Stability, Gaming and other ramblings

If you've been following my personal blog as well as the Macdates section you'll know that it's one of those incredibly busy weeks for me; if you haven't been following the personal blog: it has been one of those incredibly busy weeks for me :)

That being said, I'm still using the G5 and there's much more to talk about so let's go for it:

I mentioned that the very first upgrade I tried on the G5 was to stick a full 4GB of some of the fastest OCZ memory I had laying around. I was met with failure at that attempt thanks to Apple's motherboard not playing too well with aggressively timed DDR400. OCZ sent over 8 - 512MB sticks of their G5 DDR400 modules which are rated at 3-3-3-8, the slowest DDR400 I've ever used. Unfortunately it is the only stuff that the G5 will work with. I will admit that for my work machine I never really tweaked memory timings, I just left everything at SPD but in most cases SPD was at least 2-2-3-7. I'd like to see Apple migrate to some faster memory, especially considering the price premium these machines are going for, but that'll most likely have to wait for the next revision of the G5 systems. Lower latency memory will also give more of a benefit on the higher clocked G5s in any case.

The installation process was simple; it is memory after all. Unfortunately the first time I booted up the machine it only recognized 3GB. Luckily OS X's System Profiler will tell you what memory slots on the board are populated so I got the exact banks that weren't registering. I shut the system down, opened up the case (read: lifted a latch and removed a panel) and reseated the two DIMMs that weren't being detected properly. The second boot proved to be successful at 4GB. I did miss having a memory counter at POST to tell me how much memory I had installed before getting into the OS, but waiting a few seconds to get into OS X wasn't too bad.

The added memory helps a lot, right now I'm using 1.55GB and couldn't be happier. The OS seems to handle memory extremely well and will do its best to keep disk accesses from happening when they don't need to. I figure that for my needs ~2GB would be just about enough to have a very smooth running system, but I wouldn't recommend any less than 1GB for anyone putting together a G5 that's a decent multitasker. You can do just fine with only 512MB but throwing more at the OS does help.

When I first started talking about the way OS X favors keeping all programs open I mentioned that stability would be the determining factor as to whether or not this would be a good thing. I can say that I have encountered my first application crashes under OS X and they were as follows:

- Adium crashed when I was tinkering with antialiasing levels for my fonts in system properties; this has since been fixed in an update to Adium.
- Mail crashed randomly while dragging some text from a Safari window into an email
- Safari crashed once, I did not get a chance to completely document the crash; I was just surfing
- Dreamweaver has this issue where the page will disappear in design view while the HTML is there; I have to change something in the code to get the page to appear again. I encountered this problem while writing the ATI roadmap story.

Now the first two crashes were related to me doing funky GUI stuff; the first one has since been fixed and I haven't been able to duplicate the second one. Dreamweaver has issues under XP as well, although I've never seen this one in particular I've seen others so I'd be willing to accept that Dreamweaver was a Macromedia issue. Safari's crash was the first I had encountered, which was a bit surprising since I've been purposefully trying to bring it to its knees and haven't had much luck other than that one time.

So far I'm happy with the stability under OS X; the OS itself hasn't crashed and I would say that it is definitely no less stable than XP at this point and definitely with fewer individual application issues on a regular basis. I do believe (at least on the latest Apple hardware) that the Mac OS stability issues of the past (I've encountered them personally) are not an issue. But another thing to keep in mind is that just as is the case with PCs, a poorly maintained machine will be unstable. People installing everything they see, including poorly written drivers, will bring even the most stable of OSes to its knees - this applies to both OS X and XP. So be careful before you judge the stability of an OS based on a computer you used somewhere; would you really want people calling PCs "unstable" because of a crashy Windows ME machine they used in a public library somewhere? :)

After restarting several failed downloads, I finally got UT2004 to download. First of all, I couldn't find a link to the UT2004 Mac download on any of the official Epic sites when it was first released - I had to go to some Mac enthusiast sites. That's just plain wrong, I'll talk to Epic about it next time I get lunch with Tim and the gang. After I got the demo and installed it I decided to see how gaming on the Mac worked when you've got two displays.

Under XP, you pretty much have to disable your second display or close all the windows on your desktop so they don't get reorganized when running a game at a resolution different than that of your primary display. It is an annoying ordeal, but it's something that should be fixed once and for all in Longhorn. It's what we get for having ATI and NVIDIA late to the multimonitor game, otherwise we would've seen support in XP.

Under OS X, the second display shuts itself off, UT starts on my primary display and then when I'm done both displays return me to my desktop - nothing has moved an inch. I'm happy. It's the simple things that make the platform impressive (e.g. keyboard shortcuts, yes I'm a nut).

The speed of UT2004 at 10x7 on the Radeon 9600 was very good on the G5; the game was definitely smooth, but at higher resolutions the Radeon 9600 began to be a bottleneck. At 10x7 UT2004 is still fairly CPU bottlenecked but the G5s seemed to crunch along nicely. I would estimate that the higher end Athlon 64s and Pentium 4s would be faster, but the gap would definitely narrow at higher resolutions. I asked ATI for both an OEM Radeon 9800 Pro and the 9800 Pro SE so I'll be able to give you an idea of the 3D and more importantly, the 2D performance improvements offered by the two cards. As I mentioned before, once I get over 10 - 15 windows Exposé gets choppy, seemingly a video memory limitation issue. In theory moving to a 128MB/256MB Radeon 9800 should speed things up, but how much memory is necessary and what sort of a performance improvement are we talking? That's what I'm hoping to find out. I think I will start that Mac section on AT, these are the type of questions that need to be answered. The Mac section will not be another Mac vs. PC deal, that's not what the Mac community needs. It will be a section dedicated to Mac hardware and will offer articles like the one I was just talking about (impact of video memory size on Exposé performance), make sense? Any requests for comparisons to start off with? It won't launch until after the new AT database is in place (March) but I'm definitely committed to making it a reality.

As usual, I've got more "how do I?" requests for those with more OS X experience than me :)

1) Is there a keyboard shortcut to maximize a window? Is it even possible?
2) By default is there any keyboard shortcut to launch Terminal?

Hmm I honestly thought I had more questions than those two, I'm sure I'll think of them. It's getting late, time for me to turn in.

Hope you're enjoying these things, I sure am. Take care and goodnight.