id, EA Show Support For Apple 149
The iPhone may have been the star at today's Apple event, but Joystiq points out that id software's debut of 'id Tech 5' is just as beautiful. There are no current details on the first title slated to use the engine. Just the same John Carmack had a few things to say, pointing out the technology's strong graphical and cross-platform performance: "What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game ... We're going to be showing on a Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox at E3, we'll have another Mac announcement at E3." Game|Life also points out that EA will be throwing support behind OS X, with releases of major titles like Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need For Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Re:Woopee (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Say that again.... (Score:2, Informative)
- Command & Conquer 3 - March 28, 2007 [wikipedia.org]
- Battlefield 2142 - October 18, 2006 [wikipedia.org]
- Need for Speed: Carbon - October 31,2006 (November 16, 2006 for PS3; November 19, 2006 for Wii) [wikipedia.org]
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - June 26, 2007 [wikipedia.org]
They also announced that the Mac will be one of the plethora of platforms that the next Madden and Tiger Woods PGA Tour games are released on. Not a single game mentioned is "more than a year old," and one of them (three if you count Madden and Tiger Woods, although they weren't listed in theMac World New York, Can you guess the date? (Score:2, Informative)
MWNY 1999, I remember watching the stream live and getting hyped over this MMO shooter. Its such a shame it never became the game it was intended to be.-=[shake fist]=-
The video of the demo is still up on the web, ah the nostalgia. http://nikon.bungie.org/movie1.html [bungie.org]
GX is more like GL than like DX (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Woopee (Score:1, Informative)
The modern approach is to use a combination of WM hints (to tell the WM that your window is full-screen), and XRandR (to set up your screen resolution). There's no concept of a full-screen application, but there doesn't need to be one. The WM knows how to handle the window, as does the composite manager if you have one, and the driver is smart enough to use whatever full-screen rendering optimizations the hardware may have (page flipping, for example).
On older systems (we're talking 5+ years here), it involves the same set of WM hints, and use XF86VidMode to set up the screen resolution. XRandR is better, because the window manager will be made aware of the new screen resolution, but XF86VidMode can be trivially used as a fallback when XRandR is not available.
Older than that, I believe it's been possible to use DGA (another X extension) to make an app run full screen since the mid 90s.
You can also just use something like SDL, which will handle all that stuff for you.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:1, Informative)
The graphics card is slightly different, however. In a PC, the graphics card BIOS is called by the system BIOS to initialise display at the start of the POST sequence - you'll often see a quick flash mentioning the make of your video card when you boot up.
Macs use EFI, not BIOS. But part of the boot process still requires setting up a video output and therefore initialising the video card. So this requires an EFI compatible card.
Long story short - you can upgrade the GPU in a Mac tower, but you need to purchase Mac-specific models. I've done so in the past with ATi cards - the price was the same as the PC version of the card.
Re:Woopee (Score:3, Informative)