Pentium M out the door, what's next
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 24, 2005 1:48 PM EST- Posted in
- Anand
As promised the Pentium M Desktop article using ASUS' Socket-478 to 479 adapter is live. I hope you all enjoy it. It doesn't look like there's too much potential for the Pentium M (Dothan) on the desktop, but Yonah may be another story. ASUS did an excellent job with the CT-479 adapter though, it's by far the best solution if you do want to use a Pentium M on the desktop.
With the Pentium M article out of the way, I'm going to spend this weekend working on the ATI Theater 550 review as well as a $999 MCE review I had pushed aside for a little while. I've received a lot of requests for articles similar to the WoW Performance Guide but for other games (e.g. Everquest 2). I've had the idea for a while but never really had the time, but I think my schedule may be open enough to squeeze in a few game performance articles.
I'm eagerly awaiting Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, unfortunately it comes out the day I leave to go visit AMD in Austin. It'll be a short trip so I should be able to enjoy the game over the weekend at least.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is the perfect example of what's wrong with gaming on the Mac. Looking at the Mac game library you'll see a lot of the major titles, Doom 3, UT2004, WoW, etc... but the issue with games that are released on the Mac is that they usually take far too long to get there. Doom 3 is finally out on the Mac, and at one time I would've waited to play through it on the Mac but I grew bored of it last year on the PC and have no desire to play it on the Mac now. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next Splinter Cell, but it's not going to be out on the Mac so there's no way I'm waiting for it to be ported before playing it.
Then there's the issue of performance, both WoW and Doom 3 appear to run at about half the speed on the Mac as they do on the PC. Granted the Mac isn't a gaming platform, but this type of performance is just unacceptable since, architecturally, there's no explanation for the performance. It's a software/OS issue somewhere, but I'm hardly qualified to say where or why it still remains un-addressed by Apple. I guess I'd just like to be able to play the handful of games that I do play on the Mac, apparently that's too big of a wish.
So either this weekend or next week I'll be putting together a game machine in preparation for Chaos Theory :)
With the Pentium M article out of the way, I'm going to spend this weekend working on the ATI Theater 550 review as well as a $999 MCE review I had pushed aside for a little while. I've received a lot of requests for articles similar to the WoW Performance Guide but for other games (e.g. Everquest 2). I've had the idea for a while but never really had the time, but I think my schedule may be open enough to squeeze in a few game performance articles.
I'm eagerly awaiting Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, unfortunately it comes out the day I leave to go visit AMD in Austin. It'll be a short trip so I should be able to enjoy the game over the weekend at least.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is the perfect example of what's wrong with gaming on the Mac. Looking at the Mac game library you'll see a lot of the major titles, Doom 3, UT2004, WoW, etc... but the issue with games that are released on the Mac is that they usually take far too long to get there. Doom 3 is finally out on the Mac, and at one time I would've waited to play through it on the Mac but I grew bored of it last year on the PC and have no desire to play it on the Mac now. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next Splinter Cell, but it's not going to be out on the Mac so there's no way I'm waiting for it to be ported before playing it.
Then there's the issue of performance, both WoW and Doom 3 appear to run at about half the speed on the Mac as they do on the PC. Granted the Mac isn't a gaming platform, but this type of performance is just unacceptable since, architecturally, there's no explanation for the performance. It's a software/OS issue somewhere, but I'm hardly qualified to say where or why it still remains un-addressed by Apple. I guess I'd just like to be able to play the handful of games that I do play on the Mac, apparently that's too big of a wish.
