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so have the new EA games being released to mac come to a stand still?
- Thread starter togermano
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No, they said they'd release the games they announced (NFS, BF2142, TW, etc) and they did.
For me, it's more like new titles and current ones.
Mass Effect, BioShock, Half Life (complete series), Crysis, BioShock, Deus Ex (Intel please!), BF2142 (I know it's here, but patches need to come out quicker).
Most of those are available for console.
The reason they don't port those games is simply because there's not a big enough audience for it. A large portion of mac users don't have the money to splurge for the MBP (or other high performance model) and are running on integrated graphics. Porting a game for a minority OS for a minority of its users sometimes can cost more than it's worth.
I'm not saying I wouldn't love Steam apps and the rest of it, but I can understand why we're not getting them.
We can still bootcamp, though, so it's not TOO horrible.
The reason they don't port those games is simply because there's not a big enough audience for it. A large portion of mac users don't have the money to splurge for the MBP (or other high performance model) and are running on integrated graphics. Porting a game for a minority OS for a minority of its users sometimes can cost more than it's worth.
I'm not saying I wouldn't love Steam apps and the rest of it, but I can understand why we're not getting them.
We can still bootcamp, though, so it's not TOO horrible.
Completely agree. I just hope that the price of Macs and the small (but increasing markertshare) doesn't prevent Mac game development.
I have a website about to go live that'll focus on these issues. Here's to making gaming on the Mac work!
Mac market share skyrocketing = Mac games market skyrocketing.
iPhone = number of Xcode-based game developers skyrocketing.
Snow Leopard = increased attention from Apple on GPUs and performance.
I see no WAY the Mac game world won't keep getting better than it is now--and I'm pretty happy already! (I'm lucky in getting the games I want--probably because I like sci-fi and those are the games we've been getting.)
iPhone = number of Xcode-based game developers skyrocketing.
Snow Leopard = increased attention from Apple on GPUs and performance.
I see no WAY the Mac game world won't keep getting better than it is now--and I'm pretty happy already! (I'm lucky in getting the games I want--probably because I like sci-fi and those are the games we've been getting.)
Now we just need Apple to put respectable GPUs in their systems.
Why does the Mac mini and MacBook still ship with a GPU thats far worse than the last generation of iBooks?
The Mac marketshare isn't small if you consider home users. And not all home PCs have great graphic cards. I would bet the market for Mac gamers would be as big as the PC gamers if titles were available and at the same price.
But then again, if you want to run games, it is easy to just use Bootcamp and your Mac can be used for business and work related tasks.
But then again, if you want to run games, it is easy to just use Bootcamp and your Mac can be used for business and work related tasks.
Just as big?? I don't think so. It would be bigger than it is now but nowhere near the pc gaming marketshare.
The X3100, in a real world situation, is worse than the GMA 950. Go to gaming forums and you'll see people coming up with all kinds of ways to disable the hardware T&L on the X3100 because it drops frame-rates to levels well below the GMA 950.
As someone over at notebookreview put it, the X4500 is supposed to be 3x faster than the X3100.
But 3x faster than unplayable is still unplayable.
Even on a faster processor, the X4500 is still about 3x slower than the GeForce 8400M GS.
The best IGP out there right now is actually the ATI/AMD Radeon 3200.
http://www.notebookjournal.de/praxis/79/2
With current beta drivers, the X4500 is about 71% the speed of a 8400m GS compared to the X3100's 44% speed of the 8400m GS.
With plans to further increase the X4500s speed via drivers (the release driver even), the X4500 will be close to the performance of the 8400m GS if Intel's promise holds true.
Nevermind the fact that there is a pretty significant speed difference between a X9100 and T8300
Let's not forget both the speed and architectural differences between the T8300, X9100, and T9400.
Also, what drivers were being used for the GeForce GPUs? What were the power settings?
Where are the real world benchmarks? Not synthetic benchmarks and one of a game that nobody cares about?
Let's see the X4500 pushing some real games. The 8400M GS is perfectly capable of playing GRID, CoD4, UT3, Half-Life 2 EP2, Gears of War. So Let's see how the X4500 does with those. I know the 8400M GS does well with those because I've played all of those on my system.
But again, what drivers were being used for the GeForce 8400M GS? I know I've seen a substantial performance boost thanks to driver upgrades. Going from the 174.74 drivers to the 177.35 set just recently double my frame-rates in GRID and smoothed out areas in other games that had drops here and there.
This benchmark is no different than those released for the X3100. Show off the chipset with a couple of things tailor made for it so it looks good in reviews. Then when it comes time to perform in the real world, you see that it falls flat on its face.
The X4500 has already been beaten by other IGPs anyway. The Radeon 3200 IGP outperforms everything below the GeForce 8600M GS and performs nearly as well as it does.
Not to mention the 3200 has all of the features the GeForce 8 line does for video playback. Where the X4500 only has basic playback, no enhancement of any kind.
If the Radeon 3200 is combined with another dedicated ATI GPU, like the 3450, it can use a hybrid "Crossfire" mode and both GPUs will work to render the picture delivering even more performance.
Like I said before, if Apple wants to continue to shaft us with integrated graphics, they could at least have the decency to give us something with respectable performance. The GeForce 8000 series IGPs and Radeon 3200 IGP walk all over everything Intel currently has and will have for the foreseeable future. Relying on Intel GPUs automatically puts the MacBook in the same league as $500 Wal-Mart PCs when it comes to performance.
One last thing: Intel can promise all of the speed increases via drivers they want. It's not like nVidia and ATI stand still when it comes to this stuff. nVidia's reputation is based on their speed increases through drivers.