"Apple makes fast Windows PC" -Gearlog

Kosmo

Apparently Apple's strong point is not just it's OS and Hardware combo, but each in their own are superb.

Apple Hardware has been tested in other platforms than Mac OS before but never in a platform so popular before.

Now my minions! Discuss!

Bergamot

No video drivers = No games

Since that's arguably the biggest class of missing OS X apps, this doesn't really help much.

jesusphreak

Well its only a matter of time before drivers are available all over the place.

Bergamot

I don't know; they would pretty much have to be written by ATI, solely for the purpose of running in an Intel Mac on Windows.

Kosmo

OpenGL + someone with coding ability = drivers in matter of hours, and that is a fact.

Every version of ATI and nVidia cards get Omega drivers for Winnie and Linux in matter of days after their release, so there is absolutely nothing standing in the way of gaming double bootable Intel Macs.

jeffbax

As an iMac owner, yeah these new Intel computers are screamers. But I never want to put Windows on them. Dual booting is a gigantic pain, I really can't stand using Windows anymore, and doing it for gaming would dilute the Mac gaming market as people stop buying native games and then we'd be in the crap situation that Linux gaming is in. I think Intel Macs will mean games get ported faster though, eventually once the PPC comps are too slow to be expected to play new games.

jesusphreak

Oh, and several of the newer Macs don't use ATI cards anyway. They actually use integrated video, which is actually quite good and outperforms the ATI cards on some of the older PPC-based Macs.

jeffbax

The Mini is the only one using an Integrated graphics chipset, the MacBook and iMac both use ATi X1600s The Intel beats out the old Radeon 9200 it was using, but its not nearly as good as the X1600.

jesusphreak

Oh for some reason I was thinking the MacBook was running off an integrated chipset. Guess not. I bet the iBooks will, though.

Bergamot

Sadly, yes probably.

lech

When DX gets dropped on the mac, that's the day I get one. :)

Kosmo

Well, I don't want to ruin anybodys day, but the stuff I have been reading about Vista, made me decide that XP will be the last Winnie I'll be using, after that (when the market forces me to upgrade) I'll be leaving PC world completely behind.

From that point on it will be only Macs and Consoles, Intel Mac has become a really applealing new platform for game developers to go that extra mile to port their games to. And modern consoles (and by modern I only mean Revolution, everything else is just Nes with better graphsuxx) are on their way to become the best gaming experience any amount of money can buy.

Sure, MMORPGs and RTS games will be left behind. But It is for the best of all. I don't think that there is any game that can lure me to chug 1000€ just for Vista and DX10 games (well, unless I'll be suddenly making 150,000€ a year).

Besides, when reading this it's painfully obvious that MS has some major problems and I don't want to be one of those suckers paying for their shenanigans.

lech

Kosmo, I agree that at the moment the air is thick with uncertainty towards MS. And I think I've been saying it since I've heard of Vista (then longhorn) that based upon all the things they've done with it, it won't even be worth upgrading (for me at least, anyway). I can't imagine anyone besides the handful of people out there who can run with everyting on full and still enjoy a good ass kicking in the latest game. However, there is a bright side to all of it, MS is forcing change from within without any of us really to have to lay a finger. Maybe all those years of complaints from the outside must have finally paid off. Either way, MS here will be forced to reinvent either part or most of itself, and the way they create things inside. The payoff for us (while I'm sure many will not like it) is quite possibly a better product that scales well, instead of having this beast that will require you to sell your girlfriend/children/parents and step parents into slavery just to enjoy the most bleeding edge hardware just so you can boot into it all. Either way, I'm still pretty sure most will be avoiding vista initially due to not just this little shakeup (didn't something like this happen before 98/me was released?) but the fact that if they are forced to upgrade hardware, many would rather still have that death grip on their windows 98se box than even consider it. I just can't see myself switching over to a mac just yet because it's hardware is still a bit limited in terms of gfx card upgrades, and there's no DX support beyond what's on the card (if that's even there in the first place). When they get near the point of an actual release, hopefully everyone will have forgotten this.

jesusphreak

How much extra work does it take to make your average PC game a Mac game now that the Intel processors are out?

lech

There's still some translation involved. But it's mostly at the engine level as most of the resources the game uses are typically in an already universal format. On the whole, the changes are usually just switching the way the game renders under it's current OS, you also have to take into account whether or not that game has other dependancies. If the games target was initially only meant for windows, well, that company probably will have some work cut out for them, but I'd say that most companies these days from the begining already have plans to hit all consoles and platforms with their game so it's not an issue, those who make a game specificly for one console/os are just shooting themselves in the foot. The only major difference the end-user would experience is program instability and impacted game speed.

