Starcraft 2 Windows 7 vs Mac osx Snow leopard

[mcs37]

dual boot

Will do... what's the best dual boot software out there? I hear bootcamp all the time. I guess this could be a good chance to try out Windows 7 finally. How is perf on Win 7 vs. XP?

 

[Poogis]

I've installed Starcraft 2 on Mac (10.6.4) and Windows 7 (Boot Camp) on a late 2007 Macbook Pro 2.2 with 2gb of RAM, 128mb nVidia 8600 GT graphics.

It is night and day in terms of performance. Barely playable under OS 10.6.4 but runs along fine under Windows 7. Crazy eh? Same hardware and all.

I do worry about Apple these days, especially when they mention OS X as a viable gaming platform.

 

[Dr McKay]

run it on Vista?

 

[DeepIn2U]

I've got a 2009 MBP 13" with the 9400M, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

Starcraft 2 under default settings on the Mac isn't anything to write home about. It's a bit slow, clicking on units isn't as fast as I'd expect. Sometimes in combat I'd have to click on a unit several times for the click to go through. Things will slow down significantly during battles, a few skipped frames.

Overall I'm very disappointed that this 9 month old MacBook Pro, the darling of its line, souped out with a solid state drive and 8GB of RAM, still cannot play Starcraft 2. What's shocking also, although in a sense encouraging, is that I can dual boot it into Windows and it will play just fine.

Why have nVidia, Apple, and Blizzard (or some subset of the three) forsaken us? Why do I need to boot into Windows to play Starcraft 2?

Is there any solution coming? Is it a problem with OS X? The graphics drivers? Starcraft 2 itself? Who will fix this?

I'd really prefer to NOT have to boot into Windows, but I suppose if I have no other choice, I should start looking into the option. I'm amazed that none of those companies have acknowledged the performance issues and voiced their plans to fix them.

I'm curious - VERY curious how your existing machine will perform, lid closed using external monitor with a external video box setup like is offered by 3rd party companies for multiple monitor setup??!!!

dual boot

MS has spent 15 years on DirectX and it runs rings around OS X for gaming. OpenGL gaming died around the time John Carmack started using DirectX

and Apple has a habit of gimping slightly older hardware to make you buy new hardware. on Windows hardware is usually supported longer than Apple wants to support it

Yeah right! Vista forced a LOT of end users to upgrade hardware - CPU, GPU, and RAM speed to get any performance out of existing units - Win7 also, for BEST performance doing anything, you should upgrade those as well. Windows may support older hardware - but I can tell you a 5yr old Dell optiplex using Pentium 4 2Ghz and imbedded video chipset at 128MB RAM (video) will NOT perform well in Win7 - although it CAN run it.

Again you're making a blanket statement about windows in general - but you're right that Windows has had DirectX for a while and continues to optimize it - that and with the GPU companies and Intel/AMD also optimizing machine code to further get benefits from it.