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What's Wrong With Mac's
I bought a new computer last year, and after 21 years of using Windows based P/C's I thought I would try a Mac. The specifications looked pretty good, and powerful so I thought I would give it a go, I got the latest IMAC. It was more expensive than a P/C, but only a few hundred dollars....and it looked nice, and only two cables to plug in, the power cord and the internet connection....great.
I have been playing EVE for six years and I knew they had an Apple client, so that was ok. But, when I started looking around for something else, it's not there. About the only place I can find apple gams is on the Apples APPS site.
Why is it so????? Why doen't anyone want to produce Mac games??
Comments
1. Price Tag. Macs, especially the newer ones are retardedly expensive.
2. Video Cards. From my experience anything but the most expensive models usually have merely okay video cards. Thus Mac users usually aren't gamers and hardware intensive games can't be run on most Macs period.
3. DirectX. DirectX is purely a windows component, Macs don't have it. Most games use DirectX and while OpenGL (which is available for Mac) isn't rare I don't believe it's a standard either.
4. Very small userbase. Most computers use Windows. Most of the market, especially for video games, is buying for Windows.
Just a few reasons, there's likely more. But all in all a Mac is a bad platform for gaming.
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Owning a Mac book is more-so a stereo type these days, just a flashy neat little notebook with a good battery life (marked up about 50% of what they should be). They have spread like a plague the last year or two. In the movies you don't see the protagonist pull out a Sony, HP or Dell notebook to mess around on for a quick scene... it’s usually the Mac. If you're a laptop gamer I would strongly suggest ignoring them being thrown in your face at any store you go to.
If you were wanting to get a strong laptop, just custom build one (Clevo ect) from the vendors. For 2/3 the price of the higher end macs you can get a far more powerfull notebook. If you want high portability/battery life, just use your smart phone or grab a touch pad.
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First of all, just like PCs, Macs are great machines. Don't let the haters tell you otherwise. I have a Windows gaming desktop and a 2010 Macbook Pro. I love them both.
You've got a couple options for your Mac
1) Install Bootcamp and put Windows 7 on a partition. It's easy to set up and then you have the best of both worlds. You'll install and run games just like any other Windows PC. Reboot to switch OSes.
2) Use Wine. This requires a bit more tech savvy. Between Crossover Games and Wineskin (portingteam.com), you can play a good number of games and MMOs. I've had FFXI, Guild Wars, Istaria, LOTRO, DDO and UO all running in Wine on my MBP and they run great. Crossover Games may be the best solution for you if you want support, but it's $30. Wineskin apps are free, but sometimes you'll have to dig around and play with the configuration more than you would a Crossover bottle. WineHQ is a great resource for troubleshooting, as is the Crossover Games site.
There are also some games out there with native clients. EVE is one, like you mentioned. You also have WOW, Regnum Online (aka Realms Online), Ryzom, City of Heroes, WAR, Fallen Earth and more. Sometimes the official ports kinda suck though (especially in the case of WAR, COX and Fallen Earth) because they are really just using a Wine wrapper that isn't optimized enough.
Macs are great machines, hardware wise (unlike most Apple people, I find the OS to be mostly about like any other OS). They give respectable performance, are equipped with great screens, and are almost always built by Asus (a few smaller devices by Foxconn), so they're generally very reliable.
That said, they aren't typically geared towards gaming, and the markup on them can be downright stupid vs equivalent windows machines in some product lines. The Macbook Pro's, for instance, offer about the same machine for $2000-$2500 that you can get from, say, HP for about about $1000-$1200. The Mac might be built by Asus, and have better reliability for it, but is that worth double the price? Absolutely not. On the other hand, Macbook Airs are a decent value, and an overall stellar machine.
It completely depends on the product.
As for gaming, the first above poster had it right: Macs typically have bad GPUs, the userbase is still very much a minority, and there's no DirectX.