Kosmo

Jesus, if you program your game for Winnie platform using DirectX, then the answer is: A LOT! But in the happy occasion that your game has adopted several open i/o libraries and OpenGL (like Doom3) the answer is: Around the time it takes to compile the code with different compiler. I kinda made up my mind back when I heard that MS had scrapped the plans to build Vista from ground up and went for the existing code base, that I wouldn't get Vista. Look at Apple, the company is ever so popular and a major part of that is thanks to their descision to trash the Mac OS 9 and adopt the already magnificent codebase from NextStep OS. Everything build from ground up is the best way to make something work. There would be a great market for a open i/o api like DirectX that was native for Mac, Linux and Windows, and there actually was something like that on the makes but it was scrapped because they didn't get any support from the game development community and MS threatened to sue them for some bullcrap. But as long as it is the money that talks, nothing is going to get done without a trillion dollars put in to it.

lech

Kosmo, I think that the one thing you're overlooking when comparing windows to osx is the fact that apple maintains all the hardware the os is meant to run under. give or take a few hardware drivers, apple seems to do most of the legwork since the hardware is built according to their spec. Where windows, like most *nix variants is capable, as well as meant to run on just about any combination of hardware from the get go. Since I've heard about the little MS shake up with middle management, I've read a few stories and apparently they're going for more of a modular design due to the massive ammounts of backward compatibility the system will have to endure. What that will entail, your guess here is as good as mine when you boil down the specifics. But that means it will and should run under most recent and newer computers which PC users have come to enjoy so much. The two things I tend to hate about macs still are the lack of cross compatible games (seriously, return to castle wolfenstein was released for it what? late 2004/early 2005? and the game is how old now?) altho the selection is mildly getting better. And the fact that every couple quarters, they're releasing something that's bigger, better and costs a fuckload more then what you just bought six months ago. While I wouldn't mind owning a completely disposable computer platform, I just wouldn't want to have to fork over 3/4 of my savings every year just to stay on top of things and be ready to throw it away a year later for the next best thing. If I had to make a prediction: Apple will kill itself like our need for uncontrolable gasoline prices, and Windows will fall apart in the need to support everything including your old 286. Start drawing straws folks, I think inevitability is going to hit, it's just a matter of time.

Kosmo

It is true that Mac OS and Windows are two very different species, but the same still applies to both, Windows is falling for it's own cleverness. Microsoft is today basically controlling what poop ATI, nVidia, Intel, AMD and the rest of the gang is putting out, but still MS is having a problem to manage it. Where Apple doesn't have tha say on things that Intel does, they take the parts that they offer and make their whole computer around it. Two different approaches on the same subject but only one who can manage their shit. Considering this, MS should be the top dog, they could just say "make the cpu and gpu to our specifications like you have been doing for the past decade and we make sure that your cpus and gpus work rock solid on our platform" but they are not capable of such thinking, MS is way too widely spread. Management decides what gets done, and there are several completely different teams competing each other to make things work best for their software. DirectX team fuck cares about the plans of the OS team and IE team doesn't even know if the Office team really exists. The whole company is a mess. Microsoft has more resources than god, but they still manage to fuck things up. And I agree with you on Apple, IF they really want to break the glass ceiling, they should pay more attenttion on what is happening around the world. The fact that the most demanding group is also the group that spends the most money on computers, that is the gamers. And Apple could learn so much if they just let few gamers to tell them what they seek. For crying out loud, the computer is basically a big console, but for office and design applications, who gamer would say no to a system that was still a computer, but worked like a console? Potential wasted by two major companies.

Bergamot

I kinda made up my mind back when I heard that MS had scrapped the plans to build Vista from ground up and went for the existing code base, that I wouldn't get Vista.

Waaaaaaaaaait a second there; I'm calling bullshit on that one.

