[apologies to Darren Kam who may have already read some of this in my reply to his email]
-- I've just run UT and UT -Tactical Ops under OS X ... And all I have to say is (yeah, you might have guessed it) 'oh, my god.' I didn't think I'd ever see a game run nicely on my 'old' G4 under _OS X_. (I've had many hours of fun with UT, UT-Tactical Ops, Deus Ex and Diablo 2 under OS 9 :-) It handled 1024x768 32 bit with high textures faster than my ATI pro could handle 640x480 at medium txt. 'must remember to thank the guy in Melbourne who sold me this sucker ... Without any empirical comparisons, I'd say the card runs 32bit high textures in UT as well as my office OEM Radeon, which is kudos to the Radeon (which only has 32megs of VRAM compared to the 64 this card has) ... except that those comparisons are in OS 9. In OS X, the OEM Radeon Apple ships doesn't feel as fast as the Geforce 2mx, which I didn't expect to see. Stuff I'd read suggested the Geforce rocks in 16bit mode, but slows down in 32bit. Then again ... hang on a sec ... yeah, I thought so ... can anyone confirm that 16bit mode using a nvidia card isn't _half_ as fuzzy as with an ATI card? Is there any documentation on that? I barely noticed it at all playing Tact ops just now (while I had a dozen other apps open .. I love OS X ;-) However - the options screen did generate a weird 'windows/ mac double cursor' effect for the first time just then. No big deal, could still select stuff ... could well be a problem with Geforce cards and the UT X preview ... Away from games again for a sec: Funnily enough, the Mac OS X system profiler doesn't list the VRAM amount unlike the OS 9 version. That said, I think the OS X drivers are making use of _something_, I have 85Mhz refresh rates at screen resolution settings (1920x1080) I didn't know existed. Sure, most of them are anamorphic ... But wow, groovy. Note to self: Will be able to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein when it comes out ... :-) A friend pointed out these brands of card cost around $167 AU ... Well worth the dough if you've got it. Still, it's early days yet. I'll wait and see if I get the 'colour bleed' issue reported with some other cards ... If anyone would like me to run some tests, I'm ... game ... but I'd need explanations as to how ... I'm new at this. Cheers, Tobes.
