Mac question

[Breandan]

Heya folks, is it possible for a Mac, g4 or g5, to run EQII on it using a PC emulator? And if so, is there any significant degredation in performance?

[DocBobo]

Virtual PC for Mac (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx)
Qemu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/)
iEmulator (http://www.iemulator.com/)
I didn't test any of these myself, but I expect everyone to be considerably slower than an original PC. You will lose performance for emulating a different CPU type.

[Breandan]

I'm familiar with the emulators, sorry if that wasn't clear, I was just wondering if it was possible to run EQII on one, and if so how much of a degredation to the graphics would there be in the process.

And please, no Mac vs. PC flames.

[Devirka]

In one word: no.

Going in deeper: These emulators run much slower than the real thing. If you planned to run office and any other standard desktop application you'd be fine, but the last spec i read about was that a 2 GHz dual chip G4 managed to run Virtual PC at like if it was only running in a 1GHz system.

Now, going in deep, you MAY be able to run the game with an awful performance.

Note you are not only running now at 1 GHz but you are running WinXP on top of OSX so that is double the OS memory usage. Even if you had 1GB MB of ram you'd still be running low on memory.

The 3D acceleration is also an issue, although not as big as some may think; since i hear Virtual PC has some sort of plugging that allows applications to access the 3D acceleration of the Mac.

Now, if you did ran on a top of the line Mac tower with the fastest dual G5 CPUs and 2 GB of ram, you MAY run the game as fast as I was able to run it on my PC natively… and that was actually disappointing for me after my upgrade (some 13 fps in open areas with close clipping and few people arround).

(Used to be a huge mac geek at college and Virtual PC was one of my obsessions)

[Breandan]

so, unless they make EQII for the mac, geta PC for my next gaming computer :(

[Devirka]

Unless you join us in WoW that do is available for Mac ;)

I doubt EQ2 will ever go to Mac and even if it did I’d be very skeptical judging in how they treated EQ Mac.

Also, if you planning to get one of the new cute iMacs even if the game was Mac native it would not run there since it is really a very low end machine. IF EverQuest 2 was for Mac you may be stuck with the same horse that you have in PC: get one very beefy system.

[Breandan]

*points up*

G5 :D

[Devirka]

Just for checks i will do some checking here and there to see if the performance has been improved enough for Virtual PC, but i doubt it.

Most of the upgrades are about compatibility more than about performance, altough performance is usualy slightly improved with each release it is overshadowed by Windows every day higher requirement on top of the OSX's own every day higher requiremens. So the performance improvement just makes it keep up more than actually get boosted.

Anyway will check and if I find anything i'll post it here.

Extremely Quick Update:
It seems Virtual PC no longer supports 3D acceleration, it actually says it just does not, but I am very sure that version 2 had it, but that was many moons ago and they may had decided it was not worth keeping it considering it would never truly be useful for gaming.

This alone obviously means it is not good for any sort of 3D gaming.

Also seems the best of these emulators gets to perform similar to a 3 GHz Pentium but only on floating point calculations, and a bare 1 GHz on integer calculations. Ironic considering those tend to be harder to work with, but not so considering the G5 was optimized for those due to their multimedia use.

Either way, that means just benchmarks, real world tests go very down. You may be lucky to play a few recent 2D games that use loads of collision detection.