Id Software's John Carmack recently posted a comment in response to comments posted on a Slashdot article about the scathing press that some are giving the Apple PPC-Intel switch. The post responds to another poster claiming that developers will drop PPC support long before the 3-5 year time frame that Steve Jobs has set up for the transition when they discover the increase in performance, citing the fact that the recently released Doom 3 only runs well on the latest Macintosh hardware.

Does he think we just sit around and say "Lets just not support the rest of these macs because we want to screw the user base!"

We work with Apple, ATI, and Nvidia to make everything run as well as possible. Doom 3 had AltiVec code in it, and there were driver changes to make things work better. The bottom line is that the compiler / cpu / system / graphics card combinations available for macs has just never been as fast as the equivalent x86/windows systems. The performance gap is not a myth or the result of malicious developers trying to make your platform of choice look bad.

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