Gaming on a Mac

[arizonapcrepair]

Anyone attempted to do this? I have an iMac and a MacBook, both with Windows and Mac OS installed, so the OS is not the problem. I am not expecting to play games at their highest settings, but the reason I got the Mac was because of the versatility, and the ability to boot into Windows and Mac OS.

 

[Smith6612]

What games are you trying to run and what hardware does your Mac have in it? It's certainly possible to run today's games on a Mac (even though lack of support is apparent in more of the popular games).

 

[arizonapcrepair]

Just simple games like GTA and the like. It does have a dedicated graphics card, so I am set there. And also, the thing is about the Mac, I can always install windows for games (which I have)...

But I am wondering what can I throw at it, so I don't waste money, both mac os and windows games.

 

[Smith6612]

Just simple games like GTA and the like. It does have a dedicated graphics card, so I am set there. And also, the thing is about the Mac, I can always install windows for games (which I have)...

But I am wondering what can I throw at it, so I don't waste money, both mac os and windows games.

Well looking at the specs in your signature, you should be able to run a decent amount of games. Grand Theft Auto IV might be a bit painful running on that if you're running something like a GeForce 9400M, especially Crysis but games like TF2, or for that matter any Source Game, Racing Games and older Grand Auto games should run fine. For the most part, what will kill your framerate if anything on that Mac will be shaders in the newer games as well as the high levels of Anti-aliasing. Any game in particular, just tell what game so we can tell you.

 

[jermmm]

I'd say most Unreal 3-based games (UT3, Borderlands, BioShock, Mirror Edge) should run at medium-high settings on the 9400m. Also Source-based-games (TF2, HL2, L4D) should run great, they are mostly CPU bound.

If you want a big-ass-collection of games to play, for $100 you can get the Valve Complete Pack from steam, which has everything they ever made. (http://store.steampowered.com/sub/1134/)

 

[lithaerien]

I have a Macbook Pro which I tripple boot OS X, Linux and Windows and you can definitely play on a mac. You could even play in OS X itself if you're brave enough. The people at Codeweavers created a branch of WINE called Crossover Games, excelent little product. cxgames won't play like a PC but is still worth it if you don't want to run Windows.

Although if you have a copy of windows, BootCamp is definitely a better try for mac users. Your Mac will act just like a normal PC in terms of gaming. Fast and Simple. Hope that helps

 

[adamparkzer]

I don't have a Mac, nor do I game often, but I heard that overclocking your system helps it run better during gaming?

I have a friend that wrote an eHow article about overclocking Macs.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5490990_overclock-macbook-macbook-pro.html

Please visit it so he can get paid for page views by unique IP addresses.

 

[lithaerien]

You do notice a change when overclocking, but I find that most games run very well if set between Medium to Highest video settings.

Personally I stray away from overclocking because it'll just cut your hardware's life in half, and it'll make your laptop (if you're OCing a lappy) hotter than it already is.

 

[ramsankar]

Is there any major difference between the mac and pc versions of games like Sims 3 and NFS ?

 

[lithaerien]

Is there any major difference between the mac and pc versions of games like Sims 3 and NFS ?

As far as I know, yes, because the company just uses a wrapper to get it to work on Mac OS X. It's just like buying the windows game and installing it through crossover games or WINE. The only games that I know runs natively on Mac OS X are the Blizzard Games (World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, Diablo, etc.) and those games run perfectly on a mac.

 

[Smith6612]

I don't have a Mac, nor do I game often, but I heard that overclocking your system helps it run better during gaming?

I have a friend that wrote an eHow article about overclocking Macs.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5490990_overclock-macbook-macbook-pro.html

Please visit it so he can get paid for page views by unique IP addresses.

Overclocking is useful if done correctly. You need to make sure that the overclock is stable as well by stressing your hardware for 12-24 hours with programs such as OCCT to make sure errors do not show up. It does help many times on the GPU side of many PCs I come across where the CPU is more than adequite. Other times, it's due to slow data transfers between motherboard components which you can't do to much about without messing with the Northbridge/Southbridge/FSB.

 

[carter]

Just simple games like GTA and the like. It does have a dedicated graphics card, so I am set there. And also, the thing is about the Mac, I can always install windows for games (which I have)...

But I am wondering what can I throw at it, so I don't waste money, both mac os and windows games. __________________
http://www.metrophoenixcomputers.com/
Apple iMac 20" 2.4Ghz C2D, 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD
Apple White MacBook 2.0 C2D, 1GB of RAM, 80GB HDD:rant2:

 

[Mr. DOS]

I just wanted to pop in to recommend that nobody buy the Valve Complete Pack right now. If you're thinking about buying it, I would suggest you wait until L4D2 is released, instantly adding another $50 value to the package (and saving you having to buy it separately, if you were going to). If you really feel like waiting, it often goes on sale around Christmas too (it was 25% off last year between Christmas and New Years).

--- Mr. DOS

 

[racked_nation]

There is a program that ports games over for mac, that are originally made for windows so you do not need to run the virtual windows machine, but the thing is i completely forget what its called!:dunno:

 

[lithaerien]

There is a program that ports games over for mac, that are originally made for windows so you do not need to run the virtual windows machine, but the thing is i completely forget what its called!:dunno:

Crossover games and WINE? those are the two that lets windows games play on the mac that I know of.

 

[jermmm]

There is a program that ports games over for mac, that are originally made for windows so you do not need to run the virtual windows machine, but the thing is i completely forget what its called!:dunno:

Crossover Games is the commercial product which contributes/uses Wine.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/
http://www.winehq.org/

 

[crewsd]

I've installed XP on my MacBook Pro, everything works just fine for gaming. Gets a little toasty though.

 

[arizonapcrepair]

I just bought the 10th anniversary version of Medal of Honor, and I cant wait to try it out on my Mac

 

[cenobite321]

I have an iMac with 1Gb RAM and an ATI graphics card. I can tell you that games like F.E.A.R., Doom 3 and Silent Hill 4 run very well on bootcamped Windows with the default settings. For example, I've got F.E.A.R. with the automatically detected settings and the graphics in-game are pretty good plus it runs very smoothly.

Otherwise, if you want to play on Mac OS, there are also some good games for it. There's a Mac version of probably most of the old games which had its source code release, for example, Doom, Rise Of the Triad, etc. Or you can download DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/) that is a DOS emulator.

There are also some good multiplayer FPS for Mac OS like Urban Terror (http://www.urbanterror.net/) or OpenArena (www.[B]openarena[/B].ws).

 

[budumx3]

Oh, and just as a note to the topic poster, you can run a lot of stuff on Mac.

As the above reader said, games that aren't multiplayer should work almost perfectly.