Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Do you do more gaming in OSX or Bootcamp?

J

Jack Flash

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 8, 2007
1,160
7
One would assume that because there are more PC games, more gaming is done in Bootcamp, but do you go out of your way to get the Mac version of a game, or the often cheaper PC version?

In general, which is faster, too? For instance Halo Mac or PC, Call of Duty 2 Mac or PC?
 
Well actually, I do way more gaming on Bootcamp than OSX, performance, features and flexibility, those are the advantages you get on Windows over OSX.

To be honest the only advantage OSX has for gaming is convenience, that is not having to reboot everytime you want to play a game.

It is as simple as that, most games just run a lot better on Windows than OSX for a variety of reasons,
 
If I played WOW maybe, I'd play it in OS X for sure. But all the PC games I've been interested in have been Windows only so.... I game there (but if there were Mac versions I'd sure as hell play them more often, I hate having to drop everything and reboot into another OS).
 
Does the GMA 950 do better in Windows being that it can borrow up to 224MB of Memory for video RAM?
 
Only game I would play on OS X is WoW but I quit playing it a few months ago. I know Starcraft 2 will run on a Mac but I hope Hellgate: London and Warhammer online does also.
 
most of the time the games i play aren't available for mac (currently stalker). so obviously i game more in bootcamp.

plus even if there was a choice, i'd go pc anyway because my pc is better for gaming than any of my macs. money saving :eek:
 
LOL! "Gaming in OS X" :eek: What a nightmare and a half. Unless it's Bejeweled.

No matter what your "Mac" setup is, even in Boot Camp, true "gaming" with all the eye candy cannot be found unless you're on a PC. Even in the "high-end" Mac's, the 7600 gt is a joke of a card if it's being considered "top of the line."

P.S. Didn't see your response before answering, but right on janey.
 
I play legacy LAN games on my powerbook - Civ 3 and Starcraft, but besides that just some mac shareware games.
Would love to play Half life 2 and soon team fortress 2 though......
 
Seriously, bollocks to Boot Camp. I installed it mostly to play the Dawn of War series but I hardly ever boot into it and I wouldn't consider buying a game these days if it wasn't an OS X version. In fairness to it there isn't that much worth knowing about for Windows these days anyway since its mostly rehashes of games that have been done before. While I almost exclusively play WoW at the moment, I do also own Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4 and both are fine on the MacBook Pro.

In fairness my biggest issue with Boot Camp is not so much the inconvenience of booting into it but the time that it takes to reboot OS X and for the caches to become optimal again. The other thing is that Dawn of War tends to crash on me so I can't be arsed to go through the hassle for very little benefit.
 
Kelmon said:
...I wouldn't consider buying a game these days if it wasn't an OS X version.
Click to expand...
I would rather shoot myself in the head than wait for Mac ports of perfectly awesome Windows games that will probably never be ported. That's ignoring the lack of good gfx cards for Macs too.

/me for one can't wait for games like Crysis, BioShock and UT3 (oh wait, this one's gonna be for mac too...)
 
Boot Camp by far.

I bought most of my games when the PC releases came out, and my MMO City of Heroes is PC-only.

I don't really have many games that run in Mac OS X outside of freeware (plasma pong FTW!).
 
I dont know what you people are running, but Bootcamp on my Mac is just a mechanism for kickstarting Windows (which does not have complete support for EFI yet) so after Bootcamp has completed and Windows is runnning, I play games in Windows. I also game in OS X for some games that run better on the Mac under OpenGL.
 
Gaming on the Mac.

I don't know about your computing habits, but I cannot just say, "Hey, I want to play a game. I'm going to reboot now." I have several windows and applications opened at once, doing various projects/assignments/amusing myself, that rebooting for any reason is not an option. I will reboot for Battlefield 2 and FEAR Combat. That's it. I own Half Life 2 GOTY and Episode 1, but I can't say I play either regularly, nor are they installed currently.

On the Mac, I play the ports. I might demo games on the PC. I remember demoing Prey on my MacBook Pro before playing the demo for the Mac on the same MacBook Pro. Performance was equivalent.

