21 replies to this topic

[Maestro]

I saw this on slashdot...

http://news.yahoo.co..._pcworld/125325

Quote

Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on

looks like good it actually works

[Quicksilver]

Have you read anything that's been posted on this forum or on the web?

[Maestro]

Quicksilver, on April 6th 2006, 11:14 AM, said:

Have you read anything that's been posted on this forum or on the web?

what is your point?

I am pointing out an article from yahoo news. Sure other people have posted simliar articles, but this one is from a different source. Wihen will IMG write an article on it?

[DaveyJJ]

I think Quicksilver was asking if you haven't read through the forums?

There are a number of people posting success with various PC 3D games. I am running Rome Total war, Silent Hunter III, Winning Eleven (7), Studio Max 8 and more on my own machine. And they all run fast and perfectly. Every game people are trying seems to be fine ... I'm posting Half Life 2 shots later at 1680x1050 resoltuion with high settingsa nd the game is beautiful and smooth.

[hambone]

Davey -- are you running a MacBook or an iMac?

[DaveyJJ]

17" iMac at work, 1GB of RAM and the 128 card. I'm buying the 20" myself for home with 256 card and 2GB of RAM to future-proof myself somewhat.

Did I say that Studio Max 8 renders stuff 2x as fast on the iMac as it does on a single core 3.06GHz PC boxen? I played a bit of Winning Eleven, RTW and Silent Hunter III at lunch to grab screenies for later.

[Quicksilver]

DaveyJJ, on April 6th 2006, 01:03 PM, said:

17" iMac at work, 1GB of RAM and the 128 card. I'm buying the 20" myself for home with 256 card and 2GB of RAM to future-proof myself somewhat.

If you're talking about "future-proofing" when it comes to gaming, then that's not the way to go.  Buying an all-in-one computer equipped with a video card that has 256MB of VRAM doesn't future-proof yourself one bit--the machine is already outdated (and the quantity of VRAM in a video card is the 3rd-most important spec).

Remember, the iMac is and has never been a serious gaming machine.

[DaveyJJ]

Quicksilver, on April 6th 2006, 02:08 PM, said:

If you're talking about "future-proofing" when it comes to gaming, then that's not the way to go.  Buying an all-in-one computer equipped with a video card that has 256MB of VRAM doesn't future-proof yourself one bit--the machine is already outdated (and the quantity of VRAM in a video card is the 3rd-most important spec).

Remember, the iMac is and has never been a serious gaming machine.

Future-proof myself more than the 128MB version is what I should have said.

[Maestro]

Quicksilver, on April 6th 2006, 01:08 PM, said:

Remember, the iMac is and has never been a serious gaming machine.

Does it have to be? From all these reports, games seem to run very well.

[Quicksilver]

DaveyJJ, on April 6th 2006, 01:31 PM, said:

Future-proof myself more than the 128MB version is what I should have said.

That doesn't help a whole lot, though.  The primary area that it should help is when you use FSAA and/or AF.  By the time that games really hit 128MB cards hard enough to bump up the minimum requirements to a 256MB card, the effects are going to strangle that 12 pipe GPU.

Maestro, on April 6th 2006, 01:37 PM, said:

Does it have to be? From all these reports, games seem to run very well.

To quickly contrast a low-to-midrange card like the X1600XT with a real modern desktop card like the X1900XT, F.E.A.R at 1600x1200 with 4X FSAA and 8X AF on the X1600XT runs at an average of 14 fps, while the X1900XT runs at 45 fps (322% faster).  Before you cry foul at the resolution, remember that the iMac 20" has a native resolution of 1680x1050, so while you could get decent performance at a much lower resolution, it's going to be blurry compared to native res.

If you look at newer games like Far Cry 2 (release date: Q1 2007) and guesstimate the system requirements, the iMac has a short gaming lifespan if it's already borderline on FEAR, which was released almost six months ago.

