Quake 3 benchmarks

catulluscatullus
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I know that a lot of people have questioned the results of Apple's Quake 3 test. Well, if you go to SharkyExtreme's reciew of the Radeon9800Pro, they get results similar to what Apple did (test system configuration was identical to the Dell system used by Apple). The results in Apple's test are still lower than I would expect but not on the order of 100+fps as some have indicated.



http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...211_2106171__4

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    dstranathandstranathan Posts: 1,717member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catullus

    I know that a lot of people have questioned the results of Apple's Quake 3 test. Well, if you go to SharkyExtreme's reciew of the Radeon9800Pro, they get results similar to what Apple did (test system configuration was identical to the Dell system used by Apple). The results in Apple's test are still lower than I would expect but not on the order of 100+fps as some have indicated.



    http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...211_2106171__4



    I cant wait until we use Doom 3 as the benchmark. :0)
  • Reply 2 of 7
    telomartelomar Posts: 1,804member
    Quote:

    Quake 3 benchmarks were run with the default High Quality options and the in-game detail levels ramped to maximum in our special MAX setting



    The problem is here they've modified the settings while Apple supposedly used nothing but the defaults.



    I'd really need to look over what they did exactly but the results certainly seem a bit weird. I'm sure the answer is in the detail somewhere though.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    o and ao and a Posts: 579member
    All i know is what i saw. And what i saw was the powermac smacking the p4 in photoshop and mathmatica and in sound editing.



    Maybe the same won't be true for quake but then again is quake optimized for 64bits?
  • Reply 4 of 7
    catulluscatullus Posts: 4member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by O and A

    All i know is what i saw. And what i saw was the powermac smacking the p4 in photoshop and mathmatica and in sound editing.



    Maybe the same won't be true for quake but then again is quake optimized for 64bits?





    the 64 bit nature of the 970 wouldn't increase performance in Quake 3. I don't think that the graphics card matters that much any more. If I recall correctly, performance on Quake 3 is bounded by the CPU.

    I'm still wondering if anyone can explain the low scores that Apple achieved on the P4 system. Did they really run the demo at normal settings or did kill performance by turning AA on?
  • Reply 5 of 7
    junkyard dawgjunkyard dawg Posts: 2,801member
    There's a new Altivec-optimized build of Quake that just came out. I wonder if Apple used it in their benchmarks. It's giving G4 users ~10% boost in fps, if their video cards aren't limiting performance.



    I'd rather not think about the validity of Apple's benchmarks until Powermacs ship and there is solid performance data on the G5 that's worth discussing.



    Unfortunately, I suppose the net will be thrashing with speculation and masturbation over Apple's Quake 3 benchmarks for a good two months.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    the inevitablethe inevitable Posts: 62member
    The reason why Toms's Hardware and Sharky Extreme's benchmarks show higher FPS than Apple's in Quake 3 is because the sound was disabled. As anyone will tell you, sound takes-up loads of CPU power which can easily explain the massive difference in FPS. The reason why hardware sites turn the sound off is so that they can better judge a video card's performance; since different sound chipsets take up different amounts of CPU power, its a good idea to eliminate that variable from the tests. However, Apple's benchmarks aren't trying to show differences between video cards, they're trying to show differences between how fast Quake 3 will run on the G5 and the P4, so its good to test under real-world conditions since most people aren't going to be playing with their sound off.



    How do I know the hardware sites turn-off the sound in Quake 3? Every respectable hardware site publishes the conditions of the test (ie. settings and hardware used), so whether sound was on or off is an important setting to document. Both Tom's Hardware and Sharky Extreme dedicate a full page to this, and you can find where it says sound is off under their Qauke 3 settings section.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    msanttimsantti Posts: 1,377member
    I just kind of get concerned about Mac ports not getting the optimized treatment.
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