Gaming with OSX and Boot Camp

[Jobu]

Anyone tried it? I can't find any reliable impressions of it on the internet except by mac zealots.

I need a new computer sometime soon. I would maybe like a Mac, but I want to know how comfortably Windows runs under Boot Camp with regards to games. I'm not exactly on the cutting edge, so I don't really care if I can't play Crysis at 60fps... it seems at first glance it would be just fine.

[Viin]

Edit: er sorry, for some reason I was thinking Parallels

I do Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro - works great. No issues, if it wasn't my work computer I'd use it to play games.

[naum]

I am a Parallels user (on work machine), but Boot Camp comes standard on Leopard now… …I have a copy but yet to install, as first, I need to install another HD as my 160Gig drive is 75% full already… …and I'll need to dredge up a copy of Win XP…

Reports are that Intel Macs run Windows better than Windows boxes, provided you have enough memory, especially if you're running Vista… …and you still need a decent video card, though most high end Macs fit the bill there (including MBP)…

[stray]

Bootcamp isn't really any different than running a PC. I'd suggest getting a new mouse though. The Mighty Mouse sucks.

[MrHat]

So no one knows?

[stray]

I know....Thought I made it clear. Games run fine. It's just a PC with a different BIOS.

[Sky]

Key is to make sure you get a machine with a good gpu. Otherwise the macs run windows well with boot camp. I have only tried the HoMaM V demo on my work mac mini, which has a shitty intel gma pile of shit, so it didn't work out.

You might want to do some more research at some mac gaming sites or something, though.

I don't game on my macs (which are at work anyway), I have a pc for gaming. I'd love to get a mac for everything else, though.

[Jobu]

You might want to do some more research at some mac gaming sites or something, though.

Aren't those myths, like Atlantis, or Duke Nukem Forever? 

[stray]

InsideMacGaming has been around forever, and is probably the most popular site.... But... It's kind of pointless to look up Mac gaming info. It's a PC too.

[Sky]

I mentioned that because pc sites are not likely to report on boot camp issues regarding gaming. I don't think my supervisor has taken the plunge with pc gaming yet (civ4 is enough for him with a wife and 2 kids), and I don't game on the mac. So I don't want to assume there are no issues, because pc games always have issues, and some might be specific to the mac drivers or something like that. I can only rule out the cheap gpu chipsets from personal experience.

[squirrel]

I do it all the time as my portable machine is a MacBook Pro. I used the beta bootcamp to run TF2, WoW, Portal, HG:L beta and pretty much anything else. I've also used parallels to play DF and Peggle - although it sucks for gaming. I've had no issues worth mentioning.

You need a lot of RAM and a machine with a non-integrated GPU but other than that it works fine, just like gaming on any XP SP2 machine. There's better gaming rigs for sure, but it works.

[Morfiend]

My roommate has a very beefy Mac Pro, and I finally talked him in to installing windows to play Hellgate. His system runs very well. There where a few initial driver issues we had to sort out, but after that, it runs like a charm. I would say it runs Hellgate and UT3 about the same as my system which is e6600, 2gb ram, 8800gtx.

All in all I was very impressed. I can see there being some issues when new drivers are released, but thats just speculation.

[Jain Zar]

Ive had no problems with it.  Completed Warhammer Mark of Chaos Chaos campaign using it, and have played around with lots of other games. 


See?  No problems.

[Morfiend]

Damn, have a few toys?

[Surlyboi]

3GHZ Eight core Mac Pro with gobs of RAM. The camp is fully booted.

And in my experience, there have been no major driver issues. (I've been running this rig or a similar one since bootcamp was released)

The rest is 

[stray]

The rest is 

Eh? Are you talking game specific  , or something to do with system testing?


Speaking of systems... I think I'll go ahead and buy Leopard today.

[Surlyboi]

Six of one, half dozen of the other...

[squirrel]

Leopard is a bit of a mixed bag, for me at least. There's some nice stuff (file preview, spaces, time machine) and the finder visual clean up and smart folders are nice but they really pissed me off with some other changes, notably:

1. The dock has been changed so that folders placed there now display their contents as either "stacks" or "grids". Stacks are completely useless imo, and neither view allows you to drill down to subfolder content without opening a finder window. total backwards step usability wise.

