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Windows gamer switching to mac, need advise

B

bigmat1201

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 21, 2008
65
0
Houston
I play BF 2142, X3, and Civ 4, I have copies of all three for windows (2 copies of BF 2142). Is it worth buying the mac versions of these games again, or should I suck it up and bootcamp windows for gaming? its going to cost me about $130 to get them all, but it would be really nice if I didn't have to restart my computer every time I wanted to play a game? Also how playable is BF 2142 on mac, I've heard that some online mac games use different servers than windows versions (like diablo 2, i think), is BF like that? I have my favorite servers that I like to keep playing on. Any advise would really help out.

Also I wouldn't mind having Doom 3, Quake 4, and CnC Generals. Do these play as good on mac as they are on PC?

The reason I want to know if these games are playable is I've herd that since all mac games are ported from PC, that some don't run 100% as they would on PC, is this true? If so which one (so I don't accidently buy it)? Thanks
 
good of you to suck it up and post saying your a Windows users switching to Mac for gaming :D but hey a lot of us install windows on our Macs to game.

definitely get the Win versions they will run a lot better.
 
You didn't say what computer you're getting. While games do tend to perform better in Windows, there shouldn't be much difference for natively OpenGL games (e.g., Doom 3, Quake 4). If you've got a MBP/iMac or better, I wouldn't worry about the performance differences too much - not having to restart is much better than getting an extra 5 fps.
 
Actually, I own a MBP and a MacPro and the MacPro is the only system I would consider doing all my gaming in OS X on. The video drivers for Nvidia cards in OS X are pretty poor and it cause a 20% loss in performance in my experience. The MacPro is pure brute force so it will overcome the poor drivers with pure muscle. The MBP is affected by it more however. It's just not as fluid.

I play WoW in OS X but, it's better in Windows. I play FPS games in Windows even though I own some of them for the mac. Halo for example.

-mx
 
bigmat1201 said:
I've heard that some online mac games use different servers than windows versions (like diablo 2, i think)
Click to expand...

Definitely not Diablo 2. C&C Generals, yes.

I've herd that since all mac games are ported from PC, that some don't run 100% as they would on PC, is this true? If so which one (so I don't accidently buy it)? Thanks
Click to expand...

Nearly all of them. If your machine is fast enough then you won't actually notice much if any difference, though.

--Eric
 
If you're on an older MBP, don't bother with 2142. Its a disaster on my 15" MBP with 2.33Ghz c2d and X1600.
 
Actually I just got a new MBP, with 4GB DDR3 RAM, 2.5 GHz CPU, and 512MB 9600M GT GPU, what do you think now? Would that be powerful enough to overcome the discrepancy?
 
Anything that has a Mac version should run great on that - granted, you might get somewhat better performance playing on the PC version, but if a Mac porting house makes a Mac version, then they're going to be sure that it runs well on a brand-new Pro level machine like yours.
 
Mac gaming is fine. I am a hardcore gamer but I love being able to play games like TF2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, WoW, War3, Starcraft, etc in Mac. They all run well enough on my MBP.
 
You can play Civ 4 in Crossover Games if you wish. That way you won't have to reboot to Windows to play it.
 
I think what I'm going to do is get Civ 4 for mac, since you don't need a mouse to play it, and use my windows versions for everything else. That way if I just want to do some casual gaming, like between classes (I'm a student) I can quickly bring up Civ 4 and jump in where I left off. And if want to do some hardcore gaming, I'll reboot to windows and get my Razer Copperhead mouse out and get after it. I've played the mac demo of civ 4 and it was playable on a MB so it should run fine on my MBP. Anyone had any problems with it?

But now comes the big question, which version of windows should I run? (I know this is not windows forum, but as most of yall said you have to have windows to game on mac so you must have a preference)

Right now I have 32-bit Vista home premium on it, but I can get a license for any of them (xp pro 32 or 64, vista 32 or 64) for $15 with my student discount.

I've loaded 64 vista on my cousins comp and we could never get CS or CnC generals to play (had to dual boot 32bit XP), has anyone had a problem with games not working on 64bit Vista?

Also I've heard that you can actually put more than 4GB of RAM in the new MBP's, the reason they don't say that right now is because the only 8GB set (that I could find) costs $1200 so no one would pay for it. But do they even make 64bit games that would utilize more than 4GB of RAM?
Also if I stick with vista I'll have DX10. Some of the new games, I've know, have to have DX10, which sucks, cause you can't play them on XP.

Any comments/opinions would be helpful, I'm sure I'm not the only one trying to make these kind of decisions right now :)

Also, what kind of games would play through parallels/VM Fusion? Like CS, maybe CnC generals. I doubt games BF2142, Doom 3/Quake 4, or COD 4 would be playable. Also which is better for gaming parallels or VM fusion, I know that they both just got major updates, has any tried them out?

I know I ask a lot of questions, but like I said I'm a student so I have vary limited budget (my new MBP wiped me out), I don't want buy something that doesn't work right, or I won't use :(
 
3D games just don't work in the Parallels/VMware solutions. I am not sure about the others. Solitaire runs great :)

Seems like you only want to put Windows on for games anyway so just put XP on for now and later if you need Vista, blow away the xp partition and install Vista. Bootcamp makes it pretty simple. Besides, if you come across a game that requires more than 4gigs of ram, you will want a different computer in total.

