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The Ultimate Gaming Mac

First, I'll start with the obvious. Spending $3,000 on a Dual G5 just to play games is not a wise use of money. If all you want to do is play games, then an Xbox, Playstation 2, or even a homebuilt PC would all be much wiser choices. With that said, the dual G5 makes an excellent gaming platform, especially when equipped with the top-of-the-line ATI 9800 Pro. This 128mb card is one of the fastest cards available, and its performance in the G5 was mostly flawless (see details below).

Although the Mac doesn't have nearly the breadth of titles available as does the Wintel world, many of the market leaders have made the move to the Mac, along with a number of original titles. Thanks to publishers like Aspyr, MacSoft, MacPlay, and others, the Mac is no longer a second-class citizen when it comes to high-level gaming.

With the exception of Quake3, which runs quite well on my G4/733, I didn't do any head-to-head comparison testing of the various games. Instead, I focused on how well each game performed on the G5 relative to frame rate, graphic quality, and load times (both initial and levels within the game). I looked at six games in particular: Jedi Knight II, Nascar Racing 2003, Tiger Woods 2003, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, the X-Plane flight simulator, and Quake3.

I played with each game for an hour or so, to see if the G5 would get noisier or crash after pushing pixels around for that long. During these tests, the G5 was in a room on its own (no other computers), just so I could better hear any change in volume. Although I would occasionally hear the fans slightly increase in speed, they never got as loud as my current G4, and they certainly didn't get as loud as they can in single user mode. I also did not notice any visual artifacts due to overheating, nor did I see any other sign that the machine couldn't handle any of these games. In short, the Dual G5 seems to make an excellent, albeit expensive, game console.

Before I get to the performance figures, here's a small selection of screenshots from the four current Aspyr titles. Click on any image for a larger version. All the originals were taken at 1280x1024 resolution and scaled down to 800x600 to help save some bandwidth.









Jedi Knight II Nascar 2003 Tiger Woods 2003 Tony Hawk 4

The screenshots won't due the originals justice at all, due to JPEG compression and the reduced size, but all of these games looked great with the 9800 Pro providing full-screen antialiasing and the G5 providing the horsepower to drive high frame rates.

Jedi Knight II

If you haven't palyed Jedi Knight, while it's still a first person shooter (FPS), it's got some unique elements with its use of force powers and light saber battles. If you don't like FPS games, you probably won't like Jedi, but if you do, it's a very well done variant. The levels are large and well designed, and the opponents AI is reasonably good.

Having played Jedi Knight II on my PC (a somewhat older Athlon), I knew what to expect of game play. I wasn't ready, however, for the gorgeous graphics and high frame rates. Running at 1280x1024, I was able to set "high" quality on everything and use antialiasing, and still get 90+ frames per second -- better speeds are probably available with more work on the settings, but I haven't spent the time to do so. I played for a couple of hours, and never ran into a framerate problem at any point. Level loading times are reasonable, and much quicker than that of my PC, but there's still a lot of data to be loaded -- load times ran anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds to reload a saved game or change levels. The Dual G5 seemed to handle even complex scenes without a hiccup.

Nascar Racing 2003

I'll start this section by stating that I'm not a big fan of stock car simulations, but if you want to play a driving game on the Mac, that's pretty much the range of options (Spyhunter excluded). As an aside, while looking for other Mac driving games, I noticed a demo for Virtual Grand Prix 2 -- it looks like a solid Mac-only effort at a Grand Prix simulation, and the demo runs very nicely on the G5 -- well worth checking out if you like driving games. But in terms of current commercially available racing simulations, Nascar Racing 2003 is probably the best option for the Mac.

After being pleasantly surprised when my PC-only (or so I thought) force feedback steering wheel worked perfectly with Nascar 2003 (see this hint on the site), I got down to the business of testing. At 1280x1024 with all graphic options enabled, in-game frame rate varied anywhere between 200+ (when doing solo laps) and 120ish (with 10 other cars onscreen). The cars and objects surrounding the track look great, and the Dual G5 has enough power to render all of the objects, avoiding the annoying "fog" effect seen on slower CPUs when things pop into appearance from the distance.

After a few laps, between the great visuals and the force-feedback wheel and pedal set, I began to enjoy the game, despite my dislike for round-oval racing simulations. The AI cars seem intelligent, the reflections off of them are impressive, and the crashes can be truly spectacular. Through all of this, the Dual G5 just kept cranking, never letting the frame rate drop below 100fps. I've also determined through m y testing that I have no future driving a stock car!

