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Old Powerbooks - huge mismatch in specs?

  • 09-11-2008 8:06pm
    #1
    TerrorFirmer
    Closed Accounts Posts: 29,930 ✭✭✭✭


    Was just looking at old Powerbooks today. They have some of the worst pairings imaginable! For example, was looking at a PowerBook that had the 1.5Ghz PowerPC CPU and a Radeon 9700 - in loads of games that falls well flat of the minimum CPU requirement but sails past the GPU one! Same with a lot of the range - also saw an older model with an 800mhz PowerPc and Geforce 4 - another seemingly pointless match. My question....why??


Comments

  • #2
    Sad Professor
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 22,693 CMod ✭✭✭✭Sad Professor


    Well those G4 chips are 2/3+ years old now. What game specs are you comparing them to? They were probably as fast as Motorola could make them at the time. And would have been good enough for most Macs games. But Macs have never been gaming machines, even less so in the pre-Bootcamp days.


  • #3
    TerrorFirmer
    Closed Accounts Posts: 29,930 ✭✭✭✭TerrorFirmer


    I'm not comparing them to today's games obviously. But games of the time. True that Mac's have not been gaming machines; but then why offer fast video cards with slow CPUs? Doesn't make any sense...

    If you look at many games on the Mac, the minimum requirements hover around 1.6-1.8Ghz PowerPC CPU for FPS titles that are a few years old. Yet Powerbooks that are the same age (even newer in cases) have way slower CPU's, but adequate video cards? Seems bizarre to me - it's not so much why where the CPU's so slow as it is why the hell did apple include fast gaming cards with relatively slow processors, what was the point? For example, I was looking at a Powerbook G4 on adverts. Compare to to the requirements for Call of Duty 2

    CPU: Falls several 100mhz short, critically fatal.
    GPU: Considerably above minimum requirement.

    So what's the point of having a video card that's totally crippled by the cpu?? I'd be the same as a Windows PC with a slow celeron processor and a high end video card it would just make no sense. It's the same thing really, except you absolutely never see high performance GPU's paired with low end CPU's in normal laptops.

    I was comparing these to Mac game requirements by the way not windows ones. Obviously the Macbooks of today are much more in balance but I just don't get the Powerbook at all.


  • #4
    Sad Professor
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 22,693 CMod ✭✭✭✭Sad Professor


    Apple just didn't care about games at the time. And game developers cared even less about the mac. Most mac games were very poorly ported from their Windows counterpart and demanded too much from the CPU. So even on the latest mac they played like sh*te and updates were not forthcoming. Apple included the best components available to them at the time I guess. There were other benefits to having a powerful graphics card. Video editing, etc.


  • #5
    Passenger
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,150 ✭✭✭Passenger


    Well Macs gaming capabilities still doesn't cut muster compared to some gaming PC's or just PC's in general. Nobody with serious gaming intentions will buy a Mac anyway.


  • #6
    440Hz
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,424 ✭✭✭440Hz


    Passenger wrote: »
    Well Macs gaming capabilities still doesn't cut muster compared to some gaming PC's or just PC's in general. Nobody with serious gaming intentions will buy a Mac anyway.

    Nobody has ever claimed otherwise!


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  • #7
    johnk123
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,031 ✭✭✭johnk123


    Passenger wrote: »
    Well Macs gaming capabilities still doesn't cut muster compared to some gaming PC's or just PC's in general. Nobody with serious gaming intentions will buy a Mac anyway.
    Mac gaming may not be as good as that of a PC, but for a lot of people, it's just fine. The ability to game within bootcamp is a big plus and infact an employee of my dads is big into gaming and i have seen crysis etc running on his MBP via bootcamp and it looks very good.

    For me, well i think i might get Spore in a while. It seems interesting and a bit of fun so we'll see. Anyone else have spore? I have seen it on a 24inch iMac and it looked class


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