x86 macs

[jwhitt]

ok ive been a long time mac user sence os 7.* days and even before that mac classic and apple 2, though i still use my windows box for prodominatly gaming and burning dvd's etc, what are your guy's thoughts on the move to intel processors, personally i love os 10.4, i have a mac mini i use for ym everyday use, music, photos, etc, however i still keep a beefy pc around for the occasions i like to play games, do you guys think that this summer when the desktop line of mac's are to roll out that the gaming industry will start including more mac based games? i mean sence the architecture is the same why not really i mean the os is rock stable and it seems like with a mac things always just work at least in my experiences... just my 2 cents

 

[vanvock]

Time will tell. I hope so. I wonder how going 32bit will work out for them.

 

[jwhitt]

id almost have to think for now it will be ok, im sure 64 bit will take over but but i see that farther down the road, ther are way too many 32 bit systems out there as is to cut the market and say ok were upgrading to 64 bit everyone must follow is a ballsy move

 

[Zugzwang152]

There's too small a population of Mac gamers to justtify increased development. I'd like to see Apple concentrate on what they do best, which is media professionals for the high-end, and excellent all-in-one solutions for the everyday home user (iMac). I would prefer them to drop the beefy graphics card, in favor of a price drop.

 

[kamper]

I don't think that there was too much in the way of 64-bit desktop apps out for os x yet (I'm guessing anyways) as the gui code still had to be 32 bit. For any enterprise stuff that was 64-bit, the ppc processors will still be around for a while to come and isn't intel going to go 64 across the board sooner or later anyways?

Anyways, I'm seriously considering selling the powerbook I bought last summer and grabbing a '4x times faster' roll: ) macbook, but I'm sure I'd come out with a good deficit on that transaction.

 

[sourceninja]

It looks like apple has set macOS up in a way where the platform really doesn't matter as much in the long run. It is weird for them to go 32bit intel when 64bit amd/intel is avaliable and seems to be the goal of windows/linux platforms in the next few years. But I figure it will be cake for them with rosetta to just make an updated macOSX for intel64 when they need it and 32bit chips are probably cheaper then 64bit intel chips. They really have made a nice portable OS. If i ever buy a prebuilt computer I think it will be a mac.

 

[jwhitt]

what i was really trying to get at was with the hardware already there (intel artechure) it would seem that it wouldnt bee too complicated to port cames over to a mac os, and with the os being coded to work smoothly with open gl, i would see this being a pretty decent gaming machine

 

[Nothinman]

do you guys think that this summer when the desktop line of mac's are to roll out that the gaming industry will start including more mac based games? i mean sence the architecture is the same why not really i mean the os is rock stable and it seems like with a mac things always just work at least in my experiences... just my 2 cents

The game devs would still have to rewrite chunks of the game to work with the OS X libraries. The architecture is irrelevant, Linux runs just fine on x86 boxes but you don't see games being ported to it much either.

what i was really trying to get at was with the hardware already there (intel artechure) it would seem that it wouldnt bee too complicated to port cames over to a mac os, and with the os being coded to work smoothly with open gl, i would see this being a pretty decent gaming machine

If game developers were smart and used libraries that didn't tie them to one platform, like id, they wouldn't have any problems porting to OS X or Linux. But they use crap like DirectX which is only supported on Windows.

What may happen is that WINE will be made to work better with OS X and then you'll be in the same boat as most Linux users.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

do you guys think that this summer when the desktop line of mac's are to roll out that the gaming industry will start including more mac based games? i mean sence the architecture is the same why not really i mean the os is rock stable and it seems like with a mac things always just work at least in my experiences... just my 2 cents

The game devs would still have to rewrite chunks of the game to work with the OS X libraries. The architecture is irrelevant, Linux runs just fine on x86 boxes but you don't see games being ported to it much either.

what i was really trying to get at was with the hardware already there (intel artechure) it would seem that it wouldnt bee too complicated to port cames over to a mac os, and with the os being coded to work smoothly with open gl, i would see this being a pretty decent gaming machine

If game developers were smart and used libraries that didn't tie them to one platform, like id, they wouldn't have any problems porting to OS X or Linux. But they use crap like DirectX which is only supported on Windows.

What may happen is that WINE will be made to work better with OS X and then you'll be in the same boat as most Linux users.

I'm fairly sure we will see a version of cedega for macOSX real soon. And hopefully they will give back any changes they make to wine. Cedega would be fools to miss a commercial oppertunity like that. Another possiblity would be rosetta being updated to run windows apps, but that would be a bad move for apple. The more windows apps it runs, the less developers will think about developing for the mac.

 

[Link19]

If game developers were smart and used libraries that didn't tie them to one platform, like id, they wouldn't have any problems porting to OS X or Linux. But they use crap like DirectX which is only supported on Windows.

What may happen is that WINE will be made to work better with OS X and then you'll be in the same boat as most Linux users.

Why are most games writen for DirectX rather than OpenGL?

 

[Looney]

Originally posted by: jwhitt
what i was really trying to get at was with the hardware already there (intel artechure) it would seem that it wouldnt bee too complicated to port cames over to a mac os, and with the os being coded to work smoothly with open gl, i would see this being a pretty decent gaming machine

The API are different. If it was so simple, we would see tons of Linux games.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: Link19


Why are most games writen for DirectX rather than OpenGL?

Because of market speak. DirectX does a lot for a programer and there are lots of nice tools for it out there. And the comparable OpenGL tools and openAL, etc stuff is not marketed and people think it is 'hard' to work with. It really isn't any harder to work with.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
Another possiblity would be rosetta being updated to run windows apps,

That doesn't really make sense. Rosetta emulates an instruction set which is not needed to run windows apps on x86s macs. What is needed is a loader for windows executables which probably would be easier to do without rosetta and windows libraries which would either have to come from microsoft (not likely) or wine, but in neither case, rosetta.

 

[Genx87]

It will probably help their margins as the INtle platform is most likely quite a bit cheaper than the PowerPC platform. The economies of scale come to play here.

I dont think it will do much in terms of changing the Mac as it is still using a different OS and has the thing locked down like the current mac.

Basically you are going to be paying a premium for an x86 machine.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: sourceninja

Originally posted by: Link19


Why are most games writen for DirectX rather than OpenGL?

Because of market speak. DirectX does a lot for a programer and there are lots of nice tools for it out there. And the comparable OpenGL tools and openAL, etc stuff is not marketed and people think it is 'hard' to work with. It really isn't any harder to work with.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but driver support seems to be better for DirectX than for OpenGL. Also, doesn't DirectX support more new whiz-bang features of the latest video cards out of the box?

EDIT: Carmack spoke about this a few years ago.

Reasonable arguments can be made for and against the OpenGL or Direct-X style
of API evolution. With vendor extensions, you get immediate access to new
functionality, but then there is often a period of squabbling about exact
feature support from different vendors before an industry standard settles
down. With central planning, you can have "phasing problems" between
hardware and software releases, and there is a real danger of bad decisions
hampering the entire industry, but enforced commonality does make life easier
for developers. Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years
out of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows
Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL.

 

[Nothinman]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but driver support seems to be better for DirectX than for OpenGL. Also, doesn't DirectX support more new whiz-bang features of the latest video cards out of the box?

IMO driver support is only better because MS marketed DirectX agressively and made OpenGL look like a second-class citizen, now that DirectX is what everyone uses it's what the hardware developers work on supporting the best. OpenGL supports extensions so any vendor can add whatever wizbang features they want to their OpenGL implementation, it would probably be a little extra work on the game developers side to query and enable support for the available extensions but I can't imagine it's that hard, at least id and Epic don't seem to have any problems with it.