14 DAY TRIAL // Porting a game from PC to Macintosh is not such an easy job. After Aspyr Media Inc. announced that they are going Gold with the Macintosh version of Doom3, and they will begin shipping in the mid-March, the guys form MacWorld decided to give it a test.
The conversion of a game from a gaming hardware to another is widely used lately, but in the world of Mac, Doom 3 is especially important, proving that other games from id Software can be ported to Mac as well.
The test system used by MacWorld was a "Power Mac G5 2.5GHz dual processor model, equipped with 2.5GB of RAM and ATI's new Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition graphics card - the fastest ATI card you can get on the Mac, equipped with 256MB VRAM".
The chosen OS was Mac OS X10.3.8 and during the test no other applications were running in the background.
The game was tested in five resolutions: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The best results were achieved in the lowest resolution, in which the system reached 47.1 fps (No FSAA - Full-Scene Anti Aliasing), 44.9 (FSAA 2x) and 40.8 (FSAA 4x).
With these results, the Power Mac may not be a Pentium or Athlon-killer, but the good news is that the game is playable.
The guys from MacWorld also tested the game on 17-inch PowerBook G4/1.5GHz system with 1 GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics with 64MB VRAM and Mac OS X v10.3.8, on which the average frame rate was around 20 fps.
Aspyr has confirmed those values, testing the game on a Power Mac G5 1.8 GHz system equipped with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition card - considered a "mid-range" system for this game - obtaining about 29.6 frames per second.