PTherapist wrote:TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:I don't know who screwed up in the Apple 3D Graphics department during the iMacs time but someone sure did. The chips inside of Macs tend to perform at about 1/3rd the performance of there PC counterparts. A good example is the 9600 Pro inside the last gen eMac struggling to run Alien vs Predator at 800x600, a game from 1999. On PC it runs fine on a Rage 128.
The only thing iMac/eMacs are good for IMO are as quick easy to setup systems for 2D games like Heroes of Might and Magic and Railroad Tycoon. I basically just use my iMac as a display piece items (its the more sought after Bondi Blue 233 model)
I always found a recurring theme with Apple stuff that they always had underpowered Graphics. Not as bad in a desktop where you can replace it, but if it's onboard you were screwed. I have a 1.25GHz G4 Mac Mini that would've been so much better with better graphics.
With regards to game performance on similar hardware, you have to remember too a lot of Mac ports are not so great and that OpenGL can often be much slower than DirectX on Windows. Factor these things together and it isn't good for Mac gaming really.
I thought it was just me, but I did notice that some games just perform dreadfully on these older Macs, going by combined 6500, iMac G3 350, and more recently, 9600 w/G3 400 and Rage 128 experience.
Driver just bogs down even on Medium, let alone fully cranked up. Unreal Tournament... well, my MDD G4 in its dual 1.42 GHz G4/Radeon 9250 glory will chew it up and spit it out, but I wouldn't recommend that on G3-era hardware anyway because the iMac is terrible at running it. At least SiN is decently playable at a modest 640x480 on the iMac, I suppose.
What's really jarring is that two of the pack-in games with the Power Mac 6500 were MechWarrior 2 (a special RAVE-accelerated version) and Descent II (also RAVE-accelerated, and whose data files aren't compatible with a certain Classic Mac OS source port that uses OpenGL and Glide instead, alongside adding SoundSprockets support for CPU-intensive reverb), and the 6500's integrated 3D Rage II GPU is just not cut out for MechWarrior 2 at all. Not even close. Then I think about how the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh uses the same Gazelle motherboard as the 6500, and all I can think about is how ripped-off the original buyers were when they could've bought a 9600 at a fraction of the price.
I could throw the Voodoo2 into my 9600 for Glide compatibility, come to think of it, but I have yet to run into a Mac game that supports Glide, but not RAVE or OpenGL. A Voodoo3 or even Voodoo5 PCI Mac Edition would be even more preferable, but I don't want to think about the price tag on those things right now. (That and my Voodoo5 5500s are AGP cards, not PCI ones.)
Incidentally, one of my favorite aspects of the Power Mac 9600 is that it does not include integrated graphics in any capacity, unlike most PCI Power Macs. You get six PCI slots to cram with whatever you want, no worries about DA-15 Mac to DE-15 VGA monitor adapters on whatever graphics card you're likely to use these days since most of them use VGA ports anyway (sometimes DVI!), and you still have five left over for other things. Oh, and you don't need an AAUI transceiver for 10BASE-T Ethernet, too; that's already right on the motherboard!
With all that said, though, it really does seem like the peak of Mac ports was just before the 3D acceleration boom, as software-rendered games like Wolfenstein 3D and X-Wing/TIE Fighter had nicely redrawn graphics on Mac. System Shock had a respectable one too. But going forward, you get that lousy 3D performance and no apparent 3D sound acceleration whatsoever (SoundSprockets is CPU-based from what I can tell, and intensive enough that only that one Descent II source port I found actually uses it).
Even in the OS X era, it seems like Battlefield 1942 performs much worse on the MDD G4 than it ever did on the old Athlon XP 1800+/Radeon 9600 XT box I first started playing it on back in the day, and you'd think that dual 1.42 GHz G4s with 2 GB of RAM and only a slightly lower-end Radeon 9600 would actually do better. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try testing with a higher-end AGP card some day, though online reviews and benchmarks suggest 60 FPS in stuff like that and UT 2004 isn't happening without a G5.
