There's no doubt gaming fans who have made the switch to Mac OS X have been enjoying the truly impressive performance of some early native ports to the platform. Quake 3 Arena, Alice, Sacrifice, etc. Well, get ready to be even more impressed. Now available for order at the Apple Store is Giants: Citizen Kabuto, heralded as one of--if not the, most impressive 3D games on the PC.
OmniGroup ported this PC title, which will be sold by MacPlay, to OS X (OS X-only port) and in doing so made the game multiprocessor aware (which the PC original is not) and also made use of custom OpenGL extensions for the GeForce 3, to access its advanced pixel shader technology. OmniGroup made a statement a short while back indicating that Giants on a G4 dual-500 with GeForce 2 runs faster than the PC original does on the fastest GeForce 3-equipped Athlon out there. Quite impressive. What's more impressive are the recent comments made by MacPlay president Mark Cottam about the game (quoted from a MacObserver article):
The talented engineers at Omni Group have implemented SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) support into Giants, which takes advantage of Mac OS X's symmetric multiprocessing feature when running the dual processor Power Mac G4. Playing Giants on a dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4 with Mac OS X and a GeForce 3 graphics accelerator will be the best gaming experience one could enjoy on any platform."
So for once, the Mac faithful stand at the absolute pinncale of gaming performance, of all the platforms out there. This is a very exciting time for Mac gamers. The future of Mac gaming looks extremely bright thanks to the power brought by OS X.
