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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, June 11, 2005

John Carmack talks Mac game performance

... and, yes, he say it stinks. In a post on Slashdot, id programming genius John Carmack, who has probably worked harder than anyone to keep the Mac viable as a games platform, has this to say:

We work with Apple, ATI, and Nvidia to make everything run as well as possible. Doom 3 had AltiVec code in it, and there were driver changes to make things work better. The bottom line is that the compiler / cpu / system / graphics card combinations available for macs has just never been as fast as the equivalent x86/windows systems. The performance gap is not a myth or the result of malicious developers trying to make your platform of choice look bad.

Yes, it is always possible to make an application faster, but expecting developers to work harder on the mac platform than on windows is not reasonable. The xbox version of Doom required extensive effort in both programming and content to get good performance, but it was justified because of the market. In hindsight, we probably should have waited and ported the xbox version of the game to the mac, which would have played on a broader range of hardware. Of course, then we would have taken criticism for only giving the mac community the "crippled, cut down version".

[ Posted at 5:36 PM | Permalink ]