And The Winner Is...

MacOS X Server is the best MacOS for the highest performance Voodoo 2 Quake 2. This may come as a surprise to some, especially considering the port of Quake 2, the Voodoo 2 drivers, and MiniGL was done for free by some folks in their spare time. Part of this may be explained by the performance impact of Mesa, but until native OpenGL (or MiniGL) 3Dfx drivers are available for MacOS 8.6, this will be impossible to test.

Anxious gamers pining for the highest fps on their G3 hardware are recommended to stay their hand before reaching for their wallet - MacOS X Server will set you back $500 and by nature is a far more complicated operating system than MacOS 8.6, intended as it is for enterprise computing. But if you're already an enterprise computer user, MacOS X Server is easier to manage and in some ways more capable than AIX, Solaris, or Ultrix, makes a great development station (especially WebObjects, vertical application and object oriented development), and hey, it also runs Voodoo 2 Quake 2!

The numbers show that MacOS X Server is a great OS for getting the most speed out of 3D games like Quake 2, at least on 3dfx hardware. And as far as porting goes, since UNIX is the core of MacOS X, porting games to MacOS X Server (especially games already ported to Linux) will be easier than bringing them to MacOS 8.x. Omni Development, admittedly familiar with John Carmack's coding style, nonetheless ported Quake II to MacOS X Server in a little over a weekend. If a spare time port of a game and video card drivers achieves top results in the first release of an OS on the PPC architecture, the future can only be bright.

While MacOS 8.6 pulled in a solid second, the Virtual PC tests demonstrate just how much slower emulation is for modern CPU-intensive 3D games, even when the 3D video isn't being emulated. (Just for the record, we here at the Everything Mac staff find Virtual PC to be completely usable in productivity applications. This situation might improve if Connectix can accelerate the emulated x86 CPU by using the Velocity Engine in the G4 processor.) The bottom line is don't set your expectations too high when emulating PC games, and buy the Mac ports of such games when you can.