Civ IV G5 Performance

[Brad Oliver]

The topic of this thread is performance on a G5, not performance on a home-brew PC.

Geez, no kidding. Where are all these people coming from?!?

 

[AlanH]

Probably PC People who are fed up with Apple ads poking fun at them, and swooping like vultures when they see a wounded Mac user

 

[floppymoose]

You can build a PC for $650 that runs Civ4, and most other games beautifully.

Can you also build me a wife that wouldn't mind *another* ugly, noisy, heat producing computer scattered about the house? How much does that run?

 

[enkiduMT]

build me a woman, make her 10 feet tall

Seriously folks I suspect you peeps with really crappy performance might be running something else in the background? APE made my system very flaky, so I removed it at the suggestion of a buddy who works for apple. Or maybe the video drivers for your particular set up blow chunks (Brad please fix these chunks asap! =)

all I know is it runs fine and dandy on my revA 1.8 iMac G5 1GB gfx4 64MB

I hope future patches clean up even more chunks

 

[MxxPwr]

Well, get ready to point fingers at me and laugh.

What is a G5? I mean, what is it liken to: a desktop or a laptop?

 

[MxxPwr]

You can build a PC for $650 that runs Civ4, and most other games beautifully.

CPU Athlon 3700+) $100
Case/PS $100
RAM $100
HDD and DVD drives $100
Video Card Nvidia 7900GT $250

If you really want to play games, and not have to worry about whether they will play well on your Mac, just invest in a separate system.

Hmm... where's XP? That's about $300; unless you have your resale card handy.

Where's the motherboard?

Where's the sound card? PC internal sound sucks...
up game performance that is.

Where's the monitor? Apple's come with monitors right? (I mean really; do they? I don't know, I build PC's.)

Speakers anyone?

 

[AlanH]

A G5 is a bit like an AMD Athlon if you use the wrong end of a telescope

It's a 64 bit CPU made by IBM, with a very high performance math co-processing unit for high-end vector computing - the "velocity engine". It's also the name of one of Apple's range of computers, and it's now obsolete in the Macintosh range.

The G5 chip was used by Apple in their iMac desktop computers and G5 Towers. The iMacs now use the Intel Core Duo ('Yonah'), and the Towers are now called Mac Pro and use pairs of the new Xeon 5150 ('Woodcrest') CPUs.

An iMac comes as an all-in-one computer, with the guts built into the back of the beautiful screen, including steroe sound. A Mac Pro comes as a box plus keyboad plus mouse - buy a screen separately or use an existing one. You need speakers or 'phones for games sound. Both come with the best desktop OS on the planet.

 

[MxxPwr]

Probably PC People who are fed up with Apple ads poking fun at them, and swooping like vultures when they see a wounded Mac user

Heh, heh. And yet, those are the sorriest bunch of commericals I've ever seen.

Most Apple users I've met are intelligent and ready to be proud of/admit to what's good/what's bad about there Macs.

Now, they have a guy who cried like a little girl in Jeepers Kreepers saying he (Mac) can run XP, but still doesn't crash. HA! Truth is, you want an Apple to crash like a PC; run XP.

Still, I think the problem with Civ4 is/has been that many people; still, to this day, are thinking Civ3 requirements. It's just not true. One must lower one's expectations of what high performance is or what it will take to run huge world; 16 civ's.

 

[MxxPwr]

A G5 is a bit like an AMD Athlon if you use the wrong end of a telescope

It's a 64 bit CPU made by IBM, with a very high performance math co-processing unit for high-end vector computing - the "velocity engine". It's also the name of one of Apple's range of computers, and it's now obsolete in the Macintosh range.

The G5 chip was used by Apple in their iMac desktop computers and G5 Towers. The iMacs now use the Intel Core Duo ('Yonah'), and the Towers are now called Mac Pro and use pairs of the new Xeon 5150 ('Woodcrest') CPUs.

An iMac comes as an all-in-one computer, with the guts built into the back of the beautiful screen, including steroe sound. A Mac Pro comes as a box plus keyboad plus mouse - buy a screen separately or use an existing one. You need speakers or 'phones for games sound. Both come with the best desktop OS on the planet.

Ah! Obsolete is a bad, bad word. I had a friend who's motherboard failed but suprisingly didn't kill the proc. He wanted to see if I could find a board that would still use his Intel socket 478?! Ahem, I moved him on to a LGA775 board and a PD 840. It's still not creme de le creme, but miracle or miracles, it runs Civ4 like a dream.

