Project B - How fast is the G4 at 3D gaming?

G4TimeDemo

We've used our 3D engine, designed from the ground up for G4's and Velocity Engine, to see how fast G4's can be. Below is a table with a list of machines, and how fast they are at running a 1000 frame demo, using an application called G4TimeDemo. We used these and other figures to estimate the percentage speedups used in the G4 speed increases report.

G4TimeDemo contains code written especially for the Velocity Engine, so it really reflects how much faster games can be on a G4. It also contains the same functionality in regular PowerPC instructions, to see how fast a G3 etc. would be at doing the same thing. Note - you would probably get much less dramatic increases from running existing games on the G4, as they are not especially written for it. The figures show how much faster a game can be when it uses the Velocity Engine. The demo does everything a full game does - plays sound effects, allows you to navigate and shoot, alter your preferences, show pictures, run AI + physics, draw 3D, and run leading edge character animation. This means it is a real test of how fast a game can run, and the figures represent the true potential of the Velocity Engine.



If you want to get G4TimeDemo to measure your own machine, this page has download links.

The Results

The table shows the results of playing G4TimeDemo on various Macs. If you have any results you wish to share, please post them to the comp.sys.mac.games.action newsgroup and we will add them to the table. The table will also be posted at that newsgroup. With enough results we can really see how much faster G4's are.

Notice the significant increase between the G4/400 and the G4/450 - a 37% increase on only a 12.5% clock rate improvement. Clearly the ATI card and bus speeds on the 450 are very well engineered, allowing the Velocity Engine to go flat out.

Results - A G4/400 is 44% faster than a G3/400,
and a G4/450 is 76% faster than a G3/450.
From detailed results, we figure the G4/450 bus is not maxed out, so the G4/500 should be even faster -
Estimates - a G4/500 should be 96% faster than a G3/450 - i.e.
Apple's new fastest G4 should be twice the speed of Apple's fastest G3 using G4TimeDemo.

Credits

Thanks to all those who gave us their results - Victor , BeNeXT, Eric, mcshell, Steven, Cameron, Kevin, Jon, Charles, Kenneth, and Frank at Franks Game Gear.

Speedup tips

These tips are based on postings to the comp.sys.mac.games.action newsgroup and our own tests. Hints to speedup the game are:
Giving G4TimeDemo 64MB of RAM seems to help (?it might reduce disk loading?).
Some machines are slowed down by their video cards, so upgrading helps.
Thousands makes a speed difference on older 3D chips (RageII, Pro) compared with Millions. Rage128's seem so fast it does not matter!
LibMoto seems to produce 8% speedup on G3's. Thanks to Kenneth and Kwisatz. (n.b. LibMoto reduces scalar math accuracy, so may introduce bugs. G4TimeDemo is floating point bug fault tolerant, as part of the G4 speedup uses approximations to recipricals etc. so it may survive LibMoto. What about other games?)
Unknown - does VM on or off have an effect? (VM on may slow down the demo by up to 15%)
Moving the mouse while timing may significantly slow the demo timing