The Mac as a Gaming Platform, the New Era

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[citation][nom]Ciuy[/nom]Mac's cost too much. End.[/citation]
PC's cost too little and, more importantly, don't run OS X. End.
Easy isn't it?
 
[citation][nom]Kelavarus[/nom]Actually isn't the 'Can it play Crysis' question pretty fair here? The question is literally, can it PLAY Crysis, not run it at full.[/citation]

There is more to gaming than bloody Crysis (hated it anyway).
For the record on my MacPro with GTX285 I got 30-40 fps with everything maxed and the resolution set at 1920x1200. The game played very smoothly (don't remember any issues) but was still only an okay game.

Enough with the willy waving. Games are more than the sum of their graphics. I've played games in DirectX and OpenGL and the graphics frameworks did not add anything to the actual gaming.

For all intents and purposes I think OpenGL 4 (once Apple pull their finger out) is, feature for feature, every bit as god as DirectX 11.
 
OpenGL 4 is, feature for feature, every bit as pagan as DirectX 11

That should have been good not god (I'm atheist).

When are you guy's going to allow comment editing?
 
@flea, Maxs have shipped with a 3 button mouse for years, and were right click enabled long before that
 
As I see it, lots of the above comments are based on the point of view of someone who buys a platform mainly for gaming.

What about consumers who choice of platform is based on criteria aside from gaming, i.e. multimedia, etc, but wouldn't mind being able to play a game on the side regardless of a few less fps or reduced quality?

For that reason I see Valve is onto a winner.
 
According to the article, Apple's sold about 10 million Macs in the last year. That's a pretty big, mostly untapped market and Valve is smart to find a way in. I bet a lot of those high school and college kids are going to jump at the chance to put source-engine games on their macs.

BTW anybody know offhand how many XBox 360s were sold in the last year?
 
All aboard the crapple failbus. Proprietary was bad for the world when IBM did it, and it's bad for the world when Apple is doing it.


Support Competition, free markets, and innovation; boycott apple.

If you don't like windows, run linux, solaris, or freeBSD. They've got just as many games as apple at the moment; and you don't get screwed in the process.
 


Are you the fat guy in ur Avatar?
 
[citation][nom]TheKurrgan[/nom]Open OSX up to OEMs and support only a strict set of hardware configurations. Thus keeping the same "quality" they have now for the most part, the base standard for developers of games to go by, and open PC owners to the Apple experience by turning their PC into a Mac, legitimately, by installing software. This may get some attention, and enter them into the game for real.That said, they'll never do it until Jobs dies or quits, as he is just to blind to see past his own pride to admit Macs arent magical with fairy dust on the inside, but just another PC with their software on it.[/citation] Without being too picky I concur with some of your arguments. Especially with the notion now is the ideal time for Apple to open their OS conditionally to select OEM vendors (they would only be licensed to make Desktops, not Laptops). Apple's earlier attempt at licensing was at a time when Apple was very weak and had no additional tools in their product armoury to cover hardware losses and the company imploded. That is now over. Apple is swimming in money and riding a Tsunami of largely positive public awareness. 90% of the negativity targeted at Apple concerns Mac OS hardware cost.

Mac OS is needed for iPhone OS Tools and whilst there are thousands of new Apple (App Store) devs they have to use Apple PC's (well, OS X at least) to build their business models. Opening the OS to desktop OEM's only may cannibalise their PC market slightly but I think the Licence sales from budget conscious takers will more than make up the deficit from industry-wide declining desktop hardware. Apple would be forced to take more modest profit margins. Steve Job's wanted to go for Dell and this is the way to do it decisively.

The most troubling part of this would be hardware drivers. Even on Windows, GPU drivers are a mess, constantly buggy and being updated. In reality GPU hardware evolves at a snail's pace but gets marketed as if everyone's life depends on it. 1 card, 2 cards, 3 cards, 4 cards,! 2KW PSU's next!? Just to run a bloody game or two...Madness! [citation][nom]TheKurrgan[/nom]Macs arent magical with fairy dust on the inside, but just another PC with their software on it.[/citation]Au Contraire, it's that software that is the fairy-dust. That's what so many PC diehards just cannot comprehend. MacOS X is priceless.

Right or wrong (your perspective may vary), Steve Job's has decided for years that he doesn't want his products and customers caught up in an undignified scramble of updating. But it may be just the right time to roll up his polo-neck jumper sleeves and do a bit of arm wrestling with the plebs.
 
