Vertigo1 wrote:Durandal wrote:Don't kid yourself. Macs pretty much suck for any kind of serious gaming. The hardware is second-rate, and the framerates that the most expensive and loaded G4 you can get will be abysmal next to a modestly equipped and priced PC.
Uh huh....you are aware that Macs can use the same hardware as PCs, right? You are also aware that mac chips are substantially faster than their PC equivilent, right?
I'm aware of Apple's Marketing Department's claims, yes. However, while the G4 may be the more efficient chip in comparison to the P4 or K7 (it eeks more performance per clock cycle due to a shorter pipeline), the K7 and P4 have enough scalability to overcome their performance deficits. The P4 at 3GHz utterly slaughters the G4 at 1.25GHz, and it does it while being cheaper and more readily available. AltiVec is, without question, the best SIMD set out there, but it can only go so far. If you can't run an operation through the AltiVec unit, it will be done by an unscalable CPU whose true power is being choked by poor motherboard architecture.
Also, while Macs and PC's may use some of the same hardware, such is not the case when it comes to bus speeds and memory. Apple has recently adopted DDR2700 SDRAM in its towers (after an inexcusably long time), but it still retains the slow 133MHz and 167MHz frontside buses due to Motorola's incompetence. As a result, the theoretical bandwidth of the memory is being left unused because the bus can't shuttle data fast enough.
All this contributes to Macs being piss-poor gaming machines. There is no sound card to take sound calculations off the CPU, either. Everything audio-related must be done by the CPU. Furthermore, Apple's OpenGL implementation isn't anywhere near as mature as Direct3D on the Windows side. Apple hasn't had the time to tweak it like Microsoft does with Direct3D, so OpenGL on the Mac isn't as good as it could be. Roll into the equation that Macs don't get the latest and greatest video cards until about 3 to 6 months after they come out for the PC, and even then, the cards are normally $100 more expensive than their PC counterparts for the exact same specs on the card, which has forced many Mac users to buy a PC card and flash it with a Mac ROM and use Mac drivers. This is not an ideal situation for a gamer to be in.
EDIT: Oh, and about the DV Magazine tests ... After Effects has been a notoriously poor performer when it comes to multiprocessing on the Mac OS. The OS X version was little more than a badly-done carbonization with another 0.5 tacked on to the version number. The application still retains the OS 9 scheduling for threads, which isn't good at all for OS X, which is a multitasking OS.
Still, I'm amazed that the G4 is performing as well as it does. A while back, there was a dual 800MHz G4 (maybe it was a dual 1GHz, can't remember) pitted against a 2GHz P4 in RC5 decoding tests, and the G4 blew the P4 away. Of course, that test only measures raw CPU performance, and it isn't really indicative of real world results.
