Quake III beta out for Mac only

One of the most eagerly awaited games of all time--Quake III Arena--wasreleased in early beta form this past weekend but the game masters at idsurprised everyone with the release... which will run only on G3 Macintoshcomputers, rather than the Windows machines that occupy about 99% of thegaming market. But have no fear, id isn't turning into a Mac house: Thecompany, which promises releases for Windows, Linux, and the Mac, says thatthe early Mac release was a convenience only. And John Carmack, theprogramming guru at id, has little good to say about the Mac OS.

"The Macintosh market is smaller than the [Windows] market, and has lessconfiguration options than the Linux market," Carmack explained in his"plan" file, a freely available text document that he updates daily. "Thereis only a single OpenGL driver, and the hardware is essentially always thesame. This is an ideal 'controlled' environment for the initial testing.Basically, if there is a huge issue with the initial release we're exposinga smaller audience to it."

"Some of you are busy getting all bent out of shape about this," Carmacknoted, as the news spread across the Net this weekend that Windows userswould have to wait to test Quake III Arena. Carmack says that the small Macmarket makes for an ideal beta pool. "If a given bug is going to show upwhen a thousand people have looked at it, but we had released it to ahundred thousand people, then we are going to have a lot of duplication towade through. The Mac testers will find some obvious problems. We will fixthem. The later releases will be better."

"Don't be spiteful," he continues. "This is just the beginning of thetesting and release process."

And, of course, Carmack addressed the obvious criticism that id is somehowin bed with Apple. Carmack showed off a Quake III Arena video in January atMacWorld.

"One conspiracy theory suggests that Apple is somehow getting us to dothis," he writes. "What we have 'gotten' from Apple is a few developmentmachines. No cash payoff. No bundling deal. No marketing contract. I amlooking at this long term. I want to see [Mac] OS X become a top-notchplatform for graphics development. I think highly of the NEXTSTEP heritageand I might move my development from NT if it turns out well. There is a lotof groundwork that needs to be laid with Apple for this to happen, and myworking on the Mac right now is part of that."

As for the whole Mac vs. PC issue, Carmack is pretty clear.

"At this time, there is no Mac that is as fast for gaming (or justabout anything, actually) as a Pentium III with a top of the line 3D card.Period. I have been misquoted by some Mac evangelists as saying otherwise,"Carmack says. "The new (blue and white) G3 systems are very good systems inmany ways, and make a perfectly good gaming platform. However, a high-end[Windows] machine just has more horsepower on both the CPU and the 3D card.A 400 MHz G3 performs about the same as a 400 MHz PII if they aren't fillrate limited, where the faster cards on the PC will give [it] about a 25%advantage. A 500 MHz PIII with an appropriate card is 30% faster than thebest Mac you can buy. The multi-colored iMacs, old G3 desktops, andPowerBooks can play Quake3,but the RagePro 3D acceleration defines the absolute bottom end of oursupported platforms. A serious gamer will not be satisfied [with thesemachines]."

Tell us how you really feel, John.

"Gaming is not a reason to buy a Mac, but Apple is taking steps so thatit may not be a reason to avoid a Mac if you have other reasons for wantingone. Mac OS still sucks.