One week after Apple released its public beta of Boot Camp , my Intel Core Duo - equipped iMac has transformed into an impressive play scheme , albeit one with a split personality . It ’s also starting to show some wart — its own , as well as those of Windows XP and of Mac OS X.
As much as diehard Mac gamers may detest to hear this , the plot experience on an iMac - equipped Windows XP can mostly be tot up up in one Bible : Excellent . For the first time in my life sentence , I can saunter up and down the aisle of a personal computer game memory and have my choice of the litter . Just about every game on these store shelves works on the Mac and works well .
level the playing theatre of operations
An iMac is a well - endow computer as far as its Intel Core Duo central processing unit is touch , but it ’s a picayune light in the graphics department . While the Radeon X1600 is no slouch — surely not compared to premature - generation iMac graphics chip — it is solidly in the middle of the pack for PC performer .
What that means for gamers is that the iMac is capable of run just about any game with a decent level of special effect wrick on — I was able-bodied to scarper most games I ’ve try with trilinear essence , full aspect anti - aliasing and various other technologies move around on , without suffering vast frame - charge per unit losings .
But the center - of - the - route functioning on the Radeon X1600 microchip also means that I ca n’t drive games in really high resolutions , for the most part . For most of the games I tried , 1,024 - by-768 seemed to be the happy spiritualist .
What this arrive down to is that the iMac is going to be fine for online and offline personal computer gaming , but do n’t count on it hammering your ally ’s custom - build up Athlon 64 semi with a top - of - the - assembly line Radeon or GeForce graphics card . Still , when it comes right down to it , the carrying out we and our sister publicationPC Worldhave measure show that the iMac is adequate to of holding its own against similarly equip PCs .
That ’s great intelligence . It ’s the first time in a very retentive sentence that we have n’t had to shroud behind the “ megahertz myth ” or other excuses to explain why Macs are better .
Getting Steamed
Immediately , Boot Camp ’s existence has have me represent some games that have n’t come to the Macintosh and , in all likeliness , won’t — Half- Life 2 is probably the most obvious example . It ’s a fantastic first - person shooter with a rich tale short letter and absolutely stunning graphics , a great physics organisation , and on-line swordplay . What ’s more , you do n’t have to go to the fund to corrupt it — you may purchase it and download it usingSteam , developer Valve Software ’s online content delivery system .
In many ways , Steam is like Apple ’s iTunes Music Store , but for games . you may download demos , grease one’s palms full versions of title , and download them — the overhaul even offers a biz finder that helps you toy with friend online .
With commercial Mac secret plan increasingly see a crunch for retail shelf space at Apple Stores , Comp USAs , and the short other major retail merchant where Mac game can be recover , perchance an online download service for Mac game is the right way to go . This is the access offer byDeliver2Mac , a Robert William Service pioneer by the founders of Virtual Programming , a UK - based Mac plot publisher .
Coming up short
One of the most startling thing I ’ve discovered is just how wide the difference is between the carrying into action of PC secret plan and their Mac biz equivalent . I do n’t have scientific event yet , but anecdotally , I ’ve seen anywhere from 20 to 30 percent improvements in frame charge per unit on the PC version compared to the Universal Binary Mac interpretation .
That ’s another real kick in the pant for Mac secret plan developer , but I do n’t think it should be regard as an indictment of their fool skills , because this drib in Mac OS ten - aboriginal performance is detectable regardless of who publish or port the Mac variant of the game . rather , it ’s something that our friends at Apple may need to take a closer look at .
The more I verbalise with mass who make it their business to understand this engineering , the more I think this has to do with two major things . The first is a pregnant architectural dispute in the way that Mac OS X ’s OpenGL act compared to Microsoft ’s DirectX — the API that most game developers who compose Windows games prefer . The other is that graphics microchip driver on Windows are far more soundly optimize for maximal performance on Windows than they are on Mac OS X. Either direction , it ’s high time for Apple to do something to close that break , if it want Mac OS X to appease free-enterprise going forward .
Now that running game in Windows XP is an option those of us with bleeding - edge Mac computer hardware can look at , it ’s incumbent upon Apple to give us — and software developers — incentives to stick with Mac OS X as much as possible . To that end , I ’m happy to cover that , at the remnant of the day , I ca n’t wait to reboot the iMac into Mac OS X. It ’s just better . Thirty - one spyware infection just indoors of a week pretty much recite me everything I need to know about running Windows .
One confession : I did pick up myself for a short prison term the other day wondering why the Start card would n’t appear when I kept pushing the black eye pointer to the low leftfield — in Mac OS X.
