wow Unreal numbers are incredible on the G4... didn't expect that really, I had a G4 400 back in the day and It was always lagging behind the P3s of the era in raw performance... It was a blast to use though because OS9 was much faster than Windows 98 and 2000 but Windows version of the games were usually better. One of the best machines I've ever had.
Yes it is pretty slick, looking forward to doing a lot more with it. I wasn't sure if unreal was using velocity engine stuffnor not butnit was fast and looked very nice. It's a cool machine😁
If your G4 was seemingly lagging behind the P3s of that time it's probably because Intel ramped clock frequencies up pretty quickly. P3s were around 600Mhz and maybe even more when the 450Mhz G4s first appeared. But clock for clock the G4 were clearly better than P3s of that era.
I use PowerMac G3 333Mhz 1MB cache beige tower with MacOS 8.6 and 3Dfx Game Wizard Voodoo2 as of 2024. PSU was recapped, brand new HDD scsi. This pc is awesome
Its a cool machine. I might have an eMac coming which will be an improvement. Think those had gf2 and faster in them so will be cool to see what ot has.
Subscribed for more good content. In 2002 I had Pentium 3 1ghz and geforce 2gts. Gts was really fast. It runs playable layer demanding games such as Painkiller, Doom3, nfs:mw
i worked on a number of these when i was still in college doing CAD and drafting courses. powerful and technician friendly machines, especially with OS 8 and 9 for all kinds of things. about the ADC, what apple did was dedicate 4 pins of an adapted DVI connector for power, an additional pin for soft power and 3 more pins for USB data. so there are DVI to ADC adapters out there if you're keen. the nominal output i believe are pins 1 and 2, then 11 and 12, and should be 25VDC. soft power and the LED status (blinking, solid, et c) are also a couple pins. you can ignore USB entirely since it's not needed for purely video output on ADC. you can test with a voltmeter for function if you short the soft power pin to ground momentarily. a bigger thing to check is that the display adapter is actually compatible. early and middle revisions of the G4 did not support ADC and will not work with an ADC output (essentially the early G4's were upgraded G3's). the later revision G4's supported ADC once past the "Sawtooth" logic board, these are sold as digital audio or quicksilver or mirrored finish. if the date of manufacture on the logic board (aka motherboard but apple called it the logic board) is 1999 or early 2000 it's probably not ADC compatible (there is a missing regulation circuit on the motherboard for 25V). for performance, the application you were running (just like any other microarchitecture) had to be optimized for it. so for the power consumed and for each clock, a wider RISC architecture generally does better than a narrower, higher clocked instruction pipe (glossing over cache details and OS, memory, or FS overhead). RAVE in a game like Myth II Soulblighter might be interesting since that supported both OpenGL and Rave, and had excellent Rave support. but generally OpenGL was faster even if couldn't do some of the neat texture and fog effects Rave could do. Rave was on it's last legs in 1999 as it was a QuickDraw offshoot from the earlier PowerMacs and MiniGL saw how OpenGL could be reasonably cut down and then modularized into something viable. You can test pure CPU crunching with something like Stuffit Expander since there are PPC and Intel versions of it available, and there's always GeekBench too. if you can find the Mac Action Sack, you might find some gems you like :)
Cool, I was using stuffit but didn't realise there was an intel version. Thanks for the info on the voltages, I can now check. This is a sawtooth but came with a dvi card so that would explain a lot. Now I have an excuse to buy a quicksilver 😁.
