"
hi mike
someone at our university got a new powermac g4 quicksilver 867mhz to
play with today. i was invited to have a look at the machine myself.
it looks much better than on the pictures - i thought last weeks spy
photos ugly, the ones at apple.com not too bad, but the real machine
is beautiful - better than the "old" design imho.
anyway, i couldn't go away without testing my favorite application -
quake3. :D i didn't really have much time, so quake3 is the only
application i tested.
specs:
powermac g4 867mhz (quicksilver) with standard configuration
geforce2mx
128mb ram (192mb vram - they didn't have more ram yet).
quake3 129f (or 129f-2 for mac os x) with 115mb ram assigned
fps are of demo four
*** mac os 9.2 ***
mac os 9.2, default (fresh) config + 32bit color + 32bit textures:
640x480 96.4 fps
800x600 86.6 fps
1024x768 62.3 fps
1280x1024 50.2 fps
mac os 9.2, default (fresh) config + 32bit color + 32bit textures +
SOUND OFF:
640x480 122.4 fps
800x600 100.2 fps
1024x768 65.5 fps
1280x1024 51.7 fps
mac os 9.2, locki's config + 32bit color + 32bit textures + r_finish
0 + s_mixahead 0.11:
640x480 200.9 fps
mac os 9.2, locki's config + 32bit color + 32bit textures + r_finish
0 + SOUND OFF:
640x480 215.1 fps
the game ran fine even with virtual memory on. the sound was mute (in
the system, not q3!) so as not to disturb the other poeple there, so
i can't tell anything about a possible sound lag. remember quake3
runs faster with virtual memory on, but there's usually quite a bit
of soundlag, which is not there with vm off. i made my older tests on
the g4 533 dual all with virtual memory off, so we can't really
compare to those scores. but these scores do look quite nice.
*** mac os x (10.0.4) ***
mac os x (10.0.4), default config + 32bit color + 32bit textures:
640x480 52.6 fps
mac os x (10.0.4), default config + 32bit color + 32bit textures +
s_chunksize 2048:
640x480 57.6 fps
mac os x (10.0.4), default config + 32bit color + 32bit textures +
s_chunksize 2048 + s_mixahead 0.06:
640x480 66.7 fps
mac os x (10.0.4), default config + 32bit color + 32bit textures + SOUND OFF:
640x480 85.0 fps
mac os x (10.0.4), locki's config + 32bit color + 32bit textures +
r_finish 0 + r_fastsky 0 + s_chunksize 2048 + s_mixahead 0.06:
640x480 153.5 fps
unlike in mac os 9 ram was quite a problem in mac os x since it uses
the 128mb almost by itself. when running around it would pause every
now and then, which made the game pretty unplayable. so i guess the
timedemos would be a bit faster with more ram. if i'm lucky i'll be
able to test when the machine has more ram, but i wouldn't count on
that. ;) anyway, i would suspect a g4 533 dual would still be faster
in mac os x quake3 when r_smp is enabled, but that's only guesswork
until tests with the same amount of ram are out...
cheers, oliver
"
