This is slow...

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taumel(Posted 2006) [#1]
Hi,

i just had a chance to look at how fast an intel-iMac20 is. I tested some blitzmax and unity stuff and with the tests i did the intel-iMac20 is nearly as slow as my miniMac(1.25).

It seems that the whole 3d stuff is slowed down a lot. My Radeon 9800pro on the pc looks a lot smoother than the X1600 on the mac. I was really surprised by this.

Bamboo ( http://bamboo.marune.de ) for instance wasn't this smooth and beside of this depending of the light position parallax mapping was flipping to flat normal texturemapping and back...

As for blitzMax the pc-default grid (number 13 on this version http://gridwars.marune.de ) runs here with 6ms. On the iMac it ran with 32ms. 33ms on my miniMac. It was completely bottlenecked on the gfx-side.

Are openGL-calls also somehow emulated by rosetta?


Greetings,

taumel


Winni(Posted 2006) [#2]
Nothing is emulated in Rosetta, but the graphics drivers for the new Intel Macs still suck. Same with the QuickTime performance.

The problem is not hardware related, but Apple still has to do a lot of homework on the software.

However, (universal) Doom 3 at 1024*768 with ULTRA details turned on does not run much slower on the 20" iMac Core Duo than it did on a Dual G5 2GHz with a 128 MB Radeon 9800 that I had here before the iMac. I currently only have 1 GB RAM in the iMac, which actually is the cause of the few slowdowns that I experience. The PowerMac had 1.5 GB RAM and no loading delays at all, but also a lower detail level due to the less VRAM.

(Universal) UT2004 runs like hell at 1680*1050 with all details activated - I actually have never seen the game performing like that before.

Still, the entire system could perform much better if Apple would optimize the software as much as they did it for the PowerPC systems. Which, in the end, they will. Right now we are suffering through the typical early adaptor phase...


taumel(Posted 2006) [#3]
Hi Winni,

usb really improves a lot. I just uploaded the usb-files for bamboo ( http://bamboo.marune.de ) and now it's pretty smooth on the intel iMac i tested once. :O)


Regards,

taumel