UT2004 demo to be released today

Damrod said:
So I test played the UT 2k4 Demo on my Mac (G4 1.25GHz single CPU, 768MB Ram, Radeon 9000, OS 10.3), and it works real nice. I can play it with the standard settings on 1024x768 without any problems.

Nice game, the Onslaught mode is really fun. :)
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This surprises me. I have a tibook with the same (almost) specs like your mac and it's really not smooth. As I mentioned before: you never know how well a game runs unless you have seen it on a perfect machine. And eventhough I can see what happenes in the game, it's far away from being called "play without any problems". Is there any way to do a benchmark with ut2004? That would surprise a lot of ppl saying it runs smooth. ;)
 
Zammy-Sam said:
This surprises me. I have a tibook with the same (almost) specs like your mac and it's really not smooth. As I mentioned before: you never know how well a game runs unless you have seen it on a perfect machine. And eventhough I can see what happenes in the game, it's far away from being called "play without any problems". Is there any way to do a benchmark with ut2004? That would surprise a lot of ppl saying it runs smooth. ;)
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Well, I also played it on the Pentium 4 3.somewhat GHz of my parents. It has a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and 512 MB Ram. It runs just a little slower on my machine. So I guess it runs nicely on my machine. :)

But I would like to know how to activate the FPS counter, to have a number to compare between those two machines. :confused:
 
Can you spell sloppy a$$ programming for the Mac platform? This is unacceptable and the company that makes the game for the Mac should be ashamed... This huge speed gap is absolutely programming BS! :mad: Here is hoping that a patch or something will solve this "problem"... :mad:
 
Don't think it has to do with sloppy assed programming. Its just that the PowerPC line of processors really suck with floating point math, especially when Altivec isn't used. Benchmarks I've done indicate that the FPU of the G4 is about the same as the PIII.
 
And why not use Altivec? :rolleyes: Nah! IT IS sloppy a$$ programming because in the Wintel/Amd world they have that demonic DirectX all while we are stuck with OpenGL poor a$$ ports... With UT2003 the first version was not a speed demon either and later on with a patch they got somewhat better! Still, the difference with the Wintel/Amds wasn't THAT huge! This time around they screwed things badly... Sloppy or not, a patch MUST be released in order to, at least, improve the situation :mad:
 
Because Altivec requires that the data be 'packed' into chunks of 16 bytes each. Theoretically, Altivec can work with 8 double precision floating point numbers simultaneously. However, in real life, very few things can be parallelised that much. Things like signal processing (i.e. Photoshop, DivX, MP3, etc) benefit a lot from that, but other apps don't see any benefit.

3D transformation is something that would benefit from Altivec, but because most graphic cards have a transform and lighting engine built-in, Altivec isn't really going to be useful. Believe it or not, there are limits to what a patch can improve...
 
wouldn't it be smarter then to let the cpu do the transform and lighting calculations and give the gpu more air to breathe? I don't think this is an opengl thing, but more a game programming. I know directx somehow includes this all and it should be harder to move such instructions to the cpu. But opengl...
However, it seems to me that it's not the cpu that is the really weak part, but the gpu. Why? Reducing resolution and texture details gives a boost. These are typical gpu tasks. The cpu mostly handles the wireframe which is independent of resolution and texture details.
So, this makes me hope they will be able to patch it. It would be a pitty for such a nice game (which is still not worth to buy a good peecee just for this case)
 
No, the GPU is far more able to perform the transform & lighting. That's its sole purpose of existence (well, not quite. But almost). This is even more so, with GPUs like the GF4 (non MX) and Radeon 9000+. These GPUs have the ability to execute small programs (called shaders) that do all sorts of cool effects that would just kill the CPU.

You got the part about being GPU bound correct. But on the mac, many games are bound by the CPU too. Among the chief reasons is because the sound processing is done by the CPU, instead of the sound card. Top of the line PCs have the SBLive Audigy(2) that handles the processing of sounds. Macs have to rely on the CPU to do that. They should be able to patch it to make the sound system more efficient, but it remains to be seen how much of an improvement in speed can be obtained.

