macs and games
Discussion
Posted a thread a couple of months back asking if macs played games, and got a fairly negative repsonse saying that games were shit on mac even when running as a pc and nothing worked.
well Ive just seen many ofl the latest PC games running on Bootcamp on a MacBook and they ran incredibly well. Crysis Quake wars, and COD4 ran beautifully. ..so much so that I bought one, mainly because I needed keynote, but it shows, you can get the best of both worlds.
well Ive just seen many ofl the latest PC games running on Bootcamp on a MacBook and they ran incredibly well. Crysis Quake wars, and COD4 ran beautifully. ..so much so that I bought one, mainly because I needed keynote, but it shows, you can get the best of both worlds.
There is no reason why games shouldn't work well on a Mac via bootcamp. If for whatever reason it does run bad, then so would it on a regular PC, as once using windows via bootcamp, the hardware isn't really any different.
There is quite a few games available for OS X itself, but watch out for the ones that run in some kind of emulation, like CIDER. They dont run too well from what i've read..
Im not a big gamer myself, but I quite enjoy a game of UT from time to time. I just bought UT 3 today which is PC only presently, but should run fine on my Mac, as the demo certainly ran well enough
P,
There is quite a few games available for OS X itself, but watch out for the ones that run in some kind of emulation, like CIDER. They dont run too well from what i've read..
Im not a big gamer myself, but I quite enjoy a game of UT from time to time. I just bought UT 3 today which is PC only presently, but should run fine on my Mac, as the demo certainly ran well enough
P,
AFAIAC if you're running Boot Camp and (presumably) a version of Windows, then you're not using a Mac at all, you're using a Windows PC and your gaming performance should be identical to a beige-box Windows PC with the same specifications as the Apple hardware. The label on the box doesn't matter if you're using it to run Windows.
So, in this case, the problem is Apple's long-held bad attitude of using cheap and nasty graphics hardware in most of their machines. This isn't something new - even back in the good old PPC days when there simply wasn't the opportunity to use a reference Intel integrated graphics motherboard - Apple graphics have always lagged behind PC ***gamer*** cards because that's not been their focus. Yeah, Apple-specific graphics boards had better DACs, their displays have no dead pixels, and you can colour-calibrate to perfection... because that's what the pros demanded. But the typical demands of games (fast fill-rate, large texture memory, high-performance pixel shader pipelines) weren't a priority for Apple's creative graphics pros early on. Photoshop used the then awesome performance of PPC Altivec for most filters...
It's only recently that GPU hardware (with programmable shaders) has become flexible enough (and crucially, accurate enough) to be a real draw for Apple. Games don't care about absolute accuracy, they care about frame rate. CAD and video work requires identical results on different cards... something not much admitted but the reality is that the same video may render slightly differently on an ATI card compared to an nVidia card if using their drivers... Apple would have faced a shitstorm from their graphics pro users if what they saw on their screen ended up different in print or on film... Of course, I'm well aware that OS X was designed from the start to be able to take advantage of dumping as much of the display system on the graphics card as possible, but they've found it hard going (Quartz 2D Extreme's mysterious demise being a case in point, and yes I'm aware it has a stupid name, try saying it quickly, you'll sound like Vanilla Ice).
PC gaming sparked off a 3D GPU arms race that Apple didn't keep up with - even though a few companies *did* port their games to PowerPC Macs, and OS X - hell even Bungie (the guys who wrote Halo) were a Mac-only game shop (famous for Marathon before Halo came on the scene and Microsoft bought them out). John Carmack was OS X-friendly and IIRC used an Apple box for development at one point, meaning Quake, Doom and Wolfenstein made it to the Mac natively.
But getting gamer-spec graphics cards that worked on the Mac platform was always either impossible or ridiculously expensive (i.e. the only way to get the high-spec card was to buy the nVidia Quadra graphics-workstation card, which had the same core GPU as the £300 gamer graphics cards, but for the Mac it was £1000 or so).
On top of that, driver development on the Mac platform was massively retarded (in the real meaning of the term, not the USA teenage pejorative sense) compared to the white-hot competition in the PC space.
If anything, gaming on the Mac was possible *in spite* of the **3D** graphics hardware Apple chose to supply...
