Valve: Apple, ATI, Nvidia to Improve Mac Gaming

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[citation][nom]tolham[/nom]i'm sure in a couple years they'll have games running fast on macs, but unless apple lowers their prices (which is part of the allure so that's not going to happen), macs still won't be viable gaming rigs.[/citation]


Amen while a select few gamers wil brag about their awsome 4000+ dolar PC with quad vid card a but laod of ram and a intel uber cpu , most pc gmaers live on a budget much closer to 800-1200 dolars max on thier pc cost , macs just don't offer gaming at this price range.
 
Hes running a Mac Pro lol. $2499 with 3GB OF RAM STANDARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
gee! i can get those fps with my Athlon 4850e with a radeon 5k card and that was a budget build i did for less then 300 bux?? Course my puter doesn't have that pretty fruity icon on it......but for 10 times less and same frame rate? Think I prefer no pretty fruit icons lol!
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching[/citation]

That's strange, because PCs can crunch numbers too. Who woulda thunkit?
 
Ok time to put a stop to this nonsense right now.
I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.

Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching
Click to expand...

There is absolutely ~nothing~ special about the Mac "case" for video rendering. The case is about the only thing unique on a Mac, the drivers are just ports from the Linux world that Apple spent some extra time on. There is no super secret "Mac optimization code" that makes Video rendering run any faster on a Mac. Its just 1's and 0's being processed by a program. If anything "video rendering" would work significantly faster on a Windows box with a render that is using CUDA or OpenCL to process it through the GFX card. The games are getting poor performance because their DX titles and Steam is having to either use a wrapper (cheap development but significant performance hit) or transcode (significant development costs) the engines. The body responsible for OpenGL has screwed the pooch so badly that its been discarded / ignored for anything game or performance related. CAD / CAM and industrial manufactures still use it because they have millions and sometimes billions of dollars invested into software / equipment that revolves around OpenGL and some variant of Unix.

Case in point, at my house I have a fully loaded SunBlade 2000 with 8gb of memory, 2x UltraSparc III- 1.15ghz CPU's two 73GB 10K FC-AL drives and a XVR-1200 GFX card. The GFX card alone was originally the cost of an entire PC. Its old by today's standards (and I got it for super cheap used) but awhile back it was a beast of a CAD / CAM / design workstation. The software that's supposed to run on it is insanely expensive. The software license's alone dwarf the entire cost of the above noted MacPro.
 
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]Ok time to put a stop to this nonsense right now.There is absolutely ~nothing~ special about the Mac "case" for video rendering. The case is about the only thing unique on a Mac, the drivers are just ports from the Linux world that Apple spent some extra time on. There is no super secret "Mac optimization code" that makes Video rendering run any faster on a Mac. Its just 1's and 0's being processed by a program. If anything "video rendering" would work significantly faster on a Windows box with a render that is using CUDA or OpenCL to process it through the GFX card. The games are getting poor performance because their DX titles and Steam is having to either use a wrapper (cheap development but significant performance hit) or transcode (significant development costs) the engines. The body responsible for OpenGL has screwed the pooch so badly that its been discarded / ignored for anything game or performance related. CAD / CAM and industrial manufactures still use it because they have millions and sometimes billions of dollars invested into software / equipment that revolves around OpenGL and some variant of Unix.Case in point, at my house I have a fully loaded SunBlade 2000 with 8gb of memory, 2x UltraSparc III- 1.15ghz CPU's two 73GB 10K FC-AL drives and a XVR-1200 GFX card. The GFX card alone was originally the cost of an entire PC. Its old by today's standards (and I got it for super cheap used) but awhile back it was a beast of a CAD / CAM / design workstation. The software that's supposed to run on it is insanely expensive. The software license's alone dwarf the entire cost of the above noted MacPro.[/citation]

I don't disagree with you at all. Nor do I think my case gives me magic drivers. I'm saying that the hardware in my Mac Pro is heavily centered towards video rendering with 8 nehalem cores, pretty much no game today uses more then 4 cores.

Also my Quadro FX 4800 cost an arm and a leg, but it's used for doing CGI work. It cost me about $1700, and I haven't even tested any real games on it, because its not meant for them.

