CafÈ Macs reports Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) will bring drastic improvements in 3D game performance.

As we already know, the performance of DOOM 3 for Mac in comparison to its Windows counterpart is a little depressing - but those tests were on a Mac running Panther. The test machine was able to crank out an acceptable, yet somewhat lackluster performance by running the game at somewhere between 20-30 FPS at 800x600 on High quality.

On the same test machine, now running Tiger, saw an incredible performance boost. A clean install of both the latest Tiger beta (8A414) and DOOM 3 saw a steady 35-40 FPS at 1024x768 on High quality, with 2x Anti-aliasing enabled. Quite an improvement.

Tiger is due sometime during the first half of this year. Recent reports indicate Tiger will be released sometime in April.