Mac hardware has some catching up to do right now (GPU-wise), but the 7600 GT was a few months old when the Mac Pro was released, not unlike the PC market. The hardware you get on the Mac can be up to date, but the current line certainly isn't. When the iMac Core Duo and MacBook Pro came out, they sported the ATI X1600, a new GPU that performed well, which not to mention was standard on many mid- and high-end PC laptops released at a similar time. I remember reading Engadget seeing the new PC laptops with the new Intel chips and the crazy CES technology thinking how can Apple top this. Well, they matched it and more. But, right now, the GPUs need major upgrades across the line. Apple could add some more options for upgrading GPUs, too.

You won't even get "true gaming" on a retail PC. If you upgrade your PC or build, sure you get "true gaming," but how many people really do either of those things? Although we get all sorts of "Why isn't my game working?" threads here, it's really no different from your typical PC forums (unless of course it's a hardware-enthusiast/gaming forum where they actually have the hardware to play their games). You can't compared a built-PC to a Mac. I'm glad you can build your cheap PC gaming hogs, but I can't build myself a Mac. A Mac to a retail PC is more appropriate. Compare your typical Dell to a Mac and you will not see such a price difference between either, when equipped with similar hardware.

Which brings me to a solution for a Mac gaming. There is a gap between the iMac and Mac Pro. Look at Dell's XPS machines for a moment. They don't use Xeons! They use Core 2 Duos! If Apple sold a Mac tower machine with Core 2 Duos and kept the machines as upgradable as any Mac Pro, you would have an affordable and customizable Mac that has never been seen before. It would just call for gamers.

There's reason for console games to be so much more appealing. There hasn't been a PC game that has been able to grab my attention and hold it long enough. Sounds like that's the general feeling of the industry at the moment. There hasn't been that next-gen game since Doom 3/Half Life 2/Far Cry.

And don't get me started about the hassle of using a PC. Why do I get a damn warning to reboot after downloading/installing an update every 30 minutes?! Of course there's more, but you know how that story goes.
 
If a game is not designed to run on a Mac then I don't wouldn't worry about. Thankfully all the games I plan on playing on a Mac is made by Blizzard and their games can run on a Mac or windows machine like WoW, Warcraft 3 and soon to be Starcraft 2. As it stands now I play more games on my Xbox 360 than my PC.

I still plan to keep my windows machine for certain games. It's has an AMD 64 3200 processor, 2 gigs of PC 3200 ram and a Radeon X800 pro card and I can run all the games I want to play.
 
applekid said:
I don't know about your computing habits, but I cannot just say....
Click to expand...
This is why I have a separate computer for gaming. I dislike rebooting for a game, but if I am doing nothing else and I'm on, say, my MacBook, I will gladly reboot for the <1min it takes so I can play a game.

applekid said:
Mac hardware has some catching up to do right now (GPU-wise), but the 7600 GT was a few months old when the Mac Pro was released, not unlike the PC market. But, right now, the GPUs need major upgrades across the line. Apple could add some more options for upgrading GPUs, too.
Click to expand...
Sigh. I just checked and the Mac Pro has a 7300gt (upgradable to the x1900xt or quadro fx 4500). The 7600gt is an upgrade for the 24" iMac.

The 7300gt is a joke considering everything else in the Mac Pro..now if it had a 7600gt, a teeny tiny bit less of a joke, but I honestly believe the x1900xt should come default with all Mac Pros. :rolleyes:

The 7300gt was new (not necessarily good...) when the Mac Pro was new, but it's been almost a year with no changes to some of the more preposterous specs in the Mac Pro - e.g. the gfx card and 1gb ram (well...maybe given this is fb-dimm the 1gb isn't so ridiculous...)

applekid said:
You won't even get "true gaming" on a retail PC. ...Compare your typical Dell to a Mac and you will not see such a price difference between either, when equipped with similar hardware.
Click to expand...
<-- built many of her own PCs, partially because of the above

I understand that nobody else has anything unlike most of the Macs in terms of a lot of the components, but why the hell are we comparing Apple to the similarly underpowered overpriced offerings of other manufacturers? It's like saying "hey they're crappy, so it's okay for Apple to be crappy because they are".

applekid said:
...you would have an affordable and customizable Mac that has never been seen before.
Click to expand...
You and me and half this forum, mate :mad: :(

applekid said:
There's reason for console games to be so much more appealing. There hasn't been a PC game that has been able to grab my attention and hold it long enough. Sounds like that's the general feeling of the industry at the moment. There hasn't been that next-gen game since Doom 3/Half Life 2/Far Cry.
Click to expand...
Depends on what kind of genre you like, honestly. That's you...but other people have different wants and needs.