Intel Core Duo on newer iMacs: CHA!

 

[AlanH]

Don't get me wrong. If you find a G5-powered Mac at a good price you have a very powerful beastie - particularly the later Quad core towers.

But never make the mistake of buying a Mac primarily as a gaming machine. Even if it has the power, and the latest ones do, there just aren't the titles available. You have to reboot into Windows to play a wide range of games, and for that you might as well have cobbled together the various bits of sealing wax and string and sticky-backed plastic you need to make a PC - or bought a console for a fraction of the cost of either option

PS I'll wager the iMacs will have Core 2 Duo ('Merom') in a month or two.

 

[MxxPwr]

...and for that you might as well have cobbled together the various bits of sealing wax and string and sticky-backed plastic you need to make a PC

I resemble that remark

That being said, if I could ground it properly, I'd just have my gaming pc components on an open wire shelf. It would cool better at least.

But, I was more in the market for a notebook and I hear Macs have some pretty good ones.

- or bought a console for a fraction of the cost of either option

Beware of consoles; no matter who makes them. No matter how pretty they make things look: they can not help but be integrated cpu/gpu architecture (which has it's limits), they can never have proper cooling, and they have zilch as far as an OS.

PS I'll wager the iMacs will have Core 2 Duo ('Merom') in a month or two.

Impressive! Beats the crap out of those consoles

 

[AlanH]

Apple notebooks come in two flavours. The low end ones are called MacBooks, they have integrated graphics and are not officially supported for Civ4. The high end ones are MacBook Pro, and have separate Mobility GPUs. Still not the dog's whats-its for an out and out gamer, but they are capable of running Civ4, and are pretty neat machines. I would suggest holding off for a week or three to see if the Merom-based ones come out at the Paris MacWorld show his month. Meanwhile, visit http://www.apple.com/ and drool over them, or better yet go and play with one in an Apple Store if you have one nearby.

 

[comradeTJH]

Ok, remember my screen-capture movieI did at the beginning of this thread?
Here's a new one showing G5 and Pentium 4 performance compared:

http://prosecco.tjh.ch/civ-compare.mov

(both screens running @ 1280 x 1024:
- on the Mac: everything set to low, single unit display, no antialiasing
- on the PC: everything set to high, tripple unit display, 2 x antialiasing)

The very observant ones here might already have realized that there is a possibility of a, carefully called, slight difference in performance between those two clips. And I let it up to you which one you judge to be faster....

For any of you which call the G5 performance playable I can tell you that in this clip only about a quarter of the map has ben revealed yet and there are very few units lurking around and it IS getting slower and slower each time until it's really unusable.
And, no, I don't have any CPU or RAM intense apps running in the background. Even though Call Of Duty 2 runs like a charm at full resolution (1920 x 1200) with everything on high and even 2x multisampling when I had Virtual PC, several Firefox windows with loads of tabs, ICQ, Skype, RDC, Thunderbird etc open at the same time...!!

So now I really DO hope I DID make my point clear this time!

 

[Zaimejs]

Good work. What did you use to capture those screens? the PC one actually looks accelerated, but I'll take your word for it, because that's the kind of scroll lag I have on my G5.

 

[Skippy_Kangaroo]

Ok, remember my screen-capture movieI did at the beginning of this thread?
Here's a new one showing G5 and Pentium 4 performance compared:

Hey, I'd like to get the Pentium 4 kind of performance out of my MacBook Pro. That's snappy!



Maybe Apple ought to consider using Intel chips in their laptops...

 

[comradeTJH]

the PC one actually looks accelerated,

No, definately not. I captured both clips directly into Final Cut using my PowerBook from my Sony HandyCam via FireWire. The only thing I did was the resizing and placing together with the text.
So you can imagine how frustrating it is resuming a saved game on my G5 at home :-(

 

[jdevo]

Wow, Aspyr did a really bad job... it doesn't matter what specs your g5 has, the performance is truly awful. So choppy it gives me a headache. And this is with all settings to their lowest, and single units with animations turned of on a tiny map size with a x800 256mb card!

I have a feeling aspyr won't be fixing this... they put out a broken game

 

[5150]

Why were you running the Mac version in a window?

 

[Skippy_Kangaroo]

Why were you running the Mac version in a window?

Probably becuase you get kernel panics if you run it full screen.

 

[Bazzalisk]

Probably becuase you get kernel panics if you run it full screen.

Only on Intel macs, not on G5s you don't.