Macs got marginalized early on because Jobs failed to realize that individuals could not afford the original Macs—there just weren't compelling reasons, aside from “hobbyist” to get one. Enter Gates, who saw that businesses were going to demand them, and offered a capability — Word & Excel — that businesses wanted. Windows ruled, while Apple retreated into a couple of markets where they had built a good reputation — education, design and sci/tech — and held on only by the skin of their teeth. Computers are a volume game, so all the energy went into Windows boxes leaving Apple stuck trying to cover development costs with only a few sales. They priced high.

That's the Apple most of us know, but it's increasingly NOT the Apple of today. After a couple of bad starts, Apple has a strong OS base with tens of millions of new sales each year (since the iPhone OS shares so much with OSX, unlike Windows7 / Win6Mobile / Win7Mobile / Zune / XBox). Lots of users; lower cost per user.

Also, Apple has moved into the mainstream CPU game, so doesn't have to fight the hardware design battles that they did in the past. ARM, which reportedly provides the basic design for the iProducts' CPUs, licenses something like a billion devices a year.

They've made some strong efforts to climb the performance mountain. It may be a bit early to declare their OpenCL and GrandCentralDispatch efforts successes, but if they follow through in quality drivers, etc., programmers will have strong support for sharing CPU and GPU resources, getting less bogged down in tuning for specific cards, CPU mix, competing background processes, etc. This technology also will share across the iProducts and the Mac environment, leveraging developers' efforts.

Finally, Apple gets this, and with the iPhone and iPad, has the opportunity to leverage its first-mover role. With the iPad, Jobs specifically called out not providing a "pricing umbrella" for volume producers to sneak in under. He's aiming for majority market share, has the warchest to sink into it, and indeed, is growing that share radically: Zero to almost-first place in three years; arguably first place in the US when you throw out the mostly-business Blackberries that are uninteresting to gamers.
 
lots of people are talking about the lack of ability for apple computers to play games in their current state and that simply isn't true... I use mac for any real computing (as the os isn't a virus prone, buggy, patronizing p.o.s) and I use Windows 7 via parallels or bootcamp whenever I want. It's simply the best of both words. And my computer can run the pc games just fine. I think pc gamers are both confused and hurt by this move. What they always viewed as the pc edge over mac is starting to fade with steam's attempts at bringing gaming over to mac (and yes more will follow). Also, I think a lot of pc users simply don't get the mac mindset. I personally bought my macbook pro because I know that it will provide the best answer for me personally. It offers the ilife suite (several programs I love), access to logic pro (being a hobbyist composer its a must), and a fantastic os. I am paying more for the computer up front sure, but it offers a combination of customer service, hardware/software integration, and an os that are simply unparalleled in the computer industry. I know it's been a long time since pc users have loved their operating system (and those commercials for windows 7 are trying hard to make people forget that) but mac users have been happy with their operating system for around 10 years and counting.
 
error in article:

estimated Apple’s market share of total PC sales at almost 9% in late 2009, while IDC published a number closer to 9.5%.

Link please? These are almost certainly the US figures and not for the world. Gartner and IDC keep putting MAC in the 'other' category meaning they sell less than Toshiba which sells about 5% of worlds PCs. Why do Mac fanboys keep making this mistake over and over???
 
The gaming community is the worst place for Apple to reach out to for the simple reason that we make up the majority of people who understand what every component in a computer is. We know that Macs are extremely overpriced. Stupid Apple...leave gaming to the PC 😛
 
Most Mac ports are using a D3D wrapper (similar to wine) which further degrades performance adding an overhead on top of the weak hardware.
 
Listen. Who cares if macs are overpriced or not.

The more PC gamers, the better (macs are also "personal computers"). Regardless of what platform, game developers will give us more attention.
 
What? There was outrage over Steam going to Mac? Since when? Personally I say the more the merrier! I can't wait to incinerate some Mac n00bs in TF2 :)
 
[citation][nom]intelpatriot[/nom]Most Mac ports are using a D3D wrapper (similar to wine) which further degrades performance adding an overhead on top of the weak hardware.[/citation]

Yes. And yet those ported games can still be played. Just shows how over the top a lot of dedicated games rigs actually are.

As I said elsewhere, if you're a rig building hobbyist, that's fine. But don't compare yourself or your preferred computers and OS to Apple customers and Mac OS X the requirements each of you have are quite different. General game-playing does not require bleeding-edge tech.
 
