driver has been modified. On the PC, video card manufacturers are free to write their own OpenGL extensions and publish them for developers to use. This is good in terms of getting a vendor specific piece of hardware up and running in a hurry. This is bad in that every vendor writes their own extensions and it makes our job as developers that much harder to get a consistent feature set across all hardware. Apple takes a different approach, Apple controls everything that is added to their OpenGL drive. By doing this, they can ensure that only those extensions that would have maximum benefit are added to the driver but this also means that it often takes a bit longer to get extensions into the driver.
Right now the GeForce 3's stellar features are off limits until OpenGL catches up. I know that Apple is in the process of adding these extensions, so it shouldn't be long before we see the results which you can use for your comparison. "
<hr></blockquote>
Cleary Apple's doing....
GeForce 4 Ti 4600-$399
GeForce4 MX460- $199
GeForce4 MX440-$149
GeForce4 MX420- $69-99
I think the MX460 looks like a sick card for the price and features. How much are Radeon 8500s selling for? $200-$250? Would this card give it a run for it's money?
Still trying to post the pics of some GeForce 4 boxes. Any help would be appreciated. They are on my desktop.
<strong>Here is some info on approximateprices for the cards:
GeForce 4 Ti 4600-$399
GeForce4 MX460- $199
GeForce4 MX440-$149
GeForce4 MX420- $69-99
I think the MX460 looks like a sick card for the price and features. How much are Radeon 8500s selling for? $200-$250? Would this card give it a run for it's money?
Still trying to post the pics of some GeForce 4 boxes. Any help would be appreciated. They are on my desktop.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Again, I will offer to post them if you want to email them to me [email protected]
Meanwhile, some pics for you guys to chew on in the meantime of the actual card.
Looks like it has VGA, S-Video, and DVI.
Got these off of Ars.
[ 01-26-2002: Message edited by: MacAddict ]</p>
<strong>email me. I'll have them up within 5 minutes if you can get them here soon.
Meanwhile, some pics for you guys to chew on in the meantime of the actual card.
[ 01-26-2002: Message edited by: MacAddict ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
jeez, my hopes of a silent powermac were shot to hell with these cards