Stability, Gaming and other ramblings
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 18, 2004 2:57 AM EST- Posted in
- Anand
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.
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
BZ - Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - link
Just wanted to say (to all, but mostly Anand) I have never read your site but since this G5Blog I have been coming back to check it out.As a long time Mac user (and PC user/Admin/geek at work) I think you are doing a great job of pointing out the fair pros and cons. It will be interesting to see what you have to say in 6 months or a year or when the next person asks what type of computer they should get.
Keep blogging...
BZ
xozlh - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
Anand,10.3 comes with Full Keyboard Access enabled by default, opening up a huge world of keyboard shortcut possibilities. As far as getting to the terminal quickly and easily, you can Apple-Tab to the Finder, Shift-Apple-U to the Utilities Folder, start typing 'Terminal', and press Apple-O. You can also press Control-D and have immediate keyboard access to the Dock. And Terminal is in your Dock, right?
Damien Sorresso - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
Unbelievable as it may sound, Apple, who have over $4 billion in cash, don't have a Dolby Digital license. That's right. They can't stand the thought of forking over the cash so that their applications can actually decode DD streams and shove them out through discrete analogue outputs, like the ones the Revolution 7.1 has.That's why Panther's DVD player only supports 5.1 DD via pass through. Apple don't have a license to decode the streams in the OS, so all they can do is pass the streams on to something that does have a license, like the decoder built into the Logitech Z-680's.
From what I understand, there's uncertainty as to which API to use for Mac gaming surround sound. EAX, as I understand, it strictly Windows-only with no chance of ever making it to the Mac. The M-Audio guys were pushing for Circle Surround Sound II over the feature-lacking OpenAL. Apple wants people to use CoreAudio, but apparently Apple's CoreAudio documentation blows, and it's a bitch to write for on top of that. The surround audio situation on the Mac definitely sucks more than anything else I can think of.
Flatlyna - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
@a2daj - now thats a comprehensive reply!Thanks for the info.
Its a shame that there isn't a more definitive solution at this point even if M-Audio has capable hardware. I think its good that the G5 has a digital optical out, but afaik it doesn't do realtime Dolby Digital encoding like the nForce chipsets so surround is gonna just be limited to DVD playback with AC3 output.
For everyday computer use 3d audio doesn't do much for you, but I guess that there are pc users that would find the lack of options odd given that the majority of pc motherboards offer it as standard.
I suppose it might not be important to most people's gaming on the Mac (perhaps because they'v e never experienced it) but I've found it enhances my pc gaming pleasure no end.
maxplanar - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
Anand,To see the standard text during BSD boot, simply hold down Command-V upon boot. The blue screen is replaced by normal unix-land, until it goes away that is... ;-)
a2daj - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
The SE in Radeon 9800 Pro Mac SE stands for Special Edition. It seems SE in the PC world stands for Slow/Sucky Edition...There are a few reasons for no 3D audio in Mac games.
Part of the reason is due to legacy code. Back in the OS 9 days, games handled sound via the Sound Manager, which, no matter what, spit out sound in stereo, which is why the OS 9 DVD player couldn't output anything more than stereo regardless of your audio hardware setup. This essentially crippled the one consumer card that was eventually released that could have helped bring 3D sound to Mac games, the infamous Mac SoundBlaster Live. With the SBL sound was still processed via the Sound Manager so the SBL could only essentially add EAX reverb, which worked great in the few games that were compatible with it (Deus Ex, Rune, Rogue Spear after one of the patches, Diablo II, and maybe 2 or 3 others). However, if developers used OpenAL, then supposedly, one would be able to skip the Sound Manager and offload sound processing to the SBL. That never happened. No game was released with OpenAL support. Based on comments from a few developers, OpenAL and 3D positional audionever worked properly in OS 9, there were several issues with the implementation that frustrated a lot of programmers, and development on it was dead with no support from Creative Labs or whoever was maintaining the Mac version. The SBL died a slow and painful death after one driver update quietly released more than a year after the product shipped with major bugs still left to fix. No OS X drivers to save the day. Some open source drivers were attempted, but they seemed to die after some controversy and the release of the Revolution 7.1. Sound Manager is available in OS X but still converts everything to stereo.
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) apparently has improved 3D audio support in CoreAudio, the Apple preferred API for audio code. I'm not sure what major additions were added between the new version of CoreAudio and older versions, but based on what I've read from others, developers can use CoreAudio as a 3D API now. I believe World of Warcraft is using an internal Blizzard 3D audio library based on CoreAudio. However, I believe it's only supported through digital audio outs, like those in G5s, and possibly the Revolution 7.1. We'll see once WoW is released.
OpenAL is available in OS X and was used in the original OS X port for Unreal Tournament. But at the time, development wasn't very active. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy both use OpenAL but I'm not sure if the work Brad Oliver did to get OpenAL usuable was rolled into the main source tree. Ryan Gordon recently rolled his own version of OS X OpenAL built on top of CoreAudio for Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 but it's pretty much tuned for those games at the moment. OS X OpenAL doesn't have 3D support as far as I've seen.
The Miles audio library is available for Macs in both OS 9 and OS X. However, they do not support 3D audio as far as I can tell. If they do, no Mac developer is taking advantage of the capabilities. They may support encoding sound into a Dolby Surround format, but I'm not sure if it really can, and that wouldn't be true 3D sound anyway.
Which leads to another reason for lack of 3D audio games... not many people have the machines to handle it. As mentioned before the SBL failed in various ways. Until the G5s rolled out, all built-in sound out was handled through a stereo connection unless one had a 3rd party audio card. Until the Revolution 7.1, multichannel sound outputs were only available on relatively expensive sound card. The SBL doesn't count since it never handled multichannel sound to begin with.
M-Audio brings the potential of 3D audio support to the Mac platform with a consumer level card Revolution 7.1. However, M-Audio doesn't know which API to use for 3D support, OpenAL, CoreAudio, etc, but their card currently does support descrete audio channels.
Lucian - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
I cringe at the thought of Creative Labs making another Mac product ever again. Their first "product" was a half-assed job, which they will surely use as "evidence" that a market for consumer sound cards does not exist on the Mac. From conversations I have had with various people at Creative, they see very little interest in even marketing their speaker products towards Mac users (even though it would take a simple "Mac-compatible" sticker). I have a M-Audio Revolution and while the drivers aren't perfect, the hardware is good and so is the sound.Flatlyna - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
As a database developer and regular reader of your site, I'm delighted that you're treating the Mac with respect and approaching it with an open mind. Despite my day job, the Mac is my preferred platform and adding a Mac section to here is a fantastic idea. Platform advocacy has its place, yet hopefully that can be for somewhere else than here because it been done to death already. An unbiased appraisal of the platform in your current style will be appreciated by many I'm sure.As a suggestions for content, I'd like to see a "software equivalents" listing or database to aid those people looking for alternatives to their pc utilities etc. As others have mentioned, a forum would be welcome too.
If you've got any contacts with Creative Labs, I'd be interested to know why they made a bit of a mess of bringing SB Live to the Mac... I'd have thought that Audigy might be good for 3d audio in Mac gaming?
Keep up the good work Anand!
Michael - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Maximized windows are the work of the devil -- or Bill Gates, whichever. But, some applications implement maximize as a secondary function of the zoom window when holding down the shift key.Scot Walker - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
You can run UT2K4 in a window on OS X and see your other applications. It's just the "Full Screen" option in the settings of the game.Anand, does the fan on the video card shut off when the Mac goes to sleep? How loud is it? Much louder than the G5's fans?
Thanks