They can port Steam to run on Linux,Unix,a Atari 2600,a four slice toaster and whatever else they want.Without a commitment from game developers to support the platform its meaningless.
 
I say this is a move in the right direction. My first enjoyable gaming experiance was with an apple IIe. It was my last gaming machine with an apple on it though.
 
[citation][nom]Also, wasn't there something about Steam coming to Linux?[/citation]

Yeah. It's in the pretty early stages from what I can tell. Someone did rig it to render a window in X11, but it doesn't do much else as of yet. It's hard to tell whether this is trending toward an official release, or just a Valve engineer messing around/getting some of the grunt work done as a 'just in case'.
 
[citation][nom]madass[/nom]You missed out on upgrades. And the fact that Apple will never let you use radically fast hardware. Do you really think Apple will let someone run quad 5870's? Or even dual 4850's? And what about upgrades? IN two years time I can easily change my 4870 for a 5970 or a GT400 without any problems whatsoever. Or dump a PHII X6 on the mobo. Apple will never do anything like that....[/citation]

The Mac Pro is actually surprisingly upgradeable. Everything else isn't, mainly because Apple likes to use laptop parts in the majority of their computers, including the iMac. Thus everything is soldered on the board.

And do I think Apple will let people run quad 5870s? Yes, yes I do. But first they need a reason for those quad GPUs. Right now the most task intensive thing Apple users do is probably video producing... which doesn't exactly require a high-end GPU. Gaming would give them a reason to offer a computer with quad GPUs.

But like I said, I'm not holding my breath. I would actually be VERY surprised if stretched their gaming reach beyond the iPhone/iPad.
 
[citation][nom]waltfrench[/nom]Macs got marginalized early on because Jobs failed to realize that individuals could not afford the original Macs—there just weren't compelling reasons, aside from “hobbyist” to get one. Enter Gates, who saw that businesses were going to demand them, and offered a capability — Word & Excel — that businesses wanted. Windows ruled, while Apple retreated into a couple of markets where they had built a good reputation — education, design and sci/tech — and held on only by the skin of their teeth. Computers are a volume game, so all the energy went into Windows boxes leaving Apple stuck trying to cover development costs with only a few sales. They priced high.That's the Apple most of us know, but it's increasingly NOT the Apple of today. After a couple of bad starts, Apple has a strong OS base with tens of millions of new sales each year (since the iPhone OS shares so much with OSX, unlike Windows7 / Win6Mobile / Win7Mobile / Zune / XBox). Lots of users; lower cost per user.Also, Apple has moved into the mainstream CPU game, so doesn't have to fight the hardware design battles that they did in the past. ARM, which reportedly provides the basic design for the iProducts' CPUs, licenses something like a billion devices a year.They've made some strong efforts to climb the performance mountain. It may be a bit early to declare their OpenCL and GrandCentralDispatch efforts successes, but if they follow through in quality drivers, etc., programmers will have strong support for sharing CPU and GPU resources, getting less bogged down in tuning for specific cards, CPU mix, competing background processes, etc. This technology also will share across the iProducts and the Mac environment, leveraging developers' efforts.Finally, Apple gets this, and with the iPhone and iPad, has the opportunity to leverage its first-mover role. With the iPad, Jobs specifically called out not providing a "pricing umbrella" for volume producers to sneak in under. He's aiming for majority market share, has the warchest to sink into it, and indeed, is growing that share radically: Zero to almost-first place in three years; arguably first place in the US when you throw out the mostly-business Blackberries that are uninteresting to gamers.[/citation]

IBM backed the PC, it was their creation, so it sold well, particularly to businesses. No one got fired for buying IBM. If IBM had created and sold the Mac, it would have become the dominant standard.

Excel was available for the Mac before it was available for the PC. Please do fact checking.
 
cloakster

Very funny, You should be a top gammer because you know very well every component inside your PC
So thats a big news to all the engineers out there creating the components for the next generation PCs
They should be a hell of gamers. Kidding, you need to know some basic things and how you can benefit from them. A bit of knowledge and some money

But, don't even pretend gaming is science or to complicated or too PC specific. Gaming is more like art. But a good artist know its tools, right?

Mac players are not different from you, manny of them use PCs too. Where do you live, do you think we are isolated in a capsule? I don't game that much but I kicked a lot of PC boys online. You can chose because I have a PC and a Mac. But I wouldn't care really I am just having fun with you I play to have fun and I have been kicked a lot. That is how you learn.
 
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