Mac OS 8.1 and later supports a multi button mouse. If there is any issues, install USB overdrive. Most games ported to the mac at that time were much more polished, but I remember my g3 333 outrunning a P3 600. Second, max the RAM and turn off the virtual memory, this will make the system even faster 😉 The g4 450 really was a retro gaming power house and there is many thing you can do, to make it shine. Best of luck 😀
The architecture between PC and Mac was essentially the same; the cpu, the cache (the G4 had a 1Mb 3rd level cache) and the chips for managing the various system buses are different. The G4 had Altivev, a coprocessor for 128bit vector calculations, the Pentium 3 had MMx but a little less efficient. These arithmetic units were used only if the program required it, so they could increase computing skills in some fields but not in all. The G4 was an excellent processor, which managed to give its best in conjunction with a second unit and under Osx. From the link you can observe the multitasking and intensive calculation capabilities of a latest generation dual G4 (2002). czcams.com/video/hh3Gsx8Urnw/video.html
In order to get results that go a bit deeper than what the average user would have seen at the time, I would recommend comparing both systems with more modern OSes that include all possible optimizations for each respective platforms namely OS X 10.4.11 Tiger (2007) for the Mac and Windows XP Pro SP3 5.1.2600.5512 (2008) for the PC. You can use Geekbench 2.2.0 (last version that supports both 10.4 and XP SP3) to perform basic tests, Photoshop CS2 for productivity and maybe something like Half Life 2 for gaming.
It was a bit of fun on the original os for each machine at the time they launched. You could probabaly upgrade the os but wouldn't be able to play games like half life 2 on a p3 450 and probably the mac neither. The performance difference would still be relative albeit probably slower overall I would think.
Sadly, RAVE had a lot of overhead despite being designed for hardware acceleration. Games that supported both OpenGL and RAVE generally ran much faster on OpenGL. Quake 1 is a good example.
@@john_ace I am not mixing them up. I guess mileage will vary based on graphics card and driver, but according to my tests GLQuake has always been faster than Quake RAVE when both are supported. I'm actually working on a game that uses RAVE. We'll see what kind of performance I can cram out of my classic macs!
It's worth noting that RAVE was deprecated in the late 90's and as such is missing crucial features that were added as extensions to OpenGL such as hardware transform and lighting and even hardware clipping
Probably not an entirely fair comparison considering the fact that the PIII Coppermine hit 1ghz within about a month (March 2000) of the Graphite Sawtooth G4 finally getting enough G4 450 processors in stock to sell.
No, was just a bit of fun since I had the 2 machines more or less in an average launch config from about the same time (not considering the chip issues).
It's been a while but I still dont know. I dont think the motherboard in my g4 provides power to the adc cable needed to fire up the monitor. I think I concluded I needed an earlier version of thr g4 motherboard to get it working.
@@66mhzbrain These two links show that type of monitor working with similar computers. czcams.com/video/z27b40T6lLs/video.html czcams.com/video/i8EQMkmg_yo/video.html
Yes but you need the correct graphics card/motherboard combo (which he clearly has) . There is an adapter that provides external power but it is rare and expensive. I would need the correct model g4 to use with this monitor. The agp adc card has an extra tab that plugs into the motherboard to supply power to the monitor. There is no socket to take this on this g4s motherboard. So no power goes to the monitor.
@@laurencejohnson4106 the machine came with an agp rage 128 so I bought another with an adc port but then saw the edtra tab and read about the power thing. I may com into a machine or find an adapter for it at somempoibt hopefully.
I wouldn’t care if the Windows platforms were consistently faster even to this day. Bottom line is I don’t want to have to untangle the interface. How many panels do they need that do basically the same thing but differ in such minor ways it’s frustrating? I’ve used Windows since 95 and to this day I can’t understand the control panel, devices, device manager etc. slew of garbled panes. I actually just clicked through these now to verify my complaint and got sick because I can’t for the life of me open the pane I wanted to use as an example 🤢 Dealing with windows is like dealing with a bipolar girlfriend. No matter what you do, as soon as you think you’ve figured it out, you’re wrong and she’s burning your clothes.
Day the Power Mac G4 shipped to customers you could build a P3 600 with OG Geforce 256 for less money.
Whenever apple ships anything there is a better alternative for less money😁
Very interesting hardware, like!
wow Unreal numbers are incredible on the G4... didn't expect that really, I had a G4 400 back in the day and It was always lagging behind the P3s of the era in raw performance... It was a blast to use though because OS9 was much faster than Windows 98 and 2000 but Windows version of the games were usually better. One of the best machines I've ever had.
