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Inside Mac Games Volume 6 #3
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IMG Volume 6, Issue 3
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TEXT_130.txt
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1998-06-12
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71 lines
  
 
 
  by Chris McVeigh
 
Atlanta’s Electronic Enter-
tainment Exposition was a
much-needed breath of fresh
air for the Macintosh gaming
market. In particular, it was
Thursday evening’s MacHome/Apple party that served as a catalyst for a lot
of good will and cautious optimism among Mac developers and the Mac press.
That’s not to say there isn’t lingering concern about the future. While Apple
may have stemmed its financial free-fall, the potential for actual growth in
market share remains unclear. And since the total sales of a Macintosh game
is a subset of the total number of Macintosh owners, developers are
obviously anxious to see real, lucrative expansion of the market.
Apple is hedging its bets on the iMac. A beauty to some, a beast to others, the
iMac represents an aggressive push by Apple to deliver a quality consumer
product at a remarkable price. Whether the market wants such a device is
another question.
To sell the iMac, Apple needs to create a demand for it. The looks will only go
so far. And although the iMac beats with the heart of a champion, it’s got to
run with the competition, too.
Steve Jobs knows this. He fully realizes that games are a driving force
behind PC sales. And quality gaming is what should drive iMac sales, too.
But can the iMac keep up? In terms of raw processing power, sure.
Expandability is a whole other can of worms. Although the iMac is equipped
with ATI’s modestly capable RAGE IIc 3D acceleration chipset, it lacks a
crucial PCI expansion slot needed for a 3Dfx VooDoo or VooDoo2 acceleration
card.
Why is the ability to add a high-powered 3D card so damned important?
Well, if I were a salivating 16-year old nagging Dad for a new computer, I’d
be pointing out the one with cool games and jaw-dropping graphics. And
that’s not the iMac. Riven may look pristine, but Unreal will drag along in
anything but its 320x240 graphics mode.
I recently asked a developer if he thought accelerated 3D graphics had
become the new standard for Macintosh games. His reply was overly stern
and to the point—"Not until advanced 3D acceleration is built onto the logic
board. Games cannot be overly hardware dependent." He’s right, of course.
But while Unreal is certainly playable with ATI 3D acceleration, it simply
rocks with 3Dfx acceleration—higher resolution, higher frame rates, and
higher realism.
Let’s face it—PCs are often sold on what they have the capacity to do, and not
what they are equipped to do out of the box. What the iMac can’t do might
stop it in its tracks.