Upcoming Mac OS X Leopard question(s)

[imported_Sev]

Hello all. First post here so be easy on me. =) I use to be a Apple/Mac user for a LONG time but hit the eject button back in the late 90's when I thought they were finally finished. Now that it seems like they are on the cutting edge and stronger than ever with gaining support I'm flirting with the idea of going back to Mac and wave bye-bye to Winblows (can i say that?) but have a few questions. You see, I'm a PC gamer. The only reason I use PC and Windows is for the games like WoW, BF 2142 and other strong titles. My questions are: How smooth do Macs run games like WoW and BF 2142 in WinXP mode using boot camp? How well do Macs run PC games in general? And with the upcoming Leopard OS I guess boot camp is part of the OS. If your running in OSX can you load up XP OS without rebooting or do you have to reboot? Will Boot Camp eventually support Vista since MS will cut the cord on XP in 2009? Mind you, I'm eyeballin' the Mac Pro with dual Xeon 2.0gHz processors, 2gb ram, and ATi Radeon X1900 512mb video card with a Dell 24" widescreen LCD. Thanks to those that reply and help. Have a good one!

Sev

 

[drag]

Macs don't run PC games. At least not generally.

Transgaming is a company that produces a product that is called Cedega for Linux. Cedega is based on Wine, but is more oriented specificly for games.

Wine provides a compatability layer so that Win32 (aka PC) software can run natively in Linux. Cedega uses this and then builds in extra support for games and related stuff. It is not perfect, only about 60-70 percent of games work and out of those only about half are realy very usuable.

Since Mac is now x86 (aka PC) Transgaming announced that they will be porting this compatability layer over to OS X. This will enable you to run some games on MacOS.. But I haven't heard anything about it since the original announcement so I don't think that it's aviable for you to use at this time.

Depending on the game and your hardware in Linux, if the game works, it will usually run within 20% of the performance in Windows. Some games run at about the same speed, other games are much slower. It depends on how they were programmed and which parts of DirectX were used in making them.

I don't know how much this compares to running it on OS X, but keep in mind that OS X performance is generally less then what you get in Linux or Windows for various reasons.


As for using Windows in boot-camp... Since your dual booting with Windows then Windows is running natively on your hardware. Games should run with the same performance that you'd get running Windows on similar hardware from places like Dell or HP.

 

[Codewiz]

Well WoW has a MAC client so you should be fine there.

As mentioned already Boot camp is just booting natively into Windows. So just look at the hardware specs and find benchmarks for about that type of hardware to get a good idea.

 

[derail]

I Had a AMD opty 165 with a 6800 GT and then gave it to my daugter last year as she had need for it and bought a Imac with a 2 Ghz Core Duo with 2 gig of ram and the best vidieo they had was a ati x1600, I tryed to Paky WOW on it and then quit shortly after do to the great difrence in the video, audio and controling movment.
To get close to what a High to mid end gaming PC has you would need to get a MAC pro and they are expensive.

Few games are using Open Gl whis is what he Mac use's I think most are Direct X. So you would have to use boot camp play most of them.

A lot of the big titles work there way to the mac platform and some ae made to run on both widows and the Mac, but that list seems to be geting smaller as the requirment to play games gets greater.

 

[CaptKevMan]

Originally posted by: derail
I Had a AMD opty 165 with a 6800 GT and then gave it to my daugter last year as she had need for it and bought a Imac with a 2 Ghz Core Duo with 2 gig of ram and the best vidieo they had was a ati x1600, I tryed to Paky WOW on it and then quit shortly after do to the great difrence in the video, audio and controling movment.
To get close to what a High to mid end gaming PC has you would need to get a MAC pro and they are expensive.

I actually have a Core Duo iMac 20" (1GB RAM), and until late November, WoW was fairly average on it (playable when settings were low to medium). Then, Blizzard released a patch for Intel Macs that drastically improved the graphics performance, and I was then able to max out the graphics settings and run it with no problem.

