That's arguable. Blizzard is great about getting their games out simultaneously on the Mac and providing great support, but World of Warcraft runs much, much better in Windows than it does in OS X.
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OS/X Games.. why?
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That's arguable. Blizzard is great about getting their games out simultaneously on the Mac and providing great support, but World of Warcraft runs much, much better in Windows than it does in OS X.
I haven't played WoW recently, but I played that game for over 2 years, and they did significant work on closing the performance gaps in the mac version and pc version. I will admit though that some people did elect to play it in bootcamp though.
And regardless, performance problems on a blizzard game are pretty much equivalent to what you'd normally expect from any other game company
Blizzards' so much better with their mac versions than most other companies probably because they develop the mac and PC versions simultaneously. Many of you have been talking abotu the difficulties in porting a game that's already been optimized, and simultaneous development means you don't have to go through that trouble.
And there's the effort that they put in. Less than ONE WEEK after intel macs went on sale, a Universal Binary version of WoW was available for download.
I trust that Starcraft 2 will run well under OS X... though we still have to wait a little while or that.
And regardless, performance problems on a blizzard game are pretty much equivalent to what you'd normally expect from any other game company
Blizzards' so much better with their mac versions than most other companies probably because they develop the mac and PC versions simultaneously. Many of you have been talking abotu the difficulties in porting a game that's already been optimized, and simultaneous development means you don't have to go through that trouble.
And there's the effort that they put in. Less than ONE WEEK after intel macs went on sale, a Universal Binary version of WoW was available for download.
I trust that Starcraft 2 will run well under OS X... though we still have to wait a little while or that.
I've been running WOW on my MBP 2.4 with its GeForce 8600M GT and the game flies. I only run into problems with my Internet connection, which can bog down and cause lag. Graphically, the game zooms right along. I get between 50 and 80 fps all the time, sometimes higher in dungeon-type places. Is the performance really that much better on a comparable Windoze machine?
Edit: I had 2GB of RAM, upgraded to 4GB recently, but didn't notice a difference in graphics performance.
Even so, I find myself more annoyed in that one minute than I'd like. Ridiculous numbers of those little "tip" balloons, I get an error on each and every start up, the desktop and taskbar loading before they've loaded enough to actually be used, etc. Working on anything in a Windows environment is simply more of a pain in the ass than I want to deal with.
Epic. The unreal series. Unreal 3 is due out soon on the Mac, if remember correctly Unreal Tournament 2004 supported multiprocessor systems, so I would imagine that the frame rate on something like the new dual processor, quad core Mac Pro with a 8800GT is going to blistering.
Epic. The unreal series. Unreal 3 is due out soon on the Mac, if remember correctly Unreal Tournament 2004 supported multiprocessor systems, so I would imagine that the frame rate on something like the new dual processor, quad core Mac Pro with a 8800GT is going to blistering.
I would imagine the bottleneck would be the graphics card not the CPU in that instance.
I agree with most of the above posters... the real killer is rebooting...
So, I boot into windows to play some Civ IV (cause I need BtS ) but then I HAVE to restart into mac os x to listen to music, or so my Alarm Clock will work (I use Alarm Clock 2, google it) or do any real work (photos are on Mac HD and I have no office programs installed in Windows so as to save space).
Put simply, rebooting is just a pain in the proverbial.
*SIGH* I just wish Aspyr could have ported Civ4 properly and hurry up with BtS... but I doubt it will ever happen.
So, I boot into windows to play some Civ IV (cause I need BtS
) but then I HAVE to restart into mac os x to listen to music, or so my Alarm Clock will work (I use Alarm Clock 2, google it) or do any real work (photos are on Mac HD and I have no office programs installed in Windows so as to save space). Put simply, rebooting is just a pain in the proverbial.
*SIGH* I just wish Aspyr could have ported Civ4 properly and hurry up with BtS... but I doubt it will ever happen.
Now that I look back you may have a point. I seem to remember 3dmark having a shadowing mode that only the Nvidia cards could do. 3dmark only runs on D3D, so there must be commands that are vendor specific. Although supposedly D3D10 should be the same (feature/command wise) on both vendors cards.
I was always under the impression that the OS used should not make any difference when it comes to OGL. GPU code should run on either OS if it is using OGL with no changes. If what you say is true, that just sucks.
Windows may only come with 1.2, but the GPU IHV's include an updated ICD when using updated drivers. Or at least they were doing that last time I updated my GPU.
Unfortunately not. There are still platform specific optimisations that need to be done. One OpenGL command might run fast on Windows but would have a performance impact on Mac OS X and vice versa.
As for OpenGL versions, you are right but you need to download the right headers to compile against newer versions of OpenGL in Windows.
For me, it's not only rebooting. It's stability, too.
Even a harmless thing as a game can at some point mess up with your system in Windows. In OS X, games may not be as much fast (however, with newer games this is not the case) but they are MUCH more stable.