So either this weekend or next week I'll be putting together a game machine in preparation for Chaos Theory :)
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smokey5 - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
If you do an Everquest 2 review I'm sure that'd help alot of people out. I don't intend to play but I know someone who does who wants my help on designing a rig. As far as I've heard Everquest 2 is CPU-heavy - surprisingly so comaparative to GPU. Also finding the peak amount of RAM needed would be nice. Hardrive I guess the fastest loading hardrive would be best eg Hitachi drives unless its changed recently?quiksel - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
I can see that drivers would play a huge part in gaming performance on the mac... has anyone ever put the blame on the developer that picks up the game license to release it for the mac platform, though (Macsoft, Aspyre, and others)?I'm no programmer (thank god), but as such, I'm not real privy to the in's and out's of the development process, but from the perspective that picking up someone else's work and changing it to work for a different platfrom can't be all that easy, I wonder if these developers/recoders are slightly to blame as well....
Any thoughts on this?
~quiksel
Heron - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
Kudos, anand, for putting a good article there.#7, Pentium M is designed with a clockspeed wall in mind. Keeping in mind that Pentium M's pipeline is not able to scale it to the 3.8GHz we are seeing on Pentium 4 today, I don't get your reasoning.
Besides, Pentium M being not ready for the desktop is simple, as the performance figures clearly show that the Pentium 4 still has the upper hand in alot of sections. Besides, AMD is in the equation.
ViRGE - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Frankly, after thinking through the issue, I'm going to have to with #3's analysis of the situation, and place the blame largely on the drivers. If you take a look at other situations where the same video hardware is used for gaming on "non-standard" configurations such as using Quadros instead of GeForces(same basic hardware, the difference is in the drivers) or using Linux as the OS, we see the same kinds of performance hits as the Mac is seeing. I highly suspect that the drivers for these setups are not tweaked for performance like the Windows GeForce drivers are(in part because of all the performance/quality trade offs for GeForces for gaming), and that's why we're seeing such poor numbers. At the same time, I can't say I'm surprised since doing these optimizations is likely a difficult process that would require some work to port to the Mac, and that there are professional customers that would be displeased if their systems started implementing the performance/quality trade offs when they don't want it(there's no Quadro cards for the Mac, after all).I'd like to say I expect gaming on the Mac to get better, but I'm afraid it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy; the Mac wasn't "the" gaming platform, so now no one is bothering with gaming on the platform.
jonodsparks - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
#5 - Tiger is still in beta, although nearing release. I would assuming that since gaming in not the primary market for OS X, it will be low on a long list of bugs to fixMark Little - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Anand,I must disagree with your statement
"It doesn't look like there's too much potential for the Pentium M (Dothan) on the desktop."
Don't you mean that a 1GHz+ Pentium IV is required to beat a Pentium M. If the Pentium M could run at 3.8 GHz today, wouldn't it beat any x86 processor out there. The Pentium M is at the same (a little lower) clock speeds as the Athlon 64. It beats a Pentium IV 3.2 GHz in 22 out of 33 benchmarks in your ASUS adapter article.
Didn't your website accuse Intel of releasing faster processors too fast and that is why they are now stuck at 3.8 GHz? The Pentium M beat all the Pentium IVs in the gaming section. It also won some of the office benches. Don't you think that a processor that can do office apps and games is exactly what a desktop processor should do for the every day user.
What average user is decoding and encoding music and video? I just don't understand your comments about Pentium M not being ready for the desktop because it can't beat a 3.8 GHz processor. That's a difference of almost 2 GHz yet it still performs well and I think it won 2 or 3 benchmarks out of all the CPUs. I just don't understand.
Traire - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Can't wait for the Theater 550 review. I have had my finger hovering over the order button on the PowerColor model for a few days now, but will try and hold out for your article.Eug - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
#3 - Don't get your hopes up for Tiger's gaming speed, cuz others have said that Tiger isn't noticeably faster for Doom 3.But one can always hope... We will see in a few weeks/months.
smitty3268 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
#1 - Sorry, I was thinking about another article. I don't remember where it was, but it had an interview with one of the Doom 3 developers.smitty3268 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
#1 - If you read that article, the architectural differences account for about a 1% slowdown. OSX and the drivers were by far the biggest cause. Interestingly, the next version of OSX supposedly has much better gaming performance. I'll wait to see the final product before drawing any conclusions, though.