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Game performance, in my experience, has always been hugely lacking on the Mac. Beyond the sheer lack of game support (for what used to be obvious reasons) the

Game performance, in my experience, has always been hugely lacking on the Mac. Beyond the sheer lack of game support (for what used to be obvious reasons) the actual game performance never matched up, at least with 3D graphics games. The frame rate would almost always suck, and if you didn't have a ridiculously high-end card (e.g. something for a Mac Pro desktop) you might as well forget it. You were better off with your Playstation any day. Hate to say that, but it's true. Plus, oftentimes the most popular games would never get the updates/patches as quickly as the MS versions, which was annoying. The Mac was simply never taken seriously as a game platform. Educational games? Sure. 2D? Fine. 3D? Forget about it. I currently have a Leopard MBP, so maybe times have changed. But I was burned too many times in the past. It taught me to stay away from the games rack.

jrockway 19y ago
Did games ever play well on PCs with shoddy hardware? No. Things are a little better now, but try playing something like UT3 on your Intel integrated graphics. Ain't gonna work. Cheap video cards will never play games well, regardless of platform. Hopefully gaming pans out for Apple. They are paying people to do some awesome open source work on LLVM (namely running LLVM on GPUs), so if gaming works for them it means that we all get very good LLVM performance :)
Tamerlin 19y ago
Before the G5, macs were also painfully underpowered compared to even standard windows PC's, and before OSX, there wasn't really much by way of robust, high-performance 3D libraries or media API's for the mac. Now, Apple has a solid OS, comparable (i.e. identical) hardware and therefore performance and features, and also pretty close to a complete analog for DirectX -- not just for Direct3D, but all sorts of other API's like audio as well. So now Apple has the technology to offer up a solid gaming platform, so the question is what are they doing to attract game developers? I don't know the answer to that -- I'm hoping someone here might.

jrockway 19y ago

Did games ever play well on PCs with shoddy hardware? No. Things are a little better now, but try playing something like UT3 on your Intel integrated graphics. Ain't gonna work. Cheap video cards will never play games well, regardless of platform. Hopefully gaming pans out for Apple. They are paying people to do some awesome open source work on LLVM (namely running LLVM on GPUs), so if gaming works for them it means that we all get very good LLVM performance :)

Tamerlin 19y ago

Before the G5, macs were also painfully underpowered compared to even standard windows PC's, and before OSX, there wasn't really much by way of robust, high-performance 3D libraries or media API's for the mac. Now, Apple has a solid OS, comparable (i.e. identical) hardware and therefore performance and features, and also pretty close to a complete analog for DirectX -- not just for Direct3D, but all sorts of other API's like audio as well. So now Apple has the technology to offer up a solid gaming platform, so the question is what are they doing to attract game developers? I don't know the answer to that -- I'm hoping someone here might.