Tiger to bring improved 3D gaming performance

  Submitted by Anonymous macOS 62 Comments
As we already know, the performance of DOOM 3 for Mac in comparison to its Windows counterpart is a little depressing - but those tests were on a Mac running Panther. Now running Tiger, some have seen an incredible performance boost. A clean install of both the latest Tiger beta (8A414) and DOOM 3 saw a steady 35-40 FPS at 1024x768 on High quality, with 2x Anti-aliasing enabled. Quite an improvement over Panther.
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Intel ships 64-bit, 2MB L2 Pentium 4s

Intel 24 Comments
Intel yesterday formally began selling its Pentium 4 6xx series, rolling out four versions of the 90nm, 2MB L2 cache chip. The chip giant also added its latest P4 Extreme Edition to its official price list. The P4 630 (I got one of these), 640, 650 and 660 are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, respectively. All four chips support an 800MHz frontside bus. They also bring Intel's AMD64-like 64-bit addressing technology, EM64T, to the mainstream desktop, along with the latest version of the company's SpeedStep power management system, to minimise energy consumption. The anti-virus 'execute disable' bit is also supported.
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Mandrakesoft Announces Changes to Mandrakelinux

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 44 Comments
"Mandrakesoft, publisher of the Mandrakelinux operating system, today announces adjustments in the 2005 Mandrakelinux release schedule. Several changes will occur: (1) a new release cycle for retail products, (2) a new naming scheme, (3) the integration of Conectiva's technology into Mandrakelinux, and (4) the immediate availability of a transitional product." Read the rest of the press release here
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Arch Linux: Why It Rocks

Linux 128 Comments
2003 was the year with Gentoo written all over it in the Linux universe. Last year was Ubuntu's & MEPIS'. I believe that Arch Linux's year is the current one. Read more for a comparison of Arch to existing distributions, and why we think it rocks and where we think it still requires some work.
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KDE-Bluetooth 1.0-beta1 Released

KDE 16 Comments
The KDE Bluetooth Framework is a set of tools built on top of Linux' Bluetooth stack BlueZ. It provides easy access to the most common Bluetooth actions. The first beta of the upcoming 1.0 version is available for testing. My Take: I had a quick look and I was positively surprised by the level of depth and abilities offered in this beta (notification icon & daemon, action's kio addons, kcontrol pref panels, konqueror registered protocol, other utils). However, much work remains to be done in the usability department, as it's pretty complicated to do anything more than send a file to another Bluetooth device (many of the related dialogs are scattered in many places and they feel disconnected).
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First Look at Linspire 5.0

  Submitted by SilentBob4 Linspire 43 Comments
Adam Doxtater writes that some developers build desktop Linux for a living, and some build it with heart. Some developers understand the needs of desktop users and some just seem to live inside your head. Some may argue that Linspire, Inc. is either, neither, or both, but I am here to clear the air. For good. Review with screenshots.
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Mac Doom 3 performance issue revealed

Games 88 Comments
Bare Feats, a popular site devoted to Mac vs PC benchmarks, benchmarked Doom 3 on the Mac to investigate what are the issues with Mac's slower performance in Doom 3 compared to the PC. They even contacted the developers responsible for the port who explained that it indeed has to do with Mac's architecture, gcc's slower optimizations and the OS X itself. From the article: "PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed."
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