IMG recently visited OmniGroup after the Macworld keynote in
an attempt to dig up new information on their work with Giants: Citizen
Kabuto. Tim Wood was nice enough to answer questions about the OS X-only
game from MacPlay, as well as their ports of other titles on the
way. Giants will require a nice machine to run well, though it looks like with
Apple's new 'QuickSilver' PowerMacs, they will eclipse the performace of even
the high end PCs. Here's an excerpt:

IMG: Giants has been announced as OS X only, can you talk about some of the reasoning for that?

Tim Wood: This game requires a really big, bad machine. So anyone that has one of those will probably be running OS X anyway. This won't run on a G3, it won't run on a Rage 128, it's a modern game. Even on the PC...

[Tim switches to his PC setup]

This is my favorite scene right here. We're getting like 13 frames per second at one particular spot [on the PC], I guess now it's getting 16 or 17. And this is a 1.3 Gigahertz Athlon, which is as fast or faster than the Pentium 4s out there. This is pretty much the fastest PC money can buy.

We still have a bunch of tuning we have to do to on the Mac OS X side as well. There's a lot of room for optimizing, the GL drivers that Apple is working on, etc. And I know some specific things that have been fixed [in OS 10.1], though OpenGL being "20% faster" seems like generic marketing speak. So as far as performance tests, it's looking really good.

IMG Interview with OmniGroup's Tim Wood

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