Buying a Power Mac & feeling screwed (need advice/input)
I'm a broke college kid that will soon be spending a good portion of my income on a Power Mac for school work as well as photo/video hobbies and some mild gaming. I've put off buying a new computer for way too long, so I have no choice but to buy one soon. However, this Intel switch has put an end to my new computer excitement and has got me worried that whatever I buy will become out of date prematurely. I will be royally upset if I cannot buy programs/games/upgrades that will work on a G5 system once Intel based Power Macs hit the stores in 2007. What can G5 Mac buyers expect in the way of graphics cards and software/gaming compatibility 3+ years from now, and realistically, how much of a performance hit will a G5 running some sort of emulation take? I know Apple will support OS and software upgrades, but the third parties have me concerned. How long can we expect Ati or Nvidia to make new graphics cards for an old system? I know information will be scarce at this point, but if anyone has some educated guesses or answers based on existing information that is above my head it would really help me out. Thanks.
Comments
Originally posted by stustanley
your main concern should be gaming. With the new xcode, all programs written from now on WILL be compiled for PowerPC and Intel, however im not sure where this will stand with games (cos they are written slightly differently i think.) So really, for all other programs you should be fine.
Programs that will have the most difficulty with the transition will be things that are significantly optimized... Especially things with assembly-level optimizations. Video games are a good example, they tailor a lot of code to the video cards. Things that are tailored specifically to hardware, and possibly bi-pass the OS APIs to directly access the hardware might have problems.