“We finally benchmarked the Apple PC in Windows successfully, thanks to the latest video driver release. It seems to struggle a bit in games with the level of detail increased, but it’s certainly not terrible, it’s about as good as a mid range notebook system.” Read on for detailed results. Cnet has special coverage of Boot Camp. And on a related note… This is just freaky.
Wait… the iMac’s GPU is a Radeon Mobility notebook chip? It doesn’t mention “Mobility” anywhere on Apple’s iMac pages.
Maybe they tested it on a Macbook Pro.
No, the iMac does have a Mobility GPU. Apple just doesn’t advertise that fact.
That benchmark is from an Apple competitor VooDoo PC, who has a lot to loose if those systems bechmarked really well.
Just pointing that out… Also take a look at:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/index.html For users posting their benchmarks.
Looks like Windows takes the lead in gaming, not by a HUGE amount, but it does point to areas that need to be improved in OS X.
Looks like Windows takes the lead in gaming, not by a HUGE amount, but it does point to areas that need to be improved in OS X.
Well Macs really aren’t built to be game machines which is obvious from the specs. We also don’t know how optimised the new drivers are Apple is delivering for use with Windows – it’s well known most GPU manufacturers optimise for specific games and benchmarks, are these optimisations in the Apple driver (or where they using an ATI-provided driver) ?
As to the Mac bluescreen – an old joke that became true. Kind of sad really.
The current intel Macs are not going to be Apple’s best gaming systems.
Now when the new Powermac comes out… That should be sweet. Lets benchmark/compare that bad boy.
“As to the Mac bluescreen – an old joke that became true. Kind of sad really.”
Yay! Hell’s freezing up at 1.8Ghz!
Oh, please. You seriously thought Macs could have avoided Microsoft for all that long? Office made its way (painfully) onto the Mac, it was only a matter of time before the entire heap spread through. All that’s really left is to port the .Net framework across, and BAM! another platform shot-dead by MicroSloth… Cheer up, if Vista fails as badly as I think it will, OSX Leopard may really become a valid alternative desktop to the general public.
Office made its way (painfully) onto the Mac
Get your facts straight. Office was on the Mac first, and on Windows after that.
Really? MS Office was a developed on Macintosh first? I guess that’s the kind of methods we should expect from Redmond….
Thank you for the note – I’ll look that one up.
That’s not what the parent said. The parent said that on the exact same computer, Windows beats OS X in gaming.
The drivers that Apple is delivering for use with Windows are just ATI CATALYST drivers — the very same ones you can download from ATI, perhaps tweaked with some additional DEVICE_IDs so that they recognize the Mac-edition of the card
No they’re not. Apple maintains their own OpenGL stack for both OS X and Windows. They do this because their OpenGL stack needs special features for the compositor and GUI to hook into. It also needs to be designed around a different set of optimizations (every app rendering to video memory, for Quartz 2D Extreme), versus the OpenGL stacks on Windows, which are optimized towards a single app rendering at a time (eg: games). Apple’s OpenGL stack, for all its nifty features, isn’t that great. That’s one reason why even Universal binary games are slower on an Intel Mac than on the equivalent Intel PC.
Apple maintains their own OpenGL stack for both OS X and Windows.
You can’t be serious. Apple would only maintain code for OS X. The work is already done for the Windows case, and since they’re NOT porting Quartz to run on top of Windows, how would they need compositing features there?
Windows versions of Quicktime and iTunes are not calling Quartz, you know…!
Heh. Slip of the tongue. I meant to say “Apple maintains their own OpenGL stack for both NVIDIA and ATI hardware”.
> Apple maintains their own OpenGL stack for both OS X and Windows.
Um, what? No.
Apple makes use of industry-standard graphics accelerators from both NVIDIA and ATI. Said graphics accelerators make use of standard drivers from both NVIDIA and ATI (respectively), when running Windows.
If you can show me that Apple writes the OpenGL stack for Radeons and GeForces for Windows, then I’ll eat my own hat.
How Apple chooses to implement its compositor makes little difference to an Intel Mac running Windows. Any differences in the drivers for Windows and the official ATI drivers would be motivated by a different reason.
The indirect composition is also going to be the norm in the future on Windows, and it would be fairly straightforward to fastpath fullscreen games while we’re at it.
Someone will probably correct me on this, but I had read in the past that ATI and nVIDIA didn’t develop Mac drivers, but rather just gave updated source code to apple and left it up to them to develop the mac drivers.
If this is true then ATI and nVIDIA really to do work on the mac drivers working with Apple vs just dumping updated source code on them.
The numbers that he provided are easily-checkable by anyone with an Intel Mac that has Windows installed. Anyone with any equally-clocked Core Duo with a Mobility Radeon X1600 could perform basic sanity checking. The hardware in the iMac is hardly the best available for gaming. That’s really just a given. If for some reason the iMac did “benchmark really well,” they’d just start shipping their own computers based on the Core Duo and the Mobility Radeon X1600. Posting BS that could be easily repudiated would make him look like a clown.
Just for the novelty’s sake. The MacOS ‘grey screen of death’ just doesn’t feel threatening enough. And it’s almost always faulty ram that blows up a Mac, I miss the randomness and spontaneity of the true Win-BSOD. But even the new BSOD isn’t as good as the old Win95/98 one – where all you get is a memory location and a tiny register dump. It was a great test for one’s ESP abilities.