But hey, that's progress. Games get better graphics, sounds, physics, etc. These cost processing power, and which is why many gamers get into the vicious upgrade cycle.
 
I won't argue anymore because, simply, this will not lead us somewhere... I strongly believe that the UT2004 is a byproduct of sloppy programming and you believe that is simply a matter of hardware... Anyways, the UT2004 and any other similar game for that matter, aren't on my gaming radar! Nah!

Doom 3 however... ;)
 
i know this is about the ut2004 demo, but on hulkaros note i have to say we will see whether this is sloppy ass programming or not, seeing as Doom 3 god John McCarmack has glorified OS X and I even saw in a article from a while ago where he had said he had ported over all of his work to his mac to make sure the mac version is just as good as the pc one. Hopefully my little old 1 ghz iMac with nvidia geforce 4 mx, 64 mb vram and 512 mb ram will be able to play it at some level! If not, theres always the xbox version hopefully..........
 
Well, call me jaded, but I've been rather disappointed with the way the G4 & G5 work, and with Apple's marketing department. The G4 is a nice chip, but it is no where near the performance of standard x86 chips in most applications. Neither is the G5. Sure, a few photoshop filters and some scientific apps, but that's about it. As a research student who runs a lot of simulations, I was rather disappointed. But I still love by Powerbook :)

I'm hopeful that Doom 3 will run well on Macs too. John Carmack has said that the minimum spec is a 1Ghz machine and GF1/Radeon 75xx and 256 MB of RAM. Here's a link http://www.doom3portal.com/info/systemreq.php
 
Viro, your statement of G5 being underpowered is surely jaded... If you must be disappointed with someone then make sure that someone is you! :eek:

Last time I checked the 3rd FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER on earth is a G5 based one... That beast ain't playing games and certainly isn't used for Photoshop :mad: Is for scientific stuff which need every single bit of horsepower... That monstrous horsepower happens to be the G5 and not some P4/Athlon BS out there! :p

If some/many gaming companies choose to code a lot better for the Wintel cartel out there that doesn't make G4/G5 slow procs :rolleyes: Damn, even ATI doesn't make any more specific drivers for OS X! They simply wrap the Windows ones and deliver 'em to us, supposedly with not THAT big performance penalty :mad:

As for you being a research student with lots of simulations, you may need to research in other ways with your amazing piece of technology aka PowerBook :D

As for the link of Doom 3 needing 1GHz CPU compared to the other Wintel/Amd games that got ported to Macs, yes, even the crap ported ones, I bet that for Macs will be a lower figure... But then again I could be wrong :rolleyes:
 
Hehe, you probably missed what I said about the G5 being good at *some* scientific apps and Photoshop filters. Who knows what Virginia Tech is running? Check this page http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/simd.html for why Altivec performance isn't that easy to accomplish. Look especially at the section on non-uniform vectors. Then remember that most data in applications can't be shoved into a vector, and operated on simultaneously. Let's just look at a very very simple mathematical equation.

C = A + B
D = B + C

Altivec is no help here, as you can't get C & D to be done in parallel since D depends on C. Plus, most of the data structures in programs are of the non-uniform type, its going to take a major rewrite just to make them Altivec compatible. This applies to my programs, and to games as well.

The G4 & G5 are only competitive with x86 only when Altivec is used. The Athlons have a triple pipelined FPU, while the G4's is single pipelined, and the G5's is double pipelined. That 1Ghz *minimum* that applies to x86 should apply to Macs as well (sadly). That means my Powerbook is going to struggle with Doom 3 :(
 
Umm Demo's been out for almost 2 weeks now... watch where u download it from there are a bunch of bad links..... i got mine on Macupdate downloaded in and hour and works fine..... Oh and the Game .. AWSOME!!!!!!!!
 
Just went to Mac update. There isn't any Doom 3 there.... Where did you download it from?
 
Does the demo run slow for anyone else or is it just my network connection? What are the system specs for UT2K4? ::evil::
 
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