MacIntels May be Excellent Mac Game Machines

2004–09February 28, 2006Macs Only!Games
for games that have universal binaries. We ran Doom 3, with the universal binary 1.3revA patch released just over a week ago, on our new 20" 2 GHz iMac Core Duo and it trounced our stock 20" 2 GHz iMac G5 (Rev. B) running at the default (Medium Quality--MQ) resolution/graphics settings. Then, we moved the settings up to those we use for our stock Power Mac G5 Quad (High Quality--HQ) and the iMac Core Duo scored a near miss of the Quad's benchmark. (For details, see how we test.)

Here are the results:

Speed of Doom 3 on Three Macs (frames/sec)*
Mac
Settings
2GHz iMac Core Duo
2GHz iMac G5 (Rev.B)
Power Mac G5 Quad
.
MQ
65
38
-
HQ
51
-
53
*Average of three runs following first run. Red is faster.

The iMac Core Duo may be a real screamer when it comes to 3D OpenGL games running natively. It is 71 per cent faster at running Doom 3 than our iMac G5. The iMac Core Duo falls only 2 fps short of the Power Mac G5 Quad's performance. So far, Doom 3 is the only game we've benchmarked that has been upgraded with universal binaries. In addition, the Doom 3 scores are highly dependent on the graphics card installed and the ATI X1600 with 256MB VRAM in the iMac Core Duo is better than the ATI 9600 with 128MB VRAM in the iMac G5. It may be as good as the Nvidia GeForce 6600 with 256MB VRAM in the Quad but we also got 52 fps in a dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with a better Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra with 256MB VRAM.

We'll withhold judgement until we see more results but the future of Mac gaming is looking very speedy! [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]



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