Tiger Woods 2003

When I first ran Tiger Woods 2003 on the G5, I had some visual artifacts, as can be seen in the above screenshot (note the partial overhead map on the right). However, when I reloaded it on subsequent plays, the visual artifacts had vanished. I'm not sure if they were transient or if they'll return at some point. If they do return, they do impact game play, as I'm unable to see the map or other key onscreen displays. I'm using the 1.1 beta version of the program from the Aspyr website, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

Compared with my G4 (I know, I said I wouldn't compare them head to head, but I did play quite a bit of TW2003 on that machine), the G5 allows much higher resolutions (1280x1024 vs. 800x600) and features at much higher frame rates. I enabled all the graphical goodies, left the detail levels about in the middle of each slider, and enabled 4x anti-aliasing for a very smooth onscreen image. On the G4, even at 800x600, I had to turn everything off and reduce the detail levels to get decent frame rates; TW2003 definitely likes the added horsepower on the G5. On courses like Colonial, with lots and lots of trees, there were spots where my G4 would really slow down, to the point where it was sometimes hard to swing the club. The G5 doesn't even seem to notice these issues at all, and just draws everything smoothly onscreen and gets on to the next scene.

TW2003 has some amazingly visuals, and they really shine on the Dual G5. If only my real golf swing had the precision and repeatability of the computerized version!

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4

For those who aren't aware, Tony Hawk (the actual person, not the game franchise!) is a big Mac fan, and (I think) every release of Tony Hawk Pro Skater since 2 has been available for the Mac. Version 4 contains many new features to enhance gameplay, including online and various "challenges" to open new levels. Repeating a recurring theme, frame rates are very high at 1280x1024 with high graphics settings and anti-aliasing on. I could get the frame rate to slow down a bit in spots by enabling high-quality shadows; since these didn't greatly enhance gameplay, I turned them off -- but even in those spots where the frame rate slowed, it was still quite fast.

Unless you're young at heart and have exceedingly nimble fingers, you'll want some form of USB gamepad to play Tony Hawk; there are numerous keys to hit rapidly, and I just couldn't get the hang of it. With the gamepad, I was actually able to accomplish some (though not all, yet?) of the challenges on the first level.

X-Plane

X-Plane is the only true flight simulation option that I'm aware of for the Mac, particularly if you're looking for something that allows full IFR aviation and provides a wide variety of aircraft. It also pushes the CPU fairly hard (X-Plane has the most amazing looking clouds I've ever seen in a simulator), and takes a while to load. X-Plane also auto-balances its graphics settings to keep frame rates around 20fps. So you can enable all the eye-candy options, but if your CPU can't handle it, X-Plane will disable features and hide far-away objects in a fog bank.

On the new machine, launch time for X-Plane has been more than cut in half, from 46 seconds on the G4 to 20 seconds on the G5. Once loaded, I was able to keep basically unlimited visibility at 1024x768 (the native resolution). Trying the same thing on the G4, X-Plane automatically reduces the visibility (through the use of distance fog) and viewing options to keep the framerate around 20 frames per second.

The G5 also allows me to enable numerous detail options such as drawing roads, cars on roads, textured lights and cloud shadows, without suffering any reduction in visibility or frame rate. While my private pilot's license will probably remain dormant for the forseeable future, X-Plane on the G5 gives me the opportunity to feel like I still know how to fly ... though those of you who have seen my landings (6mb movie) will probably disagree with that assessment!

Quake 3

Quake3 is one of the most popular 3D FPS games on the Mac, and it's often used as a benchmarking test due to its included demos and excellent graphics engine. For my testing, I looked at three resolutions (640x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024) with both "high quality" and "low quality" settings. I was using the Altivec test [1mb download] version of the Quake3 engine, and I tweaked the config fiile to support multiple CPUs on the G5 (r_smp = 1, and r_smp = 0 on the G4).

Before you read the results, keep in mind that I'm not a professional benchmarker. I ran these tests just for fun and general interest, and the only machine to compare them with was my G4/733. If you want bunches of benchmarks for Quake3 and lots of other stuff, make sure you visit Bare Feats or AccelerateYourMac (where there's a special Dual G5 report that has a bunch of benchmark results).

In high quality mode, I used 32-bit colors and textures, vertex lighting, high quality textures in 32-bit mode, and with sound enabled. Here are the results, stated in frames per second, and higher (longer bars) is better.

As you can see, the Dual G5 is more than twice as fast as G4 at the highest resolution. In looking at Bare Feats, the scores at 1280x1024 are comparable for the Dual 1.42ghz machines, suggesting that the video card is the bottleneck at this point, not the CPU.

In low quality mode, the results are similar but with higher frame rates:

I have no idea if id plans on updating the Quake engine for the G5 or not, but clearly, there's more than enough speed there for anything the game will throw at you.

Conclusion

As I said at the outset, buying a Dual G5 to use as a gaming machine is clearly a waste of money. On the other hand, if you've already decided to buy one, isn't it nice to know that it can also double as a first-class gaming rig if you ask it to do so? I've always felt the need to move over to the PC when I wanted to epxerience the latest and greatest games with high frame rates ... from now on, I think my PC may be getting a lot less use (the PC will still get more games more quickly than the Mac, of course, but things are getting better).

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