The Mac version of id Software’s seminal shooter Doom 3 has finally gone gold and will be on store shelves by the end of the week. All is not well, however, as Macworld magazine got an early look at the game, and put it through a series of benchmarking tests, with somewhat disappointing results.

Macworld used a dual-2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with 2.5 GB RAM and the ATI Radeon X800 XT with 256 MB VRAM, running 10.3.8. The fastest they were able to get the game to run was 47.1 FPS on average, and that was at 640x480 with no FSAA. See the complete results.

The reaction to those numbers has been mixed, but it mainly focused on blaming Aspyr Media, the Mac codeshop responsible for porting the game, for poorly optimizing the game. In response, Aspyr’s Glenda Adams spoke to arsTechnica, addressing that issue:

“The truth to Doom 3 OS X performance is that there isn’t one magic low hanging fruit optimization that will fix it. Engineers at Aspyr/id/Apple/ATI/nvidia haven’t ‘overlooked’ something, or just blown off an easy fix for some reason. We held the game for over 4 months purely for optimization, its not like it was rushed out for a certain date,” she wrote.

Aspyr will continue to work on the game, despite its gold status.