WoW Universal Binary FAST on iMac Core Duo
In case you didn't
see my post yesterday over at WoW
Insider, I just wanted to point out over here that, yes, indeed: yesterday's Universal Binary patch for World of
Warcraft means the game runs nice and fast on my iMac Core Duo.On a 1.83Ghz Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and 128MB of VRAM, I'm seeing 50-60 frames per second in unpopulated areas with the graphics set to the defaults. If I ramp all the graphics up, I'm still seeing 40-45 frames per second in these areas. If I enter something like a battleground where there's lots of action going on, I'm seeing about 30-40 frames per second with the graphics set to the defaults and 18-28 frames per second with the graphics pushed to their limit. Keep in mind that 24 frames per second is a stop-motion animated film, and regular full motion video is normally 29.97 frames per second.
Overall, I'm ecstatic. Finally! A Mac gaming machine that actually plays games!
Dear Game Developers: the time to code for Mac is now!
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In case you didn't see my post yesterday over at WoW Insider, I just wanted to point out over here that, yes, indeed: yesterday's Universal...
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I am running a pbook 1.25 2g ram and i have 20fps in IF and 10-5fps in a 40man raid =)
March 16 2006 at 5:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyNice numbers.
My wife runs WoW on her G4 laptop, 1.67 GHz with 512MB RAM... it is choppy in general and unusable in the major cities. We have the video turned down to low settings.
We're going to upgrade the RAM regardless, but wondering if 1.5 GB vs. 2 GB will be noticable. Anyone know?
Has anyone tried to run it on a MacBook Pro?
I have a 1.83 model at home. It has 128mb of video ram. The 2.0 20" monitor version has it as an option.
February 09 2006 at 4:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI'm sorry, i meant 128 MB VRAM.
As far as i know, 1.83 core duo ships with 256MB VRAM.
"24fps is horrible on a computer game."
I wonder if the fps is being reduced due to conflict with Apple's coalesced updates thingy.
It might be interesting to check the fps after disabling coalesced updates using QuartzDebug.
If the game is written for OpenGL, such as Doom 3, then the porting will be pretty straight forward, because now all of their processor specific code (performance tweaking) will not need to be rewritten. So I think we will see more games for the Mac because of their switch to Intel. I also think this will give game developers more incentive to use OpenGL rather than DirectX if they want to support both platforms.
As for frames per second, 24 frames per second is what is used in film and isn't directly transferable to computer monitors (apples and oranges, as film naturally smoothes transitions between the frames, monitors do not). 24fps is horrible on a computer game. Every semi-serious or serious gamer will tell you that 60fps is the minimum for smooth play on anything with fast action (of course on a LCD, 60fps is as fast as you can possible go because of the refresh rate, but on a CRT, you can easily double that). "The eye can't see more the 24fps" is an old Internet Myth, look it up.
I'll be happy when I can buy a Mac Pro (or whatever PowerMacs are going to be called), buy a $500 nvidia card, and send my PC (which I keep around just for games) off to someone else to do its dull little tasks.
So.
I'm not a gamer at all, but I'm curious...Is the FPS you are getting with the new universal binary on par, or better than what would be experienced on a comparably configured G5 machine?
Joseph, sorry, but you're wrong. There will still be need to port games, even though we now have the same processor. World of Warcraft was made a universal binary, they didn't use the Intel version of the game and make it work on Mac. They used the OS X version and made it a Universal Binary. Significant difference.
The thing is Windows games often use DirectX, also most calls to the system are completely different. Yes, it will be easier to port games to Intel processors, which the coders already now, but it doesn't mean that porting companies will go out of business.
i would DIE if hl2 could run on it
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