Windows Gaming on an Intel Mac

F

fadeout32

Registered
So far I know that Intel Mac's run Windows natively via Bootcamp. But despite trying to do research on the net, I can't seem to find much information about this. How well do these games run on new high-end Intel Macs? Are all games compatible, as if it was an actual PC? DirectX, OpenGL, etc, all work fine? Most sites I read that the games will run as if it were a PC with equivalent specs, and taking into account that most high-end modern Intel Macs are like 8 core processor, 8gb ram, nice vid card, wouldn't they run most PC games even better than most actual PC's would (because of the relative spec, and cost, difference)? Thanks a lot in advance for any help on this.
 
Last edited:
fadeout32 said:
So far I know that Intel Mac's run Windows natively via Bootcamp. But despite trying to do research on the net, I can't seem to find much information about this. How well do these games run on new high-end Intel Macs? Are all games compatible, as if it was an actual PC? ...
Click to expand...
A Mac running Windows via a Boot Camp installation is a regular PC. It may be a very well-built PC, but it is a PC with everything good or bad that being a PC represents. Therefore, you may compare processor to processor, graphics card to graphics card, hard drive to hard drive, optical drive to optical drive, etc.
 
MisterMe said:
A Mac running Windows via a Boot Camp installation is a regular PC. It may be a very well-built PC, but it is a PC with everything good or bad that being a PC represents. Therefore, you may compare processor to processor, graphics card to graphics card, hard drive to hard drive, optical drive to optical drive, etc.
Click to expand...

Gotcha... for gaming purposes, how do you think the 8 core xeon westermere processor fairs against the i7 2600k quad core? As far as I've heard, mots games don't make use of multi-cores and instead are very heavily CPU intensive. Am I wrong about this? (I hope I am so I can get away with using the mac:()
 
Generally, the i7 is better for gaming, because as you said, a lot of games don't take advantage of multiple CPU cores, and the i7 has a nice feature that will boost the speed of a single core if the rest are idle.

But the bigger issue is the graphics card, probably. You can't use just any graphics card with Macs. Well, I guess you COULD in Windows, but then it might not work in OS X, so you probably wouldn't want to upgrade. So you'd better make sure the Mac's graphics card is sufficient.
 
Mikuro said:
Generally, the i7 is better for gaming, because as you said, a lot of games don't take advantage of multiple CPU cores, and the i7 has a nice feature that will boost the speed of a single core if the rest are idle.

But the bigger issue is the graphics card, probably. You can't use just any graphics card with Macs. Well, I guess you COULD in Windows, but then it might not work in OS X, so you probably wouldn't want to upgrade. So you'd better make sure the Mac's graphics card is sufficient.
Click to expand...

The mac would be running 2 of these

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC742ZM/A

But I guess it would be pointless in the end to drop like 6k on a completely beefed up mac to try to avoid having more than one desktop if the processor will always be significantly inferior to a separate PC gaming rig's i7. Anyone know when this gen of mac pro was released? Maybe I can wait for the next one.
 
running games through bootcamp on a intel mac is AMAZING but it will incorrectly read the RAM and hard-drive space available... for me i get no sound either but i dont use sound so i dont care and im to-lazy to install the drivers... anyways it works fine if you are willing to manually instal some stuff. it runs WAY smoother than my windows PC!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top