2. Spotlights "show all" view has been changed so it no longer automatically sorts the results in categorized lists. you can manually do it as you can in the finder but it's much more tedious now.

3. I've had major compatibility issues with several apps on a clean install that range from visual errors to absolute crashes that are repeatable.

It's ok but it's not finished yet, although it's not as bad as Vista in terms of missing the mark.

[stray]

Hmm.... I'm not a big fan of Cover Flow. Column View is still the best improvement on the Finder -- though I wouldn't mind Column View with Cover Flow's black background maybe... Is there a hack out there for that?

Then again, sometimes I say to hell with all of it. Spotlight is probably the best tool for navigation.


[EDIT] Y'know, I'm gonna just use it for now and see how it goes.

[Jain Zar]

Im avoiding 10.5 till the New Year at least.  Supposedly 10.5.1 should come out this month, but as always no OS is good to have early on. 
And being the only person in my group of friends & family that is a Mac user means most of the improvements aren't anything I need or can use RIGHT NOW anyways.

[stray]

It's more spiffy...And "officially" UNIX. You do, in fact, need it RIGHT NOW. 

[Sky]

I have no urge to upgrade. For me, 10.3 is a fine version, though I use 10.4. Most of our machines are 10.3, we bought up a site license a while back. I use almost none of the touted tweaks made since 10.4, most are annoying imo. Spotlight looks interesting, but it seems to take my supervisor longer to find things than for me, and I just remember where I save stuff. I don't think I've ever used it.

My supervisor is a macaddict and thinks we need to buy a new site license for 10.5. He cannot really iterate why. And we're in a huge budget crunch. Kinda funny imo.

[Surlyboi]

 10.3???

[naum]

I have no urge to upgrade. For me, 10.3 is a fine version, though I use 10.4. Most of our machines are 10.3, we bought up a site license a while back. I use almost none of the touted tweaks made since 10.4, most are annoying imo. Spotlight looks interesting, but it seems to take my supervisor longer to find things than for me, and I just remember where I save stuff. I don't think I've ever used it.

My supervisor is a macaddict and thinks we need to buy a new site license for 10.5. He cannot really iterate why. And we're in a huge budget crunch. Kinda funny imo.

I haven't installed 10.5 yet, it's still sitting on my desk — first, I needed to hookup a new hard drive (anolther 500 Gig) and USB hub to handle all the gadgets and devices hooked in to it, and that stage is completed…

No real new "must have" features in 10.5… …however, going to upgrade as from reading all the developer mailing lists, there's going to be a lot of stuff coming out that takes advantage of new/improved OS X internals… …my text editor of choice, TextMate, is going to be Leopard only soon, as are a number of OS X applications that take advantage of 10.5 goodness…

Again, not much for me, though these features are appealing to me:

* Improved terminal.app
* spaces, for when the MBP is unplugged from the big screen
* Dashcode
* Boot camp built in
* Built in Cocoa bridges for Ruby/Python
* Time Machine
* Built in iChat hi quality recording

300 new features!
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

Admittedly, these are mostly lame, but again, I think 10.5 is more a "developer's release"…


I hear Spotlight has been improved to the point of usefulness…

[stray]

I would agree with that (it being a developer's release). I'm tempted to learn Python or Ruby now. Seems like a good place to start.

I expect OS X Server to finally start getting noticed this time around too.

[Soukyan]

I would agree with that (it being a developer's release). I'm tempted to learn Python or Ruby now. Seems like a good place to start.

I expect OS X Server to finally start getting noticed this time around too.

Yes. They added some fine new services to OS X Server 10.5. I've got it in testing right now, but we won't be rolling it into production until some production applications are upgraded and Leopard approved by the developers which will probably be next summer.

But yes, 10.5 has ignited the programming flame again and I'm learning Ruby and tackling doing some Cocoa apps again. Fun, fun.