Yes it is pretty slick, looking forward to doing a lot more with it. I wasn't sure if unreal was using velocity engine stuffnor not butnit was fast and looked very nice. It's a cool machine😁
If your G4 was seemingly lagging behind the P3s of that time it's probably because Intel ramped clock frequencies up pretty quickly. P3s were around 600Mhz and maybe even more when the 450Mhz G4s first appeared. But clock for clock the G4 were clearly better than P3s of that era.
It seems that way!
@@kathleendelcourt8136 yeah, clock freqs were higher on the P3 and much higher on the P4. G4 was faster clock per clock when Altivec was used though.
Same with G3, I have 333mhz 1mb with game wizard 12mb and 256ram
Check carefully the graphics chip of the AGP cards because it has had many variations in its long existence.
I use PowerMac G3 333Mhz 1MB cache beige tower with MacOS 8.6 and 3Dfx Game Wizard Voodoo2 as of 2024. PSU was recapped, brand new HDD scsi. This pc is awesome
Its a cool machine. I might have an eMac coming which will be an improvement. Think those had gf2 and faster in them so will be cool to see what ot has.
Subscribed for more good content. In 2002 I had Pentium 3 1ghz and geforce 2gts. Gts was really fast. It runs playable layer demanding games such as Painkiller, Doom3, nfs:mw
Cool, rhankyou! Sounds like a likker machine. Id love a gts, I have a ti in my collection but think that was a little slower.
i worked on a number of these when i was still in college doing CAD and drafting courses. powerful and technician friendly machines, especially with OS 8 and 9 for all kinds of things. about the ADC, what apple did was dedicate 4 pins of an adapted DVI connector for power, an additional pin for soft power and 3 more pins for USB data. so there are DVI to ADC adapters out there if you're keen.
the nominal output i believe are pins 1 and 2, then 11 and 12, and should be 25VDC. soft power and the LED status (blinking, solid, et c) are also a couple pins. you can ignore USB entirely since it's not needed for purely video output on ADC. you can test with a voltmeter for function if you short the soft power pin to ground momentarily.
a bigger thing to check is that the display adapter is actually compatible. early and middle revisions of the G4 did not support ADC and will not work with an ADC output (essentially the early G4's were upgraded G3's). the later revision G4's supported ADC once past the "Sawtooth" logic board, these are sold as digital audio or quicksilver or mirrored finish. if the date of manufacture on the logic board (aka motherboard but apple called it the logic board) is 1999 or early 2000 it's probably not ADC compatible (there is a missing regulation circuit on the motherboard for 25V).
for performance, the application you were running (just like any other microarchitecture) had to be optimized for it. so for the power consumed and for each clock, a wider RISC architecture generally does better than a narrower, higher clocked instruction pipe (glossing over cache details and OS, memory, or FS overhead). RAVE in a game like Myth II Soulblighter might be interesting since that supported both OpenGL and Rave, and had excellent Rave support. but generally OpenGL was faster even if couldn't do some of the neat texture and fog effects Rave could do. Rave was on it's last legs in 1999 as it was a QuickDraw offshoot from the earlier PowerMacs and MiniGL saw how OpenGL could be reasonably cut down and then modularized into something viable. You can test pure CPU crunching with something like Stuffit Expander since there are PPC and Intel versions of it available, and there's always GeekBench too.
if you can find the Mac Action Sack, you might find some gems you like :)
Cool, I was using stuffit but didn't realise there was an intel version. Thanks for the info on the voltages, I can now check. This is a sawtooth but came with a dvi card so that would explain a lot. Now I have an excuse to buy a quicksilver 😁.
Apple probably used agp INTERNALLY on atleast one of their machines.