What is time to point an end to the nonsense to is the fact that people are assuming the Mac Pro is a gaming rig. It's not. It is a number crunching machine (which is why it has 8 cores), and obviously PC's can crunch numbers. I'm simply saying the Mac Pro is meant to that, and obviously there are PC's meant to do it as well.
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]What is time to point an end to the nonsense to is the fact that people are assuming the Mac Pro is a gaming rig. It's not. It is a number crunching machine (which is why it has 8 cores), and obviously PC's can crunch numbers. I'm simply saying the Mac Pro is meant to that, and obviously there are PC's meant to do it as well.[/citation]

You kinda missed the part where you can built an equivalent (in terms of hardware) PC for much cheaper than just buying a Mac Pro, and it will number-crunch just as fast, if not faster. (many times faster if your software can utilize CUDA)
 
sliem

"I'm running a Mac Pro..."

STOP! Well there's your problem right there, fella.
Click to expand...

Very short sighted simplistic and opinion. This news is for people like me, not for someone like you, dedicated PC gamer.

This is a great news for me.

I have almost the same machine and it rocks for 3D apps, video editing and "my general use" on OSX and Windows. I know, and we know this Mac Pros are not gaming rigs so forget about it and it is not my priority to have the highest frame rate but it also doesn't mean I don't want to play games on my Mac. It will be a nice to have feature in general. I am a occasional gamer and I appreciate Valve's effort and investment into the Mac platform because I may buy some Mac titles in the future. As you can see for people like me makes sense to know that gaming will also improve in the not so distant future.

All of you expend a lot of money where others wont expend that much even if only a $200 gaming card. So don't try to be the genius with a vision here. I bet all of you have something I wont never care to pay for. I don't care with my Mac and I will buy another in the future.

The price is not an argument as I have a very capable up to date PC too that I builded myself and the Mac is where I do feel right. But I like Windows and IBM based PCs too. Is not a hate/love - cheap/expensive argument.
 
OpenGL will never match DirectX with the current API. Even with driver improvements, the base problem is OpenGL's speed, efficiency, and shader support. Then without drivers, you also have to consider consumer video cards are designed to run DirectX really fast, not so much OpenGL. This is why they are cheaper then $500. If they had good OpenGL support and complied to OpenGL standards, they would cost $1200 like Workstation cards.
 
If mac wants to be a good gaming platform, first it must open hardware and software developers and give them as much as it needs.
If apple cannot do that, it will always be a platform for anything.
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching[/citation]

Building anything for a specific purpose would rape anything not built for it. Your Mac Pro probably has 2 CPUs and a workstation based GPU. Build the same cost though on a PC and it would probably give better performance since you could buy higher end performance parts.

Hell the upgradeability of a PC alone makes it better too. If you bought a dual CPU PC with a quad Nehalem last year, you can just upgrade the CPUs to 6 core Nehalem CPUs now for a 50% +/- boost. Too bad you can't do that on a Mac.
 
sheep discussing sheep issues, mine is better than yours....so much as 6 year olds
 
[citation][nom]totalfail[/nom]sheep discussing sheep issues, mine is better than yours....so much as 6 year olds[/citation]

Clearly owns a mac.
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching[/citation]

they lost the risc chip it lost its super number crunching when it went to intel chips. now it does numbers no better then any intel computer. macs anymore are just like any computer you buy at best buy just with a crappy OS and a 4x price tag for practicly nothing.
 
I don't get it, why are they complaining about performance when they bought a MAC in the first place. It's like downloading Ubuntu and be expecting to install Crysis by double cliking the exe...
If you want performance wait at least a year from now! It's not like Microsoft got the best performance in 6 months..
 
[citation][nom]Dkz[/nom]...If you want performance wait at least a year from now! It's not like Microsoft got the best performance in 6 months..[/citation]

Exactly. DirectX was buggy rubbish for years and years only becoming relatively stable by about version 9. I remember the days when you couldn't get a PC game to run unless one wrote different auto exec bat config files and tolerated crashes every fifteen minutes. PC gaming used to be an absolute nightmare.
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching[/citation]

Thats a pretty ignorant thing to say. Really any PC with the same specs can very easily destroy your mac at video rendering. Also because you guys cant really install aftermarket cooling on macs you cant have faster components, nor can you really overclock to the speeds that we can. I could take a slower PC, and make it faster than your mac.

Another thing, how much is 8GB of DDR3 ram on a PC? (~$250)
how much is 8GB of DDR3 ram on a Mac? (~ $400)
 
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