[the Battle Cat]

Maestro, on April 6th 2006, 09:04 AM, said:

I saw this on slashdot...

http://news.yahoo.co..._pcworld/125325
looks like good it actually works

Hold on to your holdie onie thingie good and tight cause I'm not just moving this thread, I'm moving it to the brand new "Dual Boot" forum.  A whole new cottage industry of posts and OMGs has grown up here since you last visited us Maestro.

[Lemon Lime]

works perfectly for me. know i have 50GB hard drive space for my games. oh and a crappy OS...

[alldaveallen]

I have a question relating to a point in the article that was linked (and I thought I'd ask you guys and not (bleargh) "PC world":

from the article:

Quote

the Boot Camp manual provided intelligent directions about how to tell XP which partition to use and how to format that partition. (If you choose FAT instead of NTFS, you'll be able to write files to the XP volume while you're running Mac OS.)

As someone who can see a lot of good reasons to be able to write to the XP volume (web design cross-platform testing for example), the FAT option sounds good.  But I am a complete noob and I am wondering what are potential downsides? In words of six syllables or less...

[Maestro]

alldaveallen, on April 7th 2006, 01:28 PM, said:

I have a question relating to a point in the article that was linked (and I thought I'd ask you guys and not (bleargh) "PC world":

from the article:
As someone who can see a lot of good reasons to be able to write to the XP volume (web design cross-platform testing for example), the FAT option sounds good.  But I am a complete noob and I am wondering what are potential downsides? In words of six syllables or less...

I beleive that NTFS is unix specific, and FAT is Windows specific. FAT is a more common file system than NTFS. You could run into problems when file sharing from OS 9 if you used NTFS.

I could be wrong

[bobbob]

Maestro, on April 7th 2006, 11:36 AM, said:

I beleive that NTFS is unix specific, and FAT is Windows specific. FAT is a more common file system than NTFS. You could run into problems when file sharing from OS 9 if you used NTFS.

1. FAT is simple and old. It doesn't handle permissions or >4GB files, and it corrupts easily.
2. NTFS is not quite as old and has permissions, journaling, a more fault-taulerant design, and isn't related to Unix at all. OS9 of course will have 'problems when file sharing' because it can't read NTFS. OSX can't write NTFS. NTFS is the better choice in all ways except for sharing data with OSX.

[Quicksilver]

Actually, this is a question that I've been wondering about for ages:  why can't Mac OS X write to NTFS?  It seems like a stupid problem, but that's only because I don't know what I'm talking about.  I'm sure that we'd be able to write to NTFS if it was a simple solution.

[Tesseract]

AFAIK the NTFS specification is not available outside Microsoft. Linux developers have reverse-engineered it enough to get reliable read support, but last time I checked, writing that doesn't corrupt the volume is limited to one very specific (and not very common) case.

[bobbob]

Tesseract, on April 7th 2006, 02:08 PM, said:

writing that doesn't corrupt the volume is limited to one very specific (and not very common) case.

They have very beta support for general writing, IIRC. There's also the 'captive' driver that uses MS' own fs driver to do the work, which requires that you own a copy of Windows.

[Lord Brixton]

works great, but man o man: install mac os, copy data from your old ibook, software update, install bootcamp, i  n s t a l l   w i n d o w  s      x      p, jeez it takes a long time!

[Lemon Lime]

Lord Brixton, on April 7th 2006, 05:05 PM, said:

works great, but man o man: install mac os, copy data from your old ibook, software update, install bootcamp, i  n s t a l l   w i n d o w  s      x      p, jeez it takes a long time!

yah, this whole boot camp thing is much easier than the way Narf and Blanka did it but it is still by no means for the noobs and faint at heart. for example when i was partishoning my HD, it said that my HFS header was damaged so i had to repare it using disk utility. not such a big deal, but for a person who dose not even know what a HFS header is, they would be screwed.
and yes, it dose a really frickin long time.