Mac OS 8.1 and later supports a multi button mouse. If there is any issues, install USB overdrive. Most games ported to the mac at that time were much more polished, but I remember my g3 333 outrunning a P3 600. Second, max the RAM and turn off the virtual memory, this will make the system even faster 😉 The g4 450 really was a retro gaming power house and there is many thing you can do, to make it shine. Best of luck 😀
Cool, mouse buttons were my main issue with it. Yes looking forward to playing a lot of games on it😁
The architecture between PC and Mac was essentially the same; the cpu, the cache (the G4 had a 1Mb 3rd level cache) and the chips for managing the various system buses are different. The G4 had Altivev, a coprocessor for 128bit vector calculations, the Pentium 3 had MMx but a little less efficient. These arithmetic units were used only if the program required it, so they could increase computing skills in some fields but not in all. The G4 was an excellent processor, which managed to give its best in conjunction with a second unit and under Osx. From the link you can observe the multitasking and intensive calculation capabilities of a latest generation dual G4 (2002). czcams.com/video/hh3Gsx8Urnw/video.html
In order to get results that go a bit deeper than what the average user would have seen at the time, I would recommend comparing both systems with more modern OSes that include all possible optimizations for each respective platforms namely OS X 10.4.11 Tiger (2007) for the Mac and Windows XP Pro SP3 5.1.2600.5512 (2008) for the PC. You can use Geekbench 2.2.0 (last version that supports both 10.4 and XP SP3) to perform basic tests, Photoshop CS2 for productivity and maybe something like Half Life 2 for gaming.
It was a bit of fun on the original os for each machine at the time they launched. You could probabaly upgrade the os but wouldn't be able to play games like half life 2 on a p3 450 and probably the mac neither. The performance difference would still be relative albeit probably slower overall I would think.
Sadly, RAVE had a lot of overhead despite being designed for hardware acceleration. Games that supported both OpenGL and RAVE generally ran much faster on OpenGL. Quake 1 is a good example.
I might check out an open gl game, and glide if I can get a card. Unreal seemed pretty solid using rave though!
@@66mhzbrain i have almost exactly the same G4! Mine has 2 cpus at 450mhz.
@@john_ace I am not mixing them up. I guess mileage will vary based on graphics card and driver, but according to my tests GLQuake has always been faster than Quake RAVE when both are supported. I'm actually working on a game that uses RAVE. We'll see what kind of performance I can cram out of my classic macs!
It's worth noting that RAVE was deprecated in the late 90's and as such is missing crucial features that were added as extensions to OpenGL such as hardware transform and lighting and even hardware clipping
Probably not an entirely fair comparison considering the fact that the PIII Coppermine hit 1ghz within about a month (March 2000) of the Graphite Sawtooth G4 finally getting enough G4 450 processors in stock to sell.
No, was just a bit of fun since I had the 2 machines more or less in an average launch config from about the same time (not considering the chip issues).
Would be interesting to see what happens if Linux is installed on both to take out the OS from the comparison.
That's a cool idea! Project for the future😁
@@66mhzbrain I'd love to see this.
Is the Mac monitor now working?
It's been a while but I still dont know. I dont think the motherboard in my g4 provides power to the adc cable needed to fire up the monitor. I think I concluded I needed an earlier version of thr g4 motherboard to get it working.
@@66mhzbrain These two links show that type of monitor working with similar computers. czcams.com/video/z27b40T6lLs/video.html czcams.com/video/i8EQMkmg_yo/video.html
Yes but you need the correct graphics card/motherboard combo (which he clearly has) . There is an adapter that provides external power but it is rare and expensive. I would need the correct model g4 to use with this monitor. The agp adc card has an extra tab that plugs into the motherboard to supply power to the monitor. There is no socket to take this on this g4s motherboard. So no power goes to the monitor.
@@66mhzbrain Yes, proprietary connectors etc., can be a hindrance.
@@laurencejohnson4106 the machine came with an agp rage 128 so I bought another with an adc port but then saw the edtra tab and read about the power thing. I may com into a machine or find an adapter for it at somempoibt hopefully.
I wouldn’t care if the Windows platforms were consistently faster even to this day. Bottom line is I don’t want to have to untangle the interface. How many panels do they need that do basically the same thing but differ in such minor ways it’s frustrating? I’ve used Windows since 95 and to this day I can’t understand the control panel, devices, device manager etc. slew of garbled panes. I actually just clicked through these now to verify my complaint and got sick because I can’t for the life of me open the pane I wanted to use as an example 🤢
Dealing with windows is like dealing with a bipolar girlfriend. No matter what you do, as soon as you think you’ve figured it out, you’re wrong and she’s burning your clothes.
Haha, totally subjective. I never had an issue. I won't go further into my feelings about apple in general for diplomatic reasons😁)