Brief Hands-On Report--Quake 4 for the Mac has Arrived

On Wednesday, we received our copy of Aspyr Media's new 3-D first person shooter Quake 4 pre-ordered from Amazon.com but we have been too buried in the annual income tax filing ritual to do much with it. We have installed Quake 4 on our Power Mac G5 Quad and new 2.16GHz MacBook Pro (it also arrived Wednesday) and have played several levels on both.

Quake 4 runs very well on both machines at the default settings but using a higher resolution and enabling shadows take a heavy toll on Quake 4's speed just like in Doom 3, the engine that Quake 4 is based upon. Unfortunately, there is no benchmark demo with this release to measure Quake 4's speed. None of the benchmark demos we found on the Web, including the "hwspirit.demo" file, will run on either Mac. Apparently, we will have to record our own benchmark demo file, if that is even possible with the Mac version.

We are able to toggle on the speed counter in frames per second (FPS). During play while taking the energy cannon bunker on our Power Mac G5 Quad (Nvidia GeForce 6600 graphics card) with the resolution at 10245x768, graphics at high quality and shadows off, the FPS ranged from 60 down to the mid-30's in heavy action. It dipped to the high 20's when firing the energy cannon. We were unable to turn on the use of multiprocessors on the Quad ("unknown command" error).

During the same sequence of play on our 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with the same settings the FPS ranged from 60 down into the mid-20's and dipped to around 20 when firing the energy cannon. We were also unable to enable the use of multiple CPU cores. The MacBook Pro seemed only slightly slower than our Power Mac G5 Quad.

The graphics are equal to those of Doom 3, as might be expected. The play is very similar but with a different setting and models--kill the Strogg before they kill you as you, a marine called Matthew Kane, perform a large number of exploits with Rhino Squad in an attack on the Strogg stronghold on their planet Stroggos. We've fired the Strogg's energy cannon in one level but we have not yet used their 4-legged mechanical walkers nor their hover tanks.

Quake 4 also has internet and LAN multiplayer capability but we have not yet explored that option.

About the only thing we don't like about Quake 4 is having to always wait through three separate movie "commercials" (id Software, Raven and ActiVision) after launch. Stay tuned. [Bill Fox]