With the exception of 1024 x 7 x 1024 pixel resolution without anti-aliasing, however, the results weren’t remarkably better. The GeForce 6800 Ultra fared moderately better at most resolutions, with or without Full Scene Anti-Aliasing turned on. Point taken, and thanks to everyone who responded. But readers experienced with PC gaming pointed out quite correctly that Windows PCs equipped with AMD Athlon CPUs clocked at similar speeds to our Power Mac turn in dramatically higher frame rate averages than the Mac.

there’s no substitute for CPU cycles when it comes to games like this.” We think that a faster PowerPC 970 clock speed would certainly help get those numbers up somewhat. That brings us to another point: Many readers of our last benchmark article took umbrage with our comment, “. Athlon-based systems equipped with similar graphics cards turn in much higher results than the Power Mac does. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the results were discouraging for Mac gamers who were hoping to see similar performance to a comparably equipped Windows PC. Frames per second averages were achieved running the timedemo demo1 command the demo was run twice, and the higher average was used. The one exception to that was the tests performed with the 9600XT - Doom 3 defaulted graphics quality settings to Medium and set anisotropic filtering to 1, and we maintained those default settings.Īll tests were performed at “High Quality” video settings with all Advanced Options turned on (High Quality Special Effects, Enable Shadows, Enable Specular, Enable Bump Maps) except for Vertical Sync. Anisotropic filtering was kept to its default setting of 8x for most tests.

For comparison’s sake, we kept the configuration the same as many of the authoritative benchmarks we’ve seen on the PC side of the fence, which, for the most part, are the default settings on high-end graphics cards: Graphics settings set to High Quality, and all advanced settings turned on except for Vertical Sync and Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), where noted. There are certainly a lot of ways to tailor Doom 3’s performance to suit your computer, but that’s something to examine another time. To that end, we’ve now tested the game with several graphics cards: ATI’s Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition and Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition cards, Apple’s Nvidia 6800 Ultra card and the stock Radeon 9600XT card that came with our test system.

This should give Mac gamers a more general idea of how well the game performs on a high-end Mac system. With new video cards in hand, we’ve come back to provide you with more details about how Aspyr’s Macintosh conversion of Doom 3 runs.

Doom 3 ultra settings