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GeForce 3 Demoed - Running DOOM 3
green pizza writes "Yesterday at Macworld Tokyo, Steve Jobs and John Carmack demoed the new nVidia GeForce 3 (73 GIGAFLOPS of power)... on a G4... running DOOM 3. Please excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. You can get more details
from MacNN." [michael adds: VoodooExtreme has screenshots of Doom 3 running on the new GeForce card; Shugashack has more. Looks like Doom 3 will be another game where the color palette is "shades of black". Sigh.]
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
magic
You know, there's another term for that; color calibration, monitor calibration, gamma correction. All Apple machines automatically do that, it's built into the software. The monitors are also shipped calibrated. The video cards all support it as well. On the PC world it wasn't really a feature until a few years ago, and a lot of people have no idea that it exists. There are reasons why Apple still sells big in the publishing industry, because they want this feature; what they see in a brochure is identical to what they scan is identical to what they print is identical to what they email to their partners in the UK is identical to what is printed at the bookshop in Singapore is identical to what they see in their heads.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Since it doesn't appear that there will be a separate story talking about the other new announcements at MacWorld Expo, here are some of the highlights most interesting to Slashdot readers:
- The Power Macs were subtly altered. The former build-to-order dual 533 MHz model is now a standard configuration from the Apple Store (which means retailers will start carrying it as well), and there's an option to purchase a 733 MHz model with a CD burner in place of the DVD-R/CD-RW combo unit (saving $400 in the process).
- Those wild new iMacs have at least upped the specs slightly for the graphics chipset; still Rage 128-based, but at least there's more memory (16 MB) on board. Plus, the 500 and 600 MHz models are the new G3 chip with the full-speed onboard 256K cache.
- The Cube now offers the GeForce2 MX card as a build-to-order option (standard w/ CD burner on the high-end model). Guess ATi's still on Apple's shit list to some extent.
- Fellow Mac users should try running Software Update and see if they get CarbonLib 1.2.5.
- The $49.95 5-pack of DVD-R disks is finally available from the Apple Store, but the estimated ship time is 45 days.
Now, if I could only get a Flower Power G4 Cube..... mmmmmmm....
The Mac forums are blazing with commentary on the new iMac colors. Personally, I kind of like them, and hope they do a good job of stimulating interest in a highly overlooked demographic; women computer users. Anything that brings computing power to a wider audience can't be a bad thing. Besides, the effect is supposed to be slightly 3Dish, with the pattern all the way through the case instead of merely stuck onto the surface. I can't wait to see one in person.
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I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I'd show you a screen shot, but we can save bandwidth if you just look at your screen with your eyes closed for a bit.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
"Optimized for Direct3D" does not mean that it isn't also "Optimized for OpenGL". And if NVidia is so closely tied to Microsoft, then why are they releasing the GeForce 3 for the Mac first?
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Unfortunately, the giant projector screens are not color calibrated the same way at all.
The colors did get rather washed out on the big screen.
John Carmack
We did a ton of testing the last two weeks while we were putting the demo together.
The 733 G4 was not as fast as my 1 ghz PIII in any of the trouble areas.
Apple is doing a lot of good work, but the CPU's just aren't as fast as the x86 ones.
AltiVec can compensate in some cases, because it is way, way easier to program for than SSE, but it takes a very simple batched, computation intensive task for it to pay off in any noticable way. Amdahls law and all that.
We did a couple functions with AltiVec, but they didn't make much difference.
Video encoding and large image processing are two areas that it can pay off, because you may be spending 90%+ of your time in one page of code.
Even then, it takes a special balance to let a G4 come out ahead, because it has less memory bandwidthd than a high end x86 system.
John Carmack
We moved to C++ for the current game (which does not have an official full name yet).
.plan update about it, because it has definately had its pros and cons.
I will probably do a
Jim Dose had inadvertantly used a few MS specific idioms that we had to weed out over the past couple weeks of the bring up on OS-X.
John Carmack