Gaming on Mac

[Wightout]

Supose I had the money to buy this machine with a 20" LCD from apple, would it be good for gaming?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Yeah, you could play all 3 games great

 

[Wightout]

There are plenty of them out there.

http://www.apple.com/games/gettingstarted/

 

[biostud]

Depends on which videocard you install

 

[amol]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Yeah, you could play all 3 games great

really, it's more like FOUR!!

 

[Wightout]

ATI X800

 

[Mik3y]

Originally posted by: Amol

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Yeah, you could play all 3 games great

really, it's more like FOUR!!

dude, u guys gotta quit exaggerating. its not cool. everybody KNOWS that there are only 2 games, which is WoW and...wait, i think it may just be one...

 

[MisterChief]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Yeah, you could play all 3 games great

:laugh:

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: Wightout
There are plenty of them out there.

http://www.apple.com/games/gettingstarted/

Have you even looked at the page?
otehrwise scroll to the bottom and your questions will be answered.

Although I would probably buy a mouse with more than 1-button

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: Mik3y

Originally posted by: Amol

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Yeah, you could play all 3 games great

really, it's more like FOUR!!

dude, u guys gotta quit exaggerating. its not cool. everybody KNOWS that there are only 2 games, which is WoW and...wait, i think it may just be one...

Dont forget warcraft 3....I guess that makes blizzard the only company who makes games for macs

 

[Appledrop]

of course a dual g5 1.8 and an x800 gonna be good for gaming

 

[MisterChief]

Originally posted by: Azzy64
of course a dual g5 1.8 and an x800 gonna be good for gaming

If you can find a game other than Halo

 

[Baked]

Was playing WC3 on G4 Dual 1.25G / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9000 / 20" Cinema. Worked just fine. It's a bit dark though.

 

[iamskew]

well, i looked at the link...and it pretty much says it has several newer games...(i only looked at the action part)....I don't see any reason why they wouldn't play great...pleanty of cpu and gpu power, and i'm assuming you'd get at least 1gig RAM

 

[Wightout]

thanks

 

[dartworth]

call of duty:thumbsup:

 

[halfadder]

I wouldn't buy a Mac just for gaming, but I do use my Mac (a PowerBook) for games somtimes.

ATI makes a Radeon X800 for Mac, and you can buy a Mac with a GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL. Either would be great for games, but just don't go with the stock GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, it's too slow to play most modern games at a decent resolution.

As others pointed out, Blizzard is pretty much the only Tier 1 game maker that puts out Mac versions of their games. There are many second tier game makers that make Mac games though, many of which are very affordable. And there are also many porting houses that make Mac ports of popular Windows games. I'll paste some links below that you might find helpful.

http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/complete/
http://www.macsoftgames.com/navpages/games/MacSoft-Game-Page.html
http://www.feralinteractive.com/

http://www.pangeasoft.net/index2.html
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/all.html
http://www.freeverse.com/mac/

http://www.macgamefiles.com
http://mac.softpedia.com/
http://www.macupdate.com

 

[hopejr]

All you trolls (MisterChief, RadiclDreamer, Mik3y), you're not funny.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Halo runs very well on my 1GHz Mac. Doesnt play smooth all the time, depending how many players on a server, or how many explosions at a time, but it plays quite well.

Now, I know it will run a lot faster on a Dual 1.8GHz G5!

 

[Koing]

Interesting...

The ultimate gaming experience is right at your fingertips.

Can't have that 'ultimate' exerience with a servely short library of games...

Not hating on the mac as I think they are great but gaming is all about games and not platform. For the games you will get as long as you have a half decent graphics card it will run fine.

Anyone know that the games 'take' advantage of the Dual processors? Any gaming comparisions of 1 cpu Vs Dual Cpu's for the Mac? Now THAT would be interesting

Koing

 

[halfadder]

Ultimate! Compared to.... playing Spectre VR on a 16 MHz PowerBook 100

I haven't seen any recent single vs dual benchmarks for Mac games, but back in the day when Apple first started selling dual processor G4 systems there were a slew of bechmarks comparing the two. I think Quake3 on Mac OS X was the first to really take advantage of the second CPU. These days I don't think there are many Mac ports of PC games that make much use of the second CPU, but I think the Mac OS X implementation of the OpenAL audio library does use the second CPU. OpenGL and other aspects of Mac OS X probably do as well. I think it's pretty much the same as the PC world though.... dual or single, having a better graphics card and plenty of RAM are the most important things you can do to improve game performance.

Barefeats.com has been running some Mac vs PC benchmarks. They're probably not the most fair benchmarks out there, but it's interesting. One funny note is that for Quake 3 they found a dual G5 2.5 GHZ with Radeon X800 to run about 50 fps faster than a dual Xeon 3.4 GHZ with Radeon X850. Shows that Graeme Devine was serious about those Mac optimizations he promised I guess!

http://www.barefeats.com/macvpc.html

 

[Koing]

Cool link halfadder.

Yeah seriously funky that Q3 with more effort in coding for the Mac platform outperforms the other platforms. Maybe a Dual Opteron would run Q3 better? But either way you get SOLID performance out of Q3 on the Mac But the lack of game releases kills that. Would be good if more developers released more games that had more optimisations done to them. Bu the lack of the Mac gaming market probably is killing the effort or time that they need to spend. So they just spend more time for the PC games.

Koing

 

[The Sauce]

Gaming with a Mac is like taking a photograph with an etch-a-sketch.

 

[halfadder]

I don't play many games on my PowerBook because I already have two nice PC rigs plus a PS2. But I do know some local Mac Addicts that have dozens and dozens of modern looking games for their Macs. Ignoring the freeware games and all of the web/java/flash games, there are probably 250 real games for Mac OS X. Of the few dozen that I've seen, many look awesome. See the 9 links I posted above.

Mac users aren't exactly starving for games, but they don't have an overabudance either. Gaming on a Mac is kind of like buying your groceries at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, rather than buying them at a gigantic new Kroger, Safeway, or Albertsons supermarket. You still get the staples, there's still some good variety, but there's just not as much to choose from and some of the brands and styles look different.

 

[Jigglelicious]

Games will run on a Dual G5 and they might even run decently well, but for the amount of money that you pump into it, the performance you get is disappointing. A far cheaper PC can easily outperform a dual G5, no matter how expensive the video card. Mac's are awesome machines, just not for gaming.

If you are a serious gamer, then i'd stay away from the G5. If you want to do a lot of real work, with the occasional game on the side, then the G5 would be a better option.