5 ms·

It seems that Mac games do not have the same performance as PC games, even on the same hardware. Maybe not surprising with Valve, who is new to the mac platform

It seems that Mac games do not have the same performance as PC games, even on the same hardware. Maybe not surprising with Valve, who is new to the mac platform, but it is surprising with Blizzard who's been Mac from way back. I can only assume that it's either an OSX issue or bad drivers. Either way, hopefully this is the start of a virtuous circle where more games = better drivers = more gamers = more games.

sliverstorm 16y ago
Is it possible OSX just has more overhead? I mean it's not like Valve or Blizzard write the drivers, Apple does and they've of course been with OSX from day 1. I know when I ran Warcraft III on an OSX machine, it felt like a little app in a window/box, whereas on Windows it's allowed to basically take over the machine.
- pxlpshr 16y ago
  We worked with John Carmack building out Quake Live a long time ago. It took them awhile to release their OSX port, and there was a lot of internal talk about how much game developers loathed the OSX development process because the drivers for the video cards were terrible. As a whole, there was just little focus put on OSX + gaming from Apple's perspective. I think it was short-sighted given how much games have driven adoption in the past.
- giantfuzzypanda 16y ago
  I doubt OSX has more overhead, if games run faster on linux than they should run at least as fast as windows on osx, with proper drivers.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  "Is it possible OSX just has more overhead?" Most likely, it's because Apple hasn't cared much about 3D performance in the past -- and even if they did, they'd be behind, because nVidia and ATI can dedicate entire teams of people specifically to opimizing drivers. Apple really can't do that, because Apple makes operating systems and consumer electronics, not graphics processors. And as the graphics processors get more powerful and evolve toward being ever more general-purpose, the driver gap between the specialists (ATI, nVidia, and eventually probably the Larrabee team at Intel) and the likes of Apple will only grow. And the case in point -- Microsoft provides reference drivers, nVidia and ATI provide the real deal... those highly optimized drivers aren't Microsoft's code.
  - azim 16y ago
    Graphics drivers on OSX don't come from Apple. They're written by ATI/Nvidia. However, for a variety of reasons including larger development teams and end user upgradeability, Windows drivers just have the cutting edge tech available first. Just like with Apple, were you to go to Dell.com or HP.com and download manufacturer certified drivers, you'd find them woefully out of date also.

sliverstorm 16y ago

Is it possible OSX just has more overhead? I mean it's not like Valve or Blizzard write the drivers, Apple does and they've of course been with OSX from day 1. I know when I ran Warcraft III on an OSX machine, it felt like a little app in a window/box, whereas on Windows it's allowed to basically take over the machine.

pxlpshr 16y ago
We worked with John Carmack building out Quake Live a long time ago. It took them awhile to release their OSX port, and there was a lot of internal talk about how much game developers loathed the OSX development process because the drivers for the video cards were terrible. As a whole, there was just little focus put on OSX + gaming from Apple's perspective. I think it was short-sighted given how much games have driven adoption in the past.
giantfuzzypanda 16y ago
I doubt OSX has more overhead, if games run faster on linux than they should run at least as fast as windows on osx, with proper drivers.
Tamerlin 16y ago
"Is it possible OSX just has more overhead?" Most likely, it's because Apple hasn't cared much about 3D performance in the past -- and even if they did, they'd be behind, because nVidia and ATI can dedicate entire teams of people specifically to opimizing drivers. Apple really can't do that, because Apple makes operating systems and consumer electronics, not graphics processors. And as the graphics processors get more powerful and evolve toward being ever more general-purpose, the driver gap between the specialists (ATI, nVidia, and eventually probably the Larrabee team at Intel) and the likes of Apple will only grow. And the case in point -- Microsoft provides reference drivers, nVidia and ATI provide the real deal... those highly optimized drivers aren't Microsoft's code.
- azim 16y ago
  Graphics drivers on OSX don't come from Apple. They're written by ATI/Nvidia. However, for a variety of reasons including larger development teams and end user upgradeability, Windows drivers just have the cutting edge tech available first. Just like with Apple, were you to go to Dell.com or HP.com and download manufacturer certified drivers, you'd find them woefully out of date also.