John Carmack over Quake III Intel vs Mac
:So, clearly, hand tuned asm code can make either platform pull ahead. It also shows that the two platforms are at least fairly close in performance. I never said macs were SLOW, just not quite as fast as the best intel systems.
Quake3 doesn't software rasterize, so there isn't any great place for lots of asm code (the great place is in the OpenGL driver). The code is essentially identical on all platforms.
Q3 is definitely faster on a wintel system than a macos system. When the wintel version is released, everyone will be independantly repeating that measurement.
Even this measurement isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison, because the OpenGL driver and 3D card are still a significant variance. The two can be broken out farther: Q3 can be run without 3D output to test just the identical compiled code. Wintel is still faster, although somewhat less so. The OpenGL + 3D card setup can be benchmarked separately on the axis of throughput and fill rate, which show the intel system being significantly faster. I can't break that apart into the two separate components, but I will guess that the OpenGL driver is probably as efficient as the wintel drivers and the performance delta is due to the system interface and the video card. The current mac rage128 cards run at 75 mhz, which is a third slower than the PC cards. AGP is also more than just a faster PCI, it can influence the structure of communication with the card.
04:56