Quake 4 Universal Binary vs. Bootcamp Quake 4 and a some pointers for the Mac Quakers

Last week Aspyr released the Quake 4 1.2 update which fixed many of the little issues in 1.0 and brings dual core support to Quake 4 for Mac OS X, which is based on the Doom 3 engine (a UB update just came for that too). Having a shiny new MacBook Pro, I thought I'd pit the Mac version against Quake 4 running in Win XP. There's a lot of talk about the effect of dual booting on Mac gaming so I thought I'd do some benchmarking to see what, if any differences exist now that the Windows and OS X versions are even. Usually the Windows versions of games are a little faster but it used to be hard to guage exactly how much faster since the hardware was never the same. There are numerous factors at work here, not the least of which being that Bootcamp is a beta and the ATI driver clearly needs work.

Incidentally, you can use the same serial number that came with the Mac version with the Windows installer of Quake 4 so if you want to try this out, you can borrow a friend's Windows version and set up a smart little one-size-fits-all Quake 4 folder on the Bootcamp FAT32 drive (somehow permissions aren't an issue).