I've actually been playing several post-2000 games on my G4 MDD recently. It's a dual 1.25GHz with 2MB L3 per CPU, 2GB of DDR333 memory, and a GeForce 7800GS AGP. Running OS X 10.4.11.

From what I've seen so far, gaming definitely isn't PowerPC's forte. I'm not sure if the lacklustre performance is due to poor software optimization, a weak FPU, or memory/AGP throughput issues in the Motorola chipset.

Doom 3, running at 1024x768, using the "Ultra" preset only nets 24.7 fps. Lowering the resolution to 640x480 gains an additional 1.1 fps, so it's definitely CPU or platform limited. There's an interesting thread about PowerPC's lame Doom 3 performance over at Ars: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f … 26e35b054af829f

My maxed out PIII-S machine gets 50.8 fps, which is over twice as fast! This is a single 1.63GHz PIII-S on a 155MHz bus, 2GB of CL 2-2-5 DDR-310 RAM, and a 6800GT AGP.

I've also played Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 on the G4 MDD. Same story: the twin G4 CPUs are much slower than a comparable x86 CPU. However unlike Doom3, UT2004 is kinda playable. Around 25-35 fps @ 1024x768 with most of the visuals enabled.
The only game the G4 does well in is Quake III. However, the OS X version of Quake III is far better threaded than the Windows version. In this game, the dual G4 machine manages to edge out the single 1.63GHz PIII:

The PIII is not far behind.

Disabling the 2nd CPU in the G4 MDD results in a frame rate of 137 fps.
The one thing I've found the G4s to be absolute rockstars at is video playback. Using CorePlayer, which was basically hand-tuned to take advantage of AltiVec, the dual G4s can actually handle 1080p H.264 playback in software, which is just incredible. Both CPUs are nearly maxed during playback, but hey...it works! And 720p is a walk in the park; you can actually do other things while a video plays in the background.

I find the OS/X PPC port of SimCity 4 pretty amusing. My old dual-core 2.3GHz G5 with a Geforce 6600GT absolutely choked on that game. It was only a couple steps down from the fastest PowerMac ever sold, and I really doubt the extra threads from the quad core variant would have made any difference. I suspect no PowerMacs in existence can run that port smoothly.

(SC4 eventually did get a universal binary released, but only in the very last "beta" patch to the game.)

UT2004 ran fine on that machine with most of the settings maxed ("holy shit!"), but the resolution tuned down to 800x600. I ended up playing quite a lot of it that way. Never did do a proper benchmark though.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I've actually been playing several post-2000 games on my G4 MDD recently...

Interesting and thanks for chiming in with your info. For the past 2 days now I've been contemplating buying a system similar to yours (don't know if that config comes with L3 or not, but it's a MDD with dual 1,25Ghz and some basic Radeon it seems), but now having done some minimal research will probably look for an iMac with a 970FX. As for Mac OS being driver overhead choked in some ways, it does seem to be the case, here's some graphs from the Ars dual 2,5Ghz G5 review:

That's with 9800XT, obviously cpu bottlenecked. And here's some graphs for an Athlon 64 3400+:

Interestingly, in Cinebench, the 970FX pretty much matches Athlon 64 clock for clock:

Compare this with 338 points, "rendering" single core score for Athlon 64 4000+.

Would be interesting to see more results in other games for these platforms with more gpus. Any chance you could try Halo on your system?

SC4 eventually did get a universal binary released, but only in the very last "beta" patch to the game.

Is that a binary for both PPC and x86?

Found some Halo benches.

https://barefeats.com/halo.html - release version performance

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1761/7 - G5 2.0 MP, game version 1.5.1 improved performance compared to release

https://barefeats.com/radx800.html - G5 2.5 MP, game version 1.5, X800XT and high resolutions tested

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1314/12 - Athlon 64 3400+ and X800XT Halo performance

Mac seems to be doing well, runs neck in neck with a similarly clocked Athlon 64.

Here's a bit of info about the Q3 port:

One of the lead programmers at Id Software (Graeme Devine) took a personal interest in optimizing the Mac version to take advantage of the Power Mac's Velocity Engine and Dual Processors.

Not exactly a gaming benchmark, but very interesting none the less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=LMSIng6v-LU

The PPE in PS3's Cell is a surprisingly slow core. Another bit of info that I found on it's performance is from the Yellow Dog Linux forums. Running a command line pi calculation:

pi (time $(echo "scale=10000; 4*a(1);" | bc -l))

PS3:

real 11m27.588s
user 11m24.683s
sys 0m1.805s

Quad G5, frequency not specified:

real 4m41.395s
user 4m33.021s
sys 0m0.996s

Lines up with Rene's tests pretty nicely.

an81 wrote:

SC4 eventually did get a universal binary released, but only in the very last "beta" patch to the game.

Is that a binary for both PPC and x86?

Yeah - if you have the Rush Hour expansion or SC4 Deluxe you can use this "beta" patch that supports both architectures. AFAIK there's no patch to the "standard" version of the game, so it's PPC/Rosetta only.

Not really a 'gaming' benchmark, but iBench is also cross-architecture and runs some interesting tests. FWIW my old dual-core 2.3GHz G5 got something like 2.05, my PCI-X 2.0DP got 1.66, my Gigabit G4 with a 1.7GHz dual-G4 upgrade gets 1.05, and my 2012 Macbook Pro i5 gets 6.99. 😜

Edit: also, the modern Quake 1 sourceport QuakeSpasm is still distributed as a universal binary for PPC+x86.