What about Crysis or Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and 3? I'm looking forward to those, as well as a few other games coming...someday...

applekid said:
And don't get me started about the hassle of using a PC. Why do I get a damn warning to reboot after downloading/installing an update every 30 minutes?! Of course there's more, but you know how that story goes.
Click to expand...
That's you...I don't have problems with Windows Update :rolleyes:

Well, to be picky, yes I do, but it's along the same lines as Software Update for Mac OS X, nothing particularly annoying.
 
janey said:
Sigh. I just checked and the Mac Pro has a 7300gt (upgradable to the x1900xt or quadro fx 4500). The 7600gt is an upgrade for the 24" iMac.

The 7300gt is a joke considering everything else in the Mac Pro..now if it had a 7600gt, a teeny tiny bit less of a joke, but I honestly believe the x1900xt should come default with all Mac Pros. :rolleyes:

The 7300gt was new (not necessarily good...) when the Mac Pro was new, but it's been almost a year with no changes to some of the more preposterous specs in the Mac Pro - e.g. the gfx card and 1gb ram (well...maybe given this is fb-dimm the 1gb isn't so ridiculous...)
Click to expand...

This is what I get for furiously typing my long reply after watching that intense episode of Lost ;)

Nevertheless, I think we can all agree the GPUs need some updating on the Mac line up :D Next update will hopefully be the nVidia 8-series, which appears to be the "standard" in the market right now.

janey said:
I understand that nobody else has anything unlike most of the Macs in terms of a lot of the components, but why the hell are we comparing Apple to the similarly underpowered overpriced offerings of other manufacturers? It's like saying "hey they're crappy, so it's okay for Apple to be crappy because they are".
Click to expand...

Because those manufacturers are the competition. All of these high-end PC makers like Alienware and VoodooPC and user-built PCs are not Apple's competition. Until I can build my own Mac without some ridiculous hacking to get Mac OS X to install, there is no reason to consider these niche PC makers or user-built PCs as equals. You and others may have built your own PCs, but that is not that prevalent a practice.

janey said:
What about Crysis or Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and 3? I'm looking forward to those, as well as a few other games coming...someday...
Click to expand...

I am looking forward to the Orange Box, but PC games haven't gotten the buzz that we got from the next-gen game engines from 3 years ago. The popularity of WoW doesn't help since people are investing so much time in that one game. And the prospects of the whole Windows Live gaming and Windows Vista is not making the situation much better.

The good news is that Intel Mac sales have been very good, enough for the Mac game market to make any release break even or be profitable easily. Perhaps it means more ports are possible, but there are still problems with middleware and nobody knows how Vista will affect Mac porting.

janey said:
That's you...I don't have problems with Windows Update :rolleyes:

Well, to be picky, yes I do, but it's along the same lines as Software Update for Mac OS X, nothing particularly annoying.
Click to expand...

At least when I can quit Software Update and never worry about it asking to update again in another 30 minutes. Microsoft, please get rid of the Remind Me Later button. Just give me a button that says Understood. I'll restart my computer eventually. Tabbing out of Battlefield 2 when I'm in the middle of matches is very uncool.
 
WildPalms said:
I dont know what you people are running, but Bootcamp on my Mac is just a mechanism for kickstarting Windows (which does not have complete support for EFI yet) so after Bootcamp has completed and Windows is runnning, I play games in Windows. I also game in OS X for some games that run better on the Mac under OpenGL.
Click to expand...

What a load of tosh. Why do people always think this. The firmware for all new Mac machines has a CSM built in. Windows doesn't NEED EFI to boot on the Mac, it pretends to have a BIOS. You can install windows and overwrite Mac OS X without ever even viewing the bootcamp webpage, let alone installing it. BootCamp partitions the hard disk, and makes a driver disk..... and thats IT. It does not "run", it does not "emulate", It does NOTHING when the machine is booting windows at all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back