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That Voodoo That You Do (7/19/99)
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It was a good day for the hardcore Mac gamers out there. See, while Apple's done a lot in the past year to encourage the development of more games for the Mac platform, the hardware side of the equation hasn't been adding up. Serious fans of the wildly popular run-around-in-3D-and-shoot-things genre (which includes smash hits like the Quake series, Unreal, etc.) and other 3D games really need some extra oomph to make the experience more immersive-- and just as important as a fast processor is some kickin' dedicated 3D hardware acceleration.
Now, while Apple's done some nice things in the 3D realm, like embracing OpenGL as a development standard and putting ATI RAGE hardware in every Mac, the fact is, a lot of gamers want the ability to use even faster cards with even nicer feature sets; the RAGE 128 in the new Power Mac G3 is nice enough, but for gaming use, it's still a tad slower than 3dfx's Voodoo 2 (and now there's Voodoo 3). And if you're a gaming connoisseur, the RAGE Pro in the iMac is barely adequate for many of the newest games. And if you've got an older PCI-based Mac, the news is even worse; ATI is inexcusably six months late shipping its RAGE 128 cards, the only company making Mac Voodoo cards recently folded, and there are precious few other alternatives right now.
So it's 3dfx to the rescue; they've posted a free set of unsupported Mac drivers for Voodoo 2 cards. That means you can run out and buy a PC Voodoo 2 card and run it in your PCI Mac. (Voodoo 3 support is coming later.) In fact, not only can you pick up a PC Voodoo 2 card for about $60 (versus the outrageous $200-$350 Micro Conversions charged for the Mac version before they went under), you can even buy two, link 'em together, and yield even better performance-- it's called SLI, it was promised by Micro Conversions for a year, and it was never delivered (until now). Yes, for less than the cost of a single MC card, you can now have two Voodoo 2's pumping polygons to your screen. Don't expect technical support, though, either from the card manufacturer ("You're using it in a whatintosh?") or from 3dfx themselves. Still, that's not going to stop the serious Mac gamers out there from cranking up their frame rates for cheap. Now check out Accelerate Your Mac!'s extensive set of benchmarks and instructions, break your piggy banks, buy those cards, and go frag yourselves some PC users. ;-)
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SceneLink (1670)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/19/99 episode: July 19, 1999: Apple may be burying the E-Power in litigation, but Sotec steps up to the plate with their own iMac rip-off. Meanwhile, Mac gamers rejoice at the release of Mac drivers that work with cheap PC gaming cards, and the keynote is scant hours away, as Steve Jobs puts the final touches on his long-awaited address...
Other scenes from that episode: 1669: 2nd-Gen Photocopy (7/19/99) The fun never stops with the Fun Factory™. It's only been a few weeks since a brash young upstart called Future Power unveiled their latest innovation: an all-in-one Wintel box called the "E-Power" that, shall we say, "somewhat resembles" Apple's own iMac... 1671: On The Road Again (Again) (7/19/99) Can't you just smell it? Macworld Expo is here. Lots of workshops and town meetings and the like will be held on Tuesday, but for our money, the show doesn't really start until Steve Jobs takes the stage to deliver his keynote address on Wednesday morning-- an event that we can now count down in hours without exhausting all the fingers and toes of the AtAT staff...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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