The present and future of Intel Nova?

I'm thinking about buying a new machine, a MacBook Pro. Today I even got as far as choosing features at the Apple Store, but resisted the urge to click "Add to Cart".

I'm doing this for several reasons, most notably because today's video resolutions and encodings (I'm looking at you, H.264) are starting to outreach the ability of my six-year-old TiBook to play smoothly. Difficult to enjoy the latest episode of Star Trek: Odyssey when the video and audio keep falling out of sync.....

I know I'll lose the ability to use NovaTools if I do this. Also, I've seen EV Nova running very slowly under Rosetta----more slowly than it has any right to run, given the simple graphics.

So, what's the consensus? Is Nova development and testing possible with an Intel Mac? Will there be future upgrades to Nova to make it more playable? How about WinNova via BootCamp?

Christ, I am so envious of you. A mac pro plus Maya would make a real dream machine....

I've heard that EVN actually works better on Leapord than it does on Tiger. I think Guy said it, this was a while ago though so I don't know for sure. Also, MissionComputer 4 will be fully Intel compatible, so maybe you could move your operation over to that.

I just got a new MacBook Pro about two months ago, and Nova runs fine--well, Nova running Revenant does (and it's more complex). You shouldn't have any speed issues playing the game. As far as development goes, I have to say I really miss Novatools. I've kept my old G4 around almost entirely for that reason.

That being said, I absolutely love the new machine. Even better is the ability to dual boot XP because let's face it, gaming is the Mac's Achilles' heel (and foot, and entire lower body). I've been playing Oblivion a lot thanks to XP, and it looks almost as good as it does on the 360.

This post has been edited by Verb : 23 February 2008 - 12:15 PM

The only machine I ever remember Nova running poorly on was the original MacBook Pro, but I've seen no issues (well, that's not quite true, there is the whole fiasco with the X3100-equipped machines) otherwise. Both my MacBook and Mac Pro run EVN fine, and it would be fine under Windows as well.

Nova ran pretty poorly on Tiger on Intel but on Leopard it's fine. The only issue is the gameplay seems slower (as if the speed slider from EV/O had been turned down a little) but the framerate is fine and it's not jerky or glitchy or anything.

Sidenote: I miss the speed slider.

I have a MacBook Pro, I'm running Tiger, and EV:N is running so fast that I didn't even know it was PPC only.

The X3100 issue had to do with no support for 16-bit color, right? Or was that something else? Is that issue being dealt with yet?

The X3100 doesn't support thousands of colors, yes. At least not under OS X, on the Windows side there are strangely no issues.

That's because the Apple drivers for the graphics card need work