Windows on a Mac

Benchmarking
We ran 3DMark first because, unlike certain games, this benchmark has never been ported to the Mac. The Macbook did well, earning 2588 3DMarks in 3DMark05. In the 3DMark06, however, it struggled a lot more, breaking out with 1100 3DMarks.

We loaded up Doom 3 with high quality at 1024x768. The Mac didn’t take it well, churning out a disappointing 24.8fps. This is alarmingly low; many grandma PCs can do better.

We moved on to Battlefield 2. Here the picture improved somewhat, at 1024x768, we averaged 40fps on the Dalian Plant map. Although the framerate wasn’t mind blowing, we found ourselves playing for much longer than planned.

In Half-Life 2 the Mac proved very playable, producing 40fps at the crisp native resolution of 1440x900. Turning on 4xAA chopped the performance down by half, to 19fps. We also ran the Counter-Strike: Source stress test. At 1440x900, it cruised through with a cool 60fps.

The gaming benchmark results may seem low for a laptop equipped with a MOBILITY RADEON X1600. This is because Apple chose to clock the MOBILITY RADEON very modestly. On the Macbook Pro we tested, the core and memory was clocked at 310MHz and 300MHz respectively. In comparison, the ASUS A7G, another notebook powered by the same chip, is clocked at 470MHz for both core and memory. Other than Doom 3’s unusually low result, the performance is roughly in line with the hardware capabilities of the Macbook Pro.

There have been some outcries that due to heat problems, Apple has deliberately underclocked its GPU. This is a misunderstanding. The MOBILITY RADEON is a GPU architecture and can be deployed at a range of clock speeds. Different laptops have different thermal design points and these restrict how much heat can be dissipated in a particular part of the chassis. Thus a mobile GPU has no official clock speed, but only that which is viable for a particular notebook chassis. Apple decided 310MHz was right for the Macbook Pro, ASUS had more room so went up to 470MHz; both are legitimate. That said it hasn’t stopped avid users from using third party tools to overclock their GPU. Speeds of over 400MHz have been achieved with very good scaling.

Overall, gaming on the Mac is now finally viable. The performance we observed is nothing to write home about, but given that the tests were carried out on a notebook and everything had beta stamped over it (the ATI drivers were not even WHQL certified), we were fairly pleased with the results.

What comes next
A look at the current PowerMac G5 reveals Apple’s philosophy on the high end: maximum power, ultra-high bandwidth and total expandability. The enclosure is in itself a work of art and the internals are designed for optimal airflow and usability. A Core 2 Duo-equipped Mac Pro could compete with Alienware PCs for prestige and performance. With Core 2, Apple’s performance line will be complete, and serious gaming on the Mac will become a reality.

The future of Boot Camp is equally exciting. The next logical step is to support the running of Windows and OS X concurrently. This is already available with ‘Parallels’, a piece of third party virtualisation software that allows Windows to run natively within OS X. Apple’s next OS X release (Leopard) will have Boot Camp built in. This may or may not support multiple operating systems running concurrently but such a development is bound to occur.

The key technology that will support this development is Intel Virtualization Technology (VT), previously called Vanderpool. The goal of VT is to provide proper hardware support for running multiple operating systems concurrently. VT does this by supporting a new software layer that sits below the operating system. Software in this layer is called a virtual machine manager. These virtual machine managers can then launch and manage multiple operating systems. So just as application multitasking was enabled by operating systems, multiple operating systems will be enabled by virtual machine managers.

All this wouldn’t be so exciting if Intel Virtualization Technology wasn’t built into the new Macs. They are, and it won’t be long until Apple or someone else starts exploiting it. The future is not just OS X, Windows and Linux running concurrently – it will allow multiple instances of any OS running in real time. Because OS X is exclusive to Apple, virtualisation for desktop PCs will be most lucrative on the Mac.

So there we have it: Conroe, Leopard and Vanderpool, three key technologies that together will enable a completely new breed of Macs.

Picture the PowerMac of next year; quad-core driven, sporting the latest GPU and supporting any operating system that’s ever been compiled for Intel x86. Add to that a magnificent case, a brilliant Apple Cinema Display and we will have a new breed for maximum power computing.