At some point, a whole lot of people suddenly got the idea that Longhorn was going to be a complete bottom-to-top rewrite, or that Microsoft was going to rebuild the whole damn thing as managed code on .NET (throwing out millions of lines of good code, for no reason?) I suspect an overzealous tech columnist was behind it, but I haven't been able to track down the source.

Microsoft, hearing these rumors, issued a press release stating that, no, they were rewriting specific parts, modifying others, and adding some new features, but that a rewrite was completely out of the question. At this point, they were blamed for "scrapping" these fictitious plans.

Were features planned for Longhorn/Vista, and later cut? Sure, but a complete ceiling-to-floor overhaul was never one of them, and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

Look at Apple, the company is ever so popular and a major part of that is thanks to their descision to trash the Mac OS 9 and adopt the already magnificent codebase from NextStep OS. Everything build from ground up is the best way to make something work.

You seem to have a very strange idea of what "built from the ground up" means. NextStep and Mach were both at least a decade old before Apple "built an OS from the ground up" around them. I could make a similar statement about XP being "built from the ground up" around NT, but I won't, because that's just silly.

Well, I don't want to ruin anybodys day, but the stuff I have been reading about Vista, made me decide that XP will be the last Winnie I'll be using, after that (when the market forces me to upgrade) I'll be leaving PC world completely behind.

I think I just heard Steve Ballmer crying a single tear in sorrow.

I can't imagine anyone besides the handful of people out there who can run with everyting on full and still enjoy a good ass kicking in the latest game.

Since the majority of consumers will get Vista bundled with their next PC, I don't really see how this applies.

Besides, when reading this it's painfully obvious that MS has some major problems and I don't want to be one of those suckers paying for their shenanigans.

Without knowing who the hell this mystery employee is, it's almost impossible to evaluate what this means. Of course, if we knew who it was, his ass would be fired yesterday.

As far as the delay goes, every extra day they have to work on it equals extra polish and better security. Hell, I wouldn't mind a fall 2007 launch if it meant a significally improved product.

Kosmo

> and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. Apply the rule of your scientific praddle to yourself first, before you prove your self to be right, I don't think anyone has anything to prove to you. > You seem to have a very strange idea of what "built from the ground up" means. NextStep and Mach were both at least a decade old before Apple "built an OS from the ground up" around them. I could make a similar statement about XP being "built from the ground up" around NT, but I won't, because that's just silly. Silly as in "OS being built from ground up by some other company then adopted by other company to replace their outdated product is the same thing as basing their old product on an outdated base" silly? > As far as the delay goes, every extra day they have to work on it equals extra polish and better security. Hell, I wouldn't mind a fall 2007 launch if it meant a significally improved product. But you know, that statement applies to every other company other than Microsoft. Or don't you consider over a decade of OS development "extra time for polish and security". Face it, if they had a way of making Winnie perfect, they would have done it by now.

lech

Considering this, MS should be the top dog, they could just say "make the cpu and gpu to our specifications like you have been doing for the past decade and we make sure that your cpus and gpus work rock solid on our platform" but they are not capable of such thinking, MS is way too widely spread.

Kosmo, typically, when a hardware vendor is in the process of making new hardware, it's quite the opposite and it's not often a leveled playing ground. Software vendors don't make insane demands like that (well, maybe apple does), but they do sometimes offer previews to their target market. by doing so, they allow other devs to play with alpha api's along with some hardware samples and so on before it hits a distribution market. Typically, it's never clear until that company unveils it for the first time, or product info is leaked down the chain from the company manufacturing the chips.

At the most basic level, it's typically existing and earlier software being crammed onto silicon to make things run smoothly. If you have a current nvidia video card these days, you'll notice that upon post or reboot the card registers with its own bios and spits out details of what it has onboard. In this case it's DX9 and OpenGL drivers/interpreters/libraries/whatever. Most of these specs have been around for years, it's only now that tossing it up into the hardware/firmware level is where things are begining to make sense since computers can access components faster than most HD's can keep up with.

We might see word of the next generation of hardware from here, but it's quite likely that people up in apple and ms know only a little bit more than we do. Most of this stuff is from R&D and if something good comes of it, that's when we get a hint of it even getting the nod from the public that something like it could be useful.