Now Macs are little more than reference-spec Intel PCs, you'd expect to be able to sling in any PC gamer card, but the Apple platform uses EFI rather than legacy BIOS (hell, it has no DOS legacy to support) so it's not just a question of buying the latest sooper-dooper PC gamer graphics card from PC World and bolting it in.
As I said before, if you're booting Windows then it's a Windows PC, not a Mac, so you should be able to predict games performance based on reference benchmarks for similar hardware (i.e. the graphics card in the Mac, the CPU and the RAM). However if you're wanting to play games in OS X - then you've got poor driver optimisation, potentially poor quality code ports (not really applicable to id software stuff, I've read Carmack's code and he is a great programmer, and even Doom was mostly abstracted from the underlying OS) and a fundamental lack of testing due to the small market to contend with. Even games that aren't pure 3D FPS genres (that you'd expect to be dependent on a fast GPU) can perform like crap on OS X if the developer has ported it badly.
Of course, games that started on the Mac (Halo) or had good initial architecture enabling easy ports (id software stuff) will run OK on OS X, but it all depends on whether your machine has a good graphics card... I've got the fastest of the old PowerPC Macs - a Quad G5 workstation - that has enormous CPU processing power but until recently there was only one graphics card available for it which was shite. I have two of them powering my screens, and they're slow as hell (GeForce 6600). There was no other option to buy aftermarket, other than a Quadra card (if you could find one) for more than a grand.
And, of course, now that all Apple hardware is Intel based and supports running Windows natively, there's even less incentive for developers to provide well-optimised OS X versions of their games. I can see them saying 'just boot into Windows'. If you're prepared to do that, then there's no reason why game performance won't match a similar spec generic PC.
I'd still recommend a dedicated homebrew box for PC games though, only the Mac Pro has slots for graphics cards, and the EFI issue means you still need Mac-specific cards - so if you want to be on the cutting edge of gaming then you'll need the latest GPUs, which you won't get in any Apple laptop or iMac. And don't you think a Mac Pro is a bit overkill for gaming??
I'll admit that Doom 3 and Quake 4 look nice at native resolution on an Apple 30" display, but you can get a similar panel from Dell a lot cheaper and a cheap PC with an expensive graphics card for much less than the Apple option.
So, in this case, the problem is Apple's long-held bad attitude of using cheap and nasty graphics hardware in most of their machines. This isn't something new - even back in the good old PPC days when there simply wasn't the opportunity to use a reference Intel integrated graphics motherboard - Apple graphics have always lagged behind PC ***gamer*** cards because that's not been their focus. Yeah, Apple-specific graphics boards had better DACs, their displays have no dead pixels, and you can colour-calibrate to perfection... because that's what the pros demanded. But the typical demands of games (fast fill-rate, large texture memory, high-performance pixel shader pipelines) weren't a priority for Apple's creative graphics pros early on. Photoshop used the then awesome performance of PPC Altivec for most filters...
It's only recently that GPU hardware (with programmable shaders) has become flexible enough (and crucially, accurate enough) to be a real draw for Apple. Games don't care about absolute accuracy, they care about frame rate. CAD and video work requires identical results on different cards... something not much admitted but the reality is that the same video may render slightly differently on an ATI card compared to an nVidia card if using their drivers... Apple would have faced a shitstorm from their graphics pro users if what they saw on their screen ended up different in print or on film... Of course, I'm well aware that OS X was designed from the start to be able to take advantage of dumping as much of the display system on the graphics card as possible, but they've found it hard going (Quartz 2D Extreme's mysterious demise being a case in point, and yes I'm aware it has a stupid name, try saying it quickly, you'll sound like Vanilla Ice).
PC gaming sparked off a 3D GPU arms race that Apple didn't keep up with - even though a few companies *did* port their games to PowerPC Macs, and OS X - hell even Bungie (the guys who wrote Halo) were a Mac-only game shop (famous for Marathon before Halo came on the scene and Microsoft bought them out). John Carmack was OS X-friendly and IIRC used an Apple box for development at one point, meaning Quake, Doom and Wolfenstein made it to the Mac natively.
But getting gamer-spec graphics cards that worked on the Mac platform was always either impossible or ridiculously expensive (i.e. the only way to get the high-spec card was to buy the nVidia Quadra graphics-workstation card, which had the same core GPU as the £300 gamer graphics cards, but for the Mac it was £1000 or so).