OTOH, I've tried BF1942 (Mac version) on it, and it runs like a dog (I'm sure that's probably more to do with the port being originally coded for PowerPC than anything else). I also recently purchased LEGO Star Wars for Mac (for my daughter), and was disappointed in its performance...althought that's because it's also a PowerPC native app that I discovered the developer has no intentions of releasing as a Universal Binary. Boot Camp would most likely address those issue, but I haven't been compelled enough to install and run it (since I'm not much of a gamer these days outside of WoW -- which, as I stated, runs beautifully on my Mac since the update).

Hope this info helps.

EDIT: Oh, and I noticed you're considering a Mac Pro. I've seen WoW running on a Mac Pro with a high-end video card on a 30" Cinema Display -- it's like a completely. different. game. It's so stunningly rich and gorgeous it's sick.

 

[TheBiggmann]

Does anyone know when Leopard is supposed to be out? I'm looking at buying a mac book pro for doing school stuff on but if it's coming out in the somewhat near distant future I'll wait since I'm not in a huge hurry.

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: TheBiggmann
Does anyone know when Leopard is supposed to be out? I'm looking at buying a mac book pro for doing school stuff on but if it's coming out in the somewhat near distant future I'll wait since I'm not in a huge hurry.

I'd say late Spring/early Summer.

For Windows gaming, stick with a gaming PC.

 

[sam509]

Originally posted by: manly

Originally posted by: TheBiggmann
Does anyone know when Leopard is supposed to be out? I'm looking at buying a mac book pro for doing school stuff on but if it's coming out in the somewhat near distant future I'll wait since I'm not in a huge hurry.

I'd say late Spring/early Summer.

For Windows gaming, stick with a gaming PC.

Apple announced last week the release has been pushed back to October.

 

[chcarnage]

Originally posted by: sam509

Originally posted by: manly

Originally posted by: TheBiggmann
Does anyone know when Leopard is supposed to be out? I'm looking at buying a mac book pro for doing school stuff on but if it's coming out in the somewhat near distant future I'll wait since I'm not in a huge hurry.

I'd say late Spring/early Summer.

For Windows gaming, stick with a gaming PC.

Apple announced last week the release has been pushed back to October.

Uh, they didn't. "Coming spring 2007" is their official statement.

// I see that there is a rumor of a release delay. Article at TheReg

 

[theblackbox]

i run vista on my macbook pro and it runs pretty good, got an index of 4.1 due to the underclocked graphics of the x1600 w/256mb. I was in the same situation, i game on my pc and then work on my mac. i have an sli box for gaming, but also use bootcamp to dual boot for games, but play wow on the mac side.

 

[chcarnage]

Originally posted by: Sev
And with the upcoming Leopard OS I guess boot camp is part of the OS.
In all probability.
If your running in OSX can you load up XP OS without rebooting or do you have to reboot?
You have to reboot to use XP in Bootcamp. Some other solutions (Parallels and Transgaming) run XP in a virtual machine inside OS X. This is good for office applications because you can switch OSes quickly, but bad for gaming because the two OSes have to share the system ressources.
Will Boot Camp eventually support Vista since MS will cut the cord on XP in 2009?
This, too, is likely.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: chcarnage

Originally posted by: sam509

Originally posted by: manly

Originally posted by: TheBiggmann
Does anyone know when Leopard is supposed to be out? I'm looking at buying a mac book pro for doing school stuff on but if it's coming out in the somewhat near distant future I'll wait since I'm not in a huge hurry.

I'd say late Spring/early Summer.

For Windows gaming, stick with a gaming PC.

Apple announced last week the release has been pushed back to October.

Uh, they didn't. "Coming spring 2007" is their official statement.

// I see that there is a rumor of a release delay. Article at TheReg

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.a...he-presses-leopard-still-on-for-spring