Even a harmless thing as a game can at some point mess up with your system in Windows. In OS X, games may not be as much fast (however, with newer games this is not the case) but they are MUCH more stable.
Rebooting to play a game would mean quitting all my running applications - often a dozen or more. Yes I know leaving them running in the background whilst gaming probably saps a little performance and this would never be acceptable to the extreme gamer! Personally I find on a modern multi-core machine with enough RAM the vast majority of games are still perfectly smooth and that is all that matters. Frame rate read outs are great if you need to tune a game to your hardware but if a game is fluid and responsive at the most demanding points I can't see what it matters how high it goes elsewhere. My experience is that OS X gives me the performance I need.
I'm a longtime gamer on both platforms, and everytime I've had a crash(in osx too) mess with some system files, there was an underlying instability with the hardware.
Both my computers are in tip top shape now and have been for awhile. Even though some crappier games have locked up or hangs that caused me to hit restart, I've not needed to repair or reinstall in over 2 years. This goes for Windows XP, Vista x64 and 10.4 (and now 10.5)
Epic. The unreal series. Unreal 3 is due out soon on the Mac, if remember correctly Unreal Tournament 2004 supported multiprocessor systems, so I would imagine that the frame rate on something like the new dual processor, quad core Mac Pro with a 8800GT is going to blistering.
Unless you game at 1280 x 1024 or lower resolutions, your CPU will not be the bottleneck. In fact, it will probably add very little to a graphically intense game. GPU is still far and away the most important part of your system at resolutions 1280 x 1024 and higher. In fact, if the CPU is bottlenecking, it's going to bottleneck maximum FPS and when a game bottlenecks at a maximum FPS, it's often at 120+ FPS in which case your eyes won't notice anyways.
Rebooting I can understand. But stability? A game crashing in a fresh install of Windows will not occur unless you have a system conflict. Be it you didn't install drivers, patch the game, etc. Often times stability is caused by the game itself having bugs the developers didn't fix.
It's easy to blame it on Windows, but I guarantee that more than half of the cases out there of a game crashing a computer is because the person didn't install drivers for their video card, they have shady programs running / installed in the past (and didn't clean it up properly when uninstalling), or there is a conflict with the hardware they have.
I don't play games in Windows save Duke Nukem 3D and some Doom games. I do my game playing and developing in Windows XP. I bought an intel Mac hoping to run Crossover or Parallels for gaming but even with countless updates later the performance cut is just night and day.
Only takes about 10 seconds for my OSX to shut down, boot into XP in about 60 seconds. It's worth it.
edit: oh and I haven't bothered with those Cider games. Just to point that out. I only play Orange Box, id and GTA games on my PC. My beef is at Crossover and friends.
Only takes about 10 seconds for my OSX to shut down, boot into XP in about 60 seconds. It's worth it.
edit: oh and I haven't bothered with those Cider games. Just to point that out. I only play Orange Box, id and GTA games on my PC. My beef is at Crossover and friends.
Almost 40 posts into this thread before someone hit my real issue. I'm normally popping back and forth between gaming and surfing or e-mail. Sometimes I have other things going on too like unloading my camera, downloading music, or doing some file editting for school or work. It's not unusual for me to be playing a game and pop back to something else half a dozen times in an hour. This is completely unrealistic behavior when doing the dual boot scenario.
I completely agree with this poster that a quad core with 4GB of RAM should have more than enough horsepower to do all of that. Oh, and guess what, I do all of that under Winbloze on a dual core with only 2GB.
I'm just really hoping to find a Mac solution that will let me do everything non-gaming in OS X, while at the same time playing games like Civ 4 - BtS, NWN2, EQ2, Anarchy Online, EVE, etc. This is my real issue before I go drop $3k+ on a new Mac Pro.
I'm probably the only person who's bugged by this, but it's written "OS X," not "OS/X." We're not running some trumped up version of a dead IBM OS.
Also, FWIW, it's pronounced "OS Ten."
To support mac gaming development. Not ever rebooting to windows would be fine with me as well.
Same here. I'm not a hard core gamer but when I wouldn't buy windows even if I was. I mean what good is complaining about windows if all you are doing is feeding the beast.
The only game I would boot into another OS to play would be crysis.
I don't get all the fuss about Crysis. It's a very mediocre first person shooter. The ONLY notable thing about it is the graphics. Is that really enough of a draw? I'd take any Valve FPS (like Half Life 2 and its episodic sequels or Portal) over Crysis any day.
I think of Crytek's games a lot like id'scool technology demos that push the limits of graphics technology, but not very interesting games to play.
Agreed, although I was one of the few who really appreciated Doom 3 for what it was (a modern retelling of Doom 1, complete with old skool gameplay).
Some aspects of Crysis do impress me, such as the semi non-linear game design. But that alone isn't enough for the recycled gameplay.