..meeeemmmmoorreeees…. la la la la la la …
Ah, yes. As it turns out, ‘Office’ itself was released on Mac first. Why does that sound strange? And ‘Word’ was originally written for DOS.
(painfully) – referring to the kludgy performance of Office 2004 (Mac)
Twenty years later, and it feels like it just wasn’t written correctly from the beginning…
I think a fair test should be to benchmark both of these using OpenGL mode. We know that in some cases the DirectX version of a game is faster than the OpenGL one and there is no DirectX API for the Mac. In a way this is just comparing apples to oranges (pun?)
That depends on whether the OpenGL drivers of the graphics card translate to the equivalent DirectX code or visa versa. NVidia runs DirectX on top of their OpenGL driver, ATI runs OGL on DirectX.
DirectX vs. OpenGL is an argument for the Windows crowd only. It should have no bearing on MacOSX since it has a different implementation of OpenGL anyway.
Where exactly did you get the impression that NVIDIA layers its DirectX implementation on top of its OpenGL ICD?
Neither facts are true. NVIDIA has a unified driver set, with DirectX and OpenGL drivers sharing a lot of common, API-independent code. ATI has seperate code bases for its OpenGL and DirectX drivers.
When comparing Windows on a Mac to Windows on any other PC, it doesn’t matter if the games are DX or OpenGL titles. When comparing the performance of the same title on OS X and Windows you use whatever backend the game uses for that platform and like it. If you want to compare the OpenGL performance on both platforms you match OpenGL to OpenGL.
sure does in XP….especially with the new ATI drivers
(iMac 17″)
😉
I’m not sure if running faster than snot is good or bad?
(my snot is slow)
And it’s only because you mentioned the iMac 17″ – that I decided to ask:
What the heck made them pull the 15″ PowerBook off the shelf? I’d love a 15″ MacIntel PowerBook – a pcmcia card slot is still important these days and as far as I’ve seen the MacBook doesn’t have one.. is this right? or logical?
12″ is too small, 17″ is too big, but the one in the middle was juuust right.. (sigh)
the MacBook Pro is 15.4″… you’ll probably see the Powerbook models there replaced by intel equivilants under the “MacBook Pro” moniker.
and yes, the 15.4″, it includes, according to Apple (http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html) an “ExpressCard/34 slot, which yes, is a PCMIA-made expansion standard.
Overpriced x86 hardware from Apple that performs poorly – yeah their marketshare is going through the roof!
Overpriced x86 hardware from Apple that performs poorly – yeah their marketshare is going through the roof!
Have you ever done anything but trolling every post regarding Apple on OSNews?
Take your agenda somewhere else, will you? If people are seriously considering buying Apple hardware to run Windows exclusively, they’re either sick or have deep pockets, yes. But those are Macs. They’re built to run Mac OS X. While they do happen to run Windows now, they’re not built to such purpose.
Mind the lack of good APM drivers, USB modem and whatnot.
Now that Apple Computer has quietly made it known that its new Intel-based Macs will be able to dual-boot into Windows, we finally will have a basis for benchmark comparisons which will be…. well…. Apples to Apples.
I mean what do people expect? That the Apple motherboard has some special powerz that makes it a million times better then anything else on the market? These just prove that the Macs are just like any other laptop that you can buy. No more, no less.
I’ve been playing Doom III all day on my Macbook pro. At native 1440×900, high settings I get 15-25 fps, and at 720×450 (half res) I get 25-45 fps. All in all, seriously impressive for what is only a laptop, an inch thin.
Over at the onmac.net forums, there have been some reports that the GPUs in the Macs are actually underclocked from specifications, and as a result some people have been reporting that they can overclock the GPU by a significant margin while still retaining stability.
So I guess that is something to keep in mind when comparing graphics performance.
Keep in mind, Both the iMac and MacBookPro use *Mobility* chips, which aren’t comparable to Desktop chips of the same name. They often have lower clock speeds(to reduce heat production and power consumption,) have fewer vertex/pixel pipelines(again, heat and power) and a narrower memory bus (to reduce PCB traces to memory chips, saving boardspace for the already cramped laptop PCB) Compared to a Desktop part of the same name, its likely that the part in use is running at 75% speed, with only 50%-75% the pipelines and with only 50% (possibly less) Memory bandwidth.
As to why they’re using mobility parts in their iMac, its simple. There is no graphics card itself in the iMac, and while its technically possible to integrate a full desktop GPU solution on a motherboard, its not generally done (imagine dedicating a 4″x8″ swath of bardspace just for graphics, not to mention the cooling requirements) So the Mobility part makes sense here too. They did the same thing on the G4 mini, emac, and (possibly) G5 imac; All Mobility chips, though they never advertised them as such.
However, these Mobility parts are certainly more powerful than the typical Desktop integrated graphics solutions available. God save those with the new intel mini, they got intel 955 EXtreme Integrated graphics 2!
Edited 2006-04-08 00:00
… And Intel thought they could avoid Microsoft when placing their processors in a Mac. I guess now their processors will be relegated to do dull things ( once again, as they see it. ).