The company
Etnus has announced a debugger, TotalView, which will be compatible with Tiger, and its beta version should be available on May, 1st; and the final version in June.
For doing such an announcement they are probably aware that tiger will be available before the 1st of May (as we are too).
Knowing that Etnus is developing clusters-specific applications in collaboration with apple, it is quite clear that they are fully supported by Apple, and well informed.
Fastmac offers to replace the processor of the slot-loading G3 iMacs with a 500MHz G4 processor. Of course, you will need to send them your motherboard for the installation...
The replacement costs $199, which sorts of dedicates it to die-hard geeks, especially if you consider the graphics card that powers these machines.
[moose: well, it might be a good option for using the old iMac as a server...]
The Research firm Morgan Stanley has conducted a survey including 400 PC users owning an iPod, and clearly showing that 19% of them were thinking of switching in a near future. We do not know if this effect is already in action, but clearly Apple does not have any computers in stock anymore! Only Xserve and eMac are shipped within 5 to 7 days. PowerMac, PowerBook, iMac, iBook are all available only within 2 to 3 WEEKS, whereas for a Mac mini one has to wait 3 to 5 weeks...
Those data are directly from Apple, and not large resellers...
Cafemacs generated quite a bit of buzz with their alleged DOOM 3 test on a Tiger build, saying the perfs were quite a bit ahead of Panther's. Lots of comments in all directions.
So we went ahead and asked a beta tester to run some benchmarks for us, so we could compare them with the results our Gui92 gave us under 10.3.8:
- 800x600 w/o Aniso w/o shadows : 50.9 FPS
- 800x600 w/o Aniso w shadows : 38.3 FPS
- 800x600 w Aniso 4x w/o shadows : 47.7 FPS
- 800x600 w Aniso 4x w shadows : 37.1 FPS
- 1024x768 w/o Aniso w/o shadows : 41.7 FPS
- 1024x768 w/o Aniso w shadows : 29.6 FPS
- 1024x768 w Aniso 4x w/o shadows : 38.2 FPS
- 1024x768 w Aniso 4x w shadows : 28.1 FPS
Our beta tester friend then ran the same benchmarks on the most recent seeded build of Tiger:
- 800x600 w/o Aniso w/o shadows : 52.2 FPS
- 800x600 w/o Aniso w shadows : 40.2 FPS
- 800x600 w Aniso 4x w/o shadows : 46.4 FPS
- 800x600 w Aniso 4x w shadows : 35.4 FPS
- 1024x768 w/o Aniso w/o shadows : 44.2 FPS
- 1024x768 w/o Aniso w shadows : 31.6 FPS
- 1024x768 w Aniso 4x w/o shadows : 37.4 FPS
- 1024x768 w Aniso 4x w shadows : 27.9 FPS
Both results are more than similar, dare we say identical. So, no need to think Tiger will help for DOOM 3, coz it won't.