-mx
 
bigmat1201 said:
I think what I'm going to do is get Civ 4 for mac, since you don't need a mouse to play it, and use my windows versions for everything else. That way if I just want to do some casual gaming, like between classes (I'm a student) I can quickly bring up Civ 4 and jump in where I left off. And if want to do some hardcore gaming, I'll reboot to windows and get my Razer Copperhead mouse out and get after it. I've played the mac demo of civ 4 and it was playable on a MB so it should run fine on my MBP. Anyone had any problems with it?

But now comes the big question, which version of windows should I run? (I know this is not windows forum, but as most of yall said you have to have windows to game on mac so you must have a preference)

Right now I have 32-bit Vista home premium on it, but I can get a license for any of them (xp pro 32 or 64, vista 32 or 64) for $15 with my student discount.

I've loaded 64 vista on my cousins comp and we could never get CS or CnC generals to play (had to dual boot 32bit XP), has anyone had a problem with games not working on 64bit Vista?

Also I've heard that you can actually put more than 4GB of RAM in the new MBP's, the reason they don't say that right now is because the only 8GB set (that I could find) costs $1200 so no one would pay for it. But do they even make 64bit games that would utilize more than 4GB of RAM?
Also if I stick with vista I'll have DX10. Some of the new games, I've know, have to have DX10, which sucks, cause you can't play them on XP.

Any comments/opinions would be helpful, I'm sure I'm not the only one trying to make these kind of decisions right now :)

Also, what kind of games would play through parallels/VM Fusion? Like CS, maybe CnC generals. I doubt games BF2142, Doom 3/Quake 4, or COD 4 would be playable. Also which is better for gaming parallels or VM fusion, I know that they both just got major updates, has any tried them out?

I know I ask a lot of questions, but like I said I'm a student so I have vary limited budget (my new MBP wiped me out), I don't want buy something that doesn't work right, or I won't use :(
Click to expand...
Regarding Civ 4: the Mac version is finicky (the Windows version may be as well, I haven't played it). Crashes a lot on low-end hardware (not an issue for you) and caused a lot of problems (at least for awhile) on the last generation of MBPs (with the 8600m GTs). It plays fine on my current machine (iMac with 8800), albeit with a few graphical glitches. Should be fine on your machine, but don't expect perfection.

Regarding Windows, there are a million topics on this, but my vote goes for Vista 64 (Home Premium, no real need for anything greater). It's been around for long enough that I'd be surprised if you ran into any serious compatibility problems with modern games.

Regarding RAM: I'm pretty sure there are very few games that will benefit from more than around 2 gigs of RAM (of course, if you have lots of apps open that are eating RAM, then more will help, but in that case you aren't actually giving more RAM to the game itself). Definitely no need to go over 4 gigs for the purpose of gaming.

Regarding VMware (I can't speak for Parallels, I only have VMware): you'll take a performance hit, but you CAN actually play some fairly modern games in it. On my machine, Half-Life 2 is perfectly playable at medium-highish settings in VMware - I generally prefer to reboot so that I can max out the settings, but the option is there. I'd imagine you could get similar performance from the Doom 3 engine (D3, Q4), but I haven't tried those since I own the Mac versions.
 
Zortrium said:
Regarding VMware (I can't speak for Parallels, I only have VMware): you'll take a performance hit, but you CAN actually play some fairly modern games in it. On my machine, Half-Life 2 is perfectly playable at medium-highish settings in VMware - I generally prefer to reboot so that I can max out the settings, but the option is there. I'd imagine you could get similar performance from the Doom 3 engine (D3, Q4), but I haven't tried those since I own the Mac versions.
Click to expand...

That's good to know. I will have to try some of my RTS games out. I still play the Age of Empires series and I would love to avoid rebooting.

-mx
 
motoxpress said:
Seems like you only want to put Windows on for games anyway so just put XP on for now and later if you need Vista, blow away the xp partition and install Vista. Bootcamp makes it pretty simple. Besides, if you come across a game that requires more than 4gigs of ram, you will want a different computer in total.

-mx
Click to expand...

I agree. Vista runs pretty well on Mac machines, from what I've heard, but it still consumes more overhead than XP.

As far as performance- I have a 2.16 GHz MBP with the 128 Radeon X1600, 3 GB of RAM, running 10.4. The following are my experiences with games (or their demos) running either the Mac Universal Binary versions or the PC version using XP through BootCamp.

- Tremulous (Mac) (open-source Quake-3 engine game) runs at a steady 90 FPS online with everything maxed, native resolution
- Halo (Mac) runs decently with all options on full, but not at full resolution.
- Warcraft 3 (Mac) ran OK with all graphics maxed, though if I dropped it below native res, I could probably have eliminated the low framerates that occurred from time to time.
- Doom 3 (Mac) also runs ok, up to 60 FPS with medium settings, shadows off, but still suffers from the occasional drop to 15 FPS
- Quake 4 and Prey (Mac) are similar to Doom 3, though they seem to run a bit smoother, especially Prey- perhaps better processor utilization?
- Morrowind (BootCamp) runs great, though not at full screen res, and not with max distance- little disappointing for me
- Crysis (BootCamp) gets around 30+ FPS with most settings on medium (again, not full screen res, and I put shadow and water quality on low)
- Fable (BootCamp) ran quite well, but I don't remember what settings
- The Witcher (BootCamp) also ran well, but between low and medium settings

I hope that helps- just remember, you have a MUCH better graphics card- you'll easily beat these.
 
After I read that 30% of some group, (was it business or overall users?) have downgraded from Vista back to XP it really made me wonder about Vista. I got it for my MBP, because I wanted to see DX10 in action, which is ok, but for better performance I think you'd do better with XP until the next great MS OS. (MS and great is that possible?) :p
 
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