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Macologist has posted an in-depth article on the performance of Doom 3 on different Macintosh system configurations. The benchmarks cover systems from the highest-end G5 available down to a 500MHz G3 Cube. The article talks about what actually affects the performance of the game and what you can do to make it run better on your system.

The article has this to say about lower frame-rates on low-spec systems:

We have found that Doom 3's playability fares extremely well in the actual game given the timedemo numbers of any chosen setting, and in this sense it's a very good port in contrast to the crawling play of Delta Force BHD on lower-spec systems. In particular, we have found that even if the Doom 3 timedemo mark edges below 20 fps, the quality of play in the actual singleplayer game at that setting is enjoyable, darkly scary, and definitely worth playing for lower-spec Macs, despite the occasional framerate stutters due to scene scripting (but almost never in firefights). Such minor issues are likely easy to overlook for the gamer with an older Mac who is considering buying this game for playability despite acknowledging suboptimal performance-- witness the G4 iMac owners playing Call of Duty.

Doom 3 Introspective: Mac Performance Followup

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