Amusing gaming experience with my Mac Pro

[grovertdog]

Had the puppy (2.67/1900xt/3GB) for about three weeks and love it more every day- ripping DVDs, transcoding video, running iMovie, iPhoto, and Lighttable simulataneously with nary a hiccup... It has just been terrific. So much so, I forgot about even trying a game on it.

I remember I have Unreal Tournament 2004 for Mac which is now universal, so I found the old software and installed it.

Ran at 1920x1200 resolution (the max allowed by UT, even tho my 30" ACD can do more) with pretty much all eye candy turned up. Was a little stuttery, not quite the liquid smooth I was hoping for. Looked pretty good, but not fabulous. Very playable though, went through a CTF match and enjoyed it.. Figured the less than jaw-dropping speed was likely due to that high resolution I set...

After I quit, I checked System Preferences/Software/App and saw that UT2004 was a "PowerPC" app! Turns out the patch I applied was the one preceeding the universal patch. Downloaded the uni patch (200MB!) installed, and WHOA!

Liquid smooth and super fast at 1920x1200. I didn't bother pulling up framerates, because I really don't care about such things- all I know is UT has never looked this good nor played this good.

Thought I'd share...
Robert

 

[peas]

i play ut2k4 on the win side of it and it's fun. i run it in window mode and notice it takes abot 15 seconds of match time before my frames all come together. before that, its like someone pissed on an oil painting and the paints are dripping downward

happy fraggin

 

[knome]

oh yea, there is a huge improvement, i ran the powerPC version and i was getting 62fps with everything on and in complicated scenes i was getting 20fps. I installed the universal patch and OH MY GOD, i ran santaduck and was getting an average of 250 fps with high of 425 and a low of 175.

 

[lowfi]

UT2004 no wonder

 

[grovertdog]

UT2004 no wonder

Brevity aside, you're point is?

 

[steelfist]

Although UT2004 is quite an old game, it still certainly still sets as a good standard for gaming performance. just because it's two years old ( nearing 3) dosen't mean that the cheapest mac you can buy at the apple store can play it at full graphics quality and resolution.

actually, it's not even that old.

 

[Machead III]

Unreal engines are lazily coded and poorly scalable. Add on top of that the horrific game architecture of Mac OS X and you've got a big pile of slow.

Bootcamp Windows Xp, install something that runs on Source, like Half Life 2, and prepare for multiple eyegasms.

 

[MacsRgr8]

I'm pretty impressed!

That means Rosetta runs very well on your machine! Even a G5 could choke on the game at the max settings, so that is good news.

Glad you found the UB patch... having a Mac Pro with Radeon 1900 XT and not being able to run UT 2004 maxed smoothly would be a let down.

Have fun with that config!

 

[iKwick7]

I tried the Halo demo and the Quake 4 demo on mu new 24" iMac and they both FLEW w/ everything on hight! I really don't play games much anymore (except for civilization- love it!) but I plan on throwing Half Life 2 and Age of Empires 3 in there this weekend (bootcamp). I am pretty sure it will look a little bit better than the 1.4 centrino/512 ram/radeon 9600 mobility laptop I am used to running them on.

 

[apfhex]

I tried the Halo demo and the Quake 4 demo on mu new 24" iMac and they both FLEW w/ everything on hight!

Really? I played the Q4 demo on my MP and (although max res it let me use was 1600x1200) it ran liquid smooth. But I tried out Halo (UB version!!!) and it STUNK with max detail/resolution. I mean it was actually unplayable. I tried the timedemo thing and it scored really good (constant 60-70 fps, and maybe 1% of frames as low as 45 per sec), but actually playing the game was terrible. Also, the flashlight didn't work, so it was near impossible to navigate dark corridors. Can't explain it...

UT2004 UB version runs sooo fast though, haven't looked at the fps but it's well more than would ever be needed. HL2 (in XP) runs at a solid over 60 fps (something like 6x antialiasing, 6x antistropic filtering, all shaders on, 1920x1200). HL2: Episode One had one small area that caused the framerate to drop surprisingly low, but for the most part it performed equally as well.