On top of that, driver development on the Mac platform was massively retarded (in the real meaning of the term, not the USA teenage pejorative sense) compared to the white-hot competition in the PC space.
If anything, gaming on the Mac was possible *in spite* of the **3D** graphics hardware Apple chose to supply...
Now Macs are little more than reference-spec Intel PCs, you'd expect to be able to sling in any PC gamer card, but the Apple platform uses EFI rather than legacy BIOS (hell, it has no DOS legacy to support) so it's not just a question of buying the latest sooper-dooper PC gamer graphics card from PC World and bolting it in.
As I said before, if you're booting Windows then it's a Windows PC, not a Mac, so you should be able to predict games performance based on reference benchmarks for similar hardware (i.e. the graphics card in the Mac, the CPU and the RAM). However if you're wanting to play games in OS X - then you've got poor driver optimisation, potentially poor quality code ports (not really applicable to id software stuff, I've read Carmack's code and he is a great programmer, and even Doom was mostly abstracted from the underlying OS) and a fundamental lack of testing due to the small market to contend with. Even games that aren't pure 3D FPS genres (that you'd expect to be dependent on a fast GPU) can perform like crap on OS X if the developer has ported it badly.
Of course, games that started on the Mac (Halo) or had good initial architecture enabling easy ports (id software stuff) will run OK on OS X, but it all depends on whether your machine has a good graphics card... I've got the fastest of the old PowerPC Macs - a Quad G5 workstation - that has enormous CPU processing power but until recently there was only one graphics card available for it which was shite. I have two of them powering my screens, and they're slow as hell (GeForce 6600). There was no other option to buy aftermarket, other than a Quadra card (if you could find one) for more than a grand.
And, of course, now that all Apple hardware is Intel based and supports running Windows natively, there's even less incentive for developers to provide well-optimised OS X versions of their games. I can see them saying 'just boot into Windows'. If you're prepared to do that, then there's no reason why game performance won't match a similar spec generic PC.
I'd still recommend a dedicated homebrew box for PC games though, only the Mac Pro has slots for graphics cards, and the EFI issue means you still need Mac-specific cards - so if you want to be on the cutting edge of gaming then you'll need the latest GPUs, which you won't get in any Apple laptop or iMac. And don't you think a Mac Pro is a bit overkill for gaming??
I'll admit that Doom 3 and Quake 4 look nice at native resolution on an Apple 30" display, but you can get a similar panel from Dell a lot cheaper and a cheap PC with an expensive graphics card for much less than the Apple option.
As ever Cyberface you are a fountain of knowledge and provide a balanced point of view.
It is a shame you can't get a high end pc graphics card into a Mac as that would go a long way getting the gamers to consider the Mac for a games machine.
I wouldn't really understand the point though given the machine would probably live most of it's life in Windows.
It is a shame you can't get a high end pc graphics card into a Mac as that would go a long way getting the gamers to consider the Mac for a games machine.
I wouldn't really understand the point though given the machine would probably live most of it's life in Windows.
Ive had Mac's since they were powered by Candles.
they are great and look superb
but as for games ive always had a Play Station on the go or a X-Box
as most of the games that i am aware of just don't work well with Mac's
Iam now on the new MacBook Pro and that doe have a games facility on it hoe as far as i know
but i would sooner have a X-Box and a BIG BIG TELLY
they are great and look superb
but as for games ive always had a Play Station on the go or a X-Box
as most of the games that i am aware of just don't work well with Mac's
Iam now on the new MacBook Pro and that doe have a games facility on it hoe as far as i know
but i would sooner have a X-Box and a BIG BIG TELLY
All i can add is that i've got a new Imac 24" (top spec machine excluding the 4gb ram upgrade) and it couldnt work out how to play Battlefield 2010 or whatever the exact title is... very disapointed and when i returned it to Southampton the guy said we dont really return games but we've had a few back... and gave me my money back 
Anyway i may go bootcamp although i may just wait till EA et al produce drivers to work with the new Intel Macs.
Anyway i may go bootcamp although i may just wait till EA et al produce drivers to work with the new Intel Macs.
CooperS said:
Oh well i didnt buy it to play games but it is ashame with all the power its got that i cant run simple games on it. Although Call of Duty 2 is good and has an enjoyable online mode.
point is you can, but you need to do it through bootcamp and as cyberface says, it is really running as a pc.You can run anything.
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