apple.com — Apple has put some hardware suggestions on their website, for example a Mac mini for "casual gamers", the 20-inch iMac G5 for "intermediate gamers" and - this is where it's getting interesting - a quad-core G5 with 16 GB of RAM and a Quadro FX 4500 for "The Ultimate Gamer". Ok, who needs that for games?
Oct 28, 2005 View in Crawl 4
theqweOct 29, 2005
I configured the G5 they recommend for "The Ultimate Gamer". The total? $15,000. What gamer is going to spend fifteen thousand frickin' dollars on a machine that will be a tenth of that in a few years and can only play maybe 10 different games?Come to think of it, how many gamers out there have $15,000 to spend on *anything*, let along a gaming rig?
ottoOct 29, 2005
A Geforce 7800 GTX would *definitely* eat a Quadro for lunch on most any game. The Quadro is simply not optimized for 3d rendering in that way. A Quadro can display an unholy amount of polys, but not in a real time rendering situation.Anything more than perhaps 2 gigs of RAM is pretty useless for a game. Heck, 1 gig covers nearly all games, the only reason you'd want two gigs is so you can keep a lot of background applications running when you play them, and not swap like a mofo.A quad-core anything is WAY overkill. Most newer games do use multi-threading to some degree though. Consider that most 3d games nowadays use a client server model both for single player and for the networking portions. It's simpler than having to write the thing two different ways. So a dual core makes sense, since the server will be running on one core, and the client on the other. Some significant improvement can be realized this way. Not all games work right even with dual cores, mind you. FarCry has major issues on a dual core machine that are fixed by restricting the process to a single core (set the affinity). But quad-core is still way overkill.
arizona_gloverOct 29, 2005
You can play games on an Apple ?
frem001Oct 29, 2005
you can play games on a mac, but honestly just get a f**king console and leave your mac to do serious work. Games just hog resources especially hard disk space and i don't know how one can justify paying soooo much for a gaming machine (pc or mac), come on they are just games, you could be doing something much more productive especially with a computer as powerful as that. the only problem with consoles is that they don't have rts games, add a mouse to one, rts titles and a hard disk and they would be more appealing. i'd love a quad mac just as a work station, but i'll stick to my dual 2.7 g5 (with 4.5 gig ram) which is awesome even with new products out. I just bought a 17" powerbook for the road and even when new ones come out with intel this will still do it's job, no point in waiting, if you wait now you might as well wait after they have been released for the next revision. if you need something now get it now.
republicoftexasOct 29, 2005
Damn.... that's a lot of RAM. What are you going to use 16 gigs of RAM for?
homerjsimpsonOct 30, 2005
One might think that apple is going to make a serious run at the normal every day desktop market, gaming, professional, and where did that number of this rig costing 15K come from I've got it at 8K which is nothing to sneeze at considering Quake 4 won't come out for at least another year or more along with CoD 2.
mcziggzOct 30, 2005
*******WOW*******MAC = Media Access Controll<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Access_Control">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Access_Control</a>Mac = Apple Macintosh computersome of you peecee nubs are ridiculous
roadsterryanOct 30, 2005
LMAO TO ALL OF THIS!!
miothegreatOct 30, 2005
"Maybe they are gearing up for more games on their x86 chips?"Unless they get DirectX, which will never happen, it'd kill Microsoft, there might actually be less games in the future. (MS's 'emulated' OpenGL, or whatever)
chepistolasOct 31, 2005
There is such as thing as Mac gamers! I am a proud owner of a 17" powerbook and I play a boat load of games. . I religiously play Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, Halo, Max Payne, Unreal 2004 and others. Yes its possible and yes I get more than 45 fps on a regular day. You don't really need that much ram I play with 512 and everything seems smooth, and I do have everything on max settings. (except Call of Duty) its on medium settings :) ) However its a pain to wait for new games, I really want to play F.E.A.R and DOOM but my Mac is getting to be old I guess.Everyone says that you can't rely on an Apple to play games, and one would never think of playing games on a Apple laptop, but IT IS possible and quite fun. Just check it out, put them on your system and give them a whirl! Http://www.insidemacgames.comcheck them out!