Your options are:
A.) Use bootcamp, pay $100 for Windows, but be stuck with a mediocre GPU (Imacs use mobile GPUs, so the BEST you could have, as of a year ago, is a mobile Radeon HD 5850, and lower down I think it was something like a 5650/5670)
B.) Use Wine, which seems to work far better in OSes like Ubuntu than Mac OS (you could always dual boot with Ubuntu), but still have the mediocre GPU, and now have to take a giant performance hit from using using an emulator (yes, I know, "Wine is Not an Emulator", but it really is). My experience is that the Wine fps hit is very often upward of 50%, with only a small handful of games running nearly as well on Wine as Windows
C.) Don't game on your Mac
F.) Use Onlive. F is for "fail", but I figured I'd at least throw it out there. In reality, you'll almost certainly do best using your own computer's hardware, which bring me to:
A is your best option, and depending on exactly what iMac you have, it might actually be pretty decent, and well worth the $100.
Why not tell us which iMac you have, and what GPU it is? If it's the 5850-equipped model, that's actually going to allow pretty decent gaming, not something suited to a desktop with a high resolution necessarily, but as long as you don't expect high settings at 1080P, that GPU can deliver a fair bit of eye candy at moderate resolutions (my friend uses the only slightly-faster mobile 5870, and gets pretty good settings and framerates at 1680x1050). If it's one of the lower-end ones, well like I said, tell us what you've got, and we can tell you what you can expect. I've used most mobile GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 series, so I have a pretty good idea of how each performs.
Rather than coding everything from scratch, most commercial games use an API to do a lot of the low-level graphical work for them. The two main ones are DirectX and OpenGL. The main advantage of DirectX is that it is a lot easier to make the game work right. I think that DirectX also offers more graphical features.
The advantage of OpenGL is that it can run on any OS. In contrast, DirectX is made by Microsoft, who for obvious reasons has no interest in making it run on Macs or Linux. Thus DirectX is Windows-only. Wine tries to translate DirectX API calls into OpenGL to make DirectX work on Macs and Linux, and it does work for some games, but not nearly as well as running DirectX natively on Windows.
So developers have a choice: easier to code or greater OS compatibility. Since nearly all gamers have Windows anyway, most game developers take the former option.
As far as hardware goes, a Mac is a PC, so you can install Windows on it and it will work. You can play whatever games you want that way. Some gamers with a Mac dual boot, using Windows for games and Mac OS X for everything else. Look into Boot Camp if you're interested in going that route.
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As far as hardware goes, Apple sells mid-range hardware with a high end price tag. So games will run, at least if you install Windows, but don't get ideas about maxing settings, as that's not going to work for many games.
Macs are overpriced fashion accessories.
Someone else kinda mentioned it already , but if your looking for a decent amount of games , maybe not exactly the ones you are looking for but anyway, Onlive has 100's of games and works on mac or anything else all you need is decent internet , people have mentioned slight lag problems with it but i my self use it on all of my kid's pc's and my wife's laptop and it works fine imo and having over 100 games fully playable instantly with no download at all on your pc/mac/TV even on a crappy pc for only 10$ a month cannot be beat at all .
Believe it or not, Wine actually does work very well, in the sense that games will almost always run, without any hitches, and almost as soon as they come out.
I WILL give the Wine time huge props for how enormously they've improved their software in the past 2-3 years. Like I said though, the performance hit can be huge. That gap is closing (again, huge props to the Wine team; they're working near miracles), but it'll be awhile yet before it's close to being as good at gaming as Windows, and new DirectX APIs are being released pretty quick, making it even harder for them to keep up. I believe they're just now getting DX10 reliably working.
As for OpenGL vs DX, DX11 does one really big thing that I'm almost certain OpenGL 4.1 does not: multi-threaded rendering. Remember how this single feature allowed slower Geforce cards to match or beat much faster Radeon cards in Civ 5? It really is a huge deal for performance (and since OpenGL doesn't support it, that means you probably can't mimick it with Wine->OpenGL)
I did mention it, but don't forget the caveat that it's vastly inferior to using one's own hardware.
It's governed at 30fps, and 720p, and as I showed in an earlier thread using Borderlands, the image quality at 720p was vastly inferior to playing it on a PC GPU at 720p.
My experience was that "lag" wasn't really bad at all, not in a game-breaking sort of way, but it was noticeable, and it's important to realize that I'm hard-wired to a very low-latency fiber optic connection. Someone using DSL or cable, and heaven forbid, connecting to the internet with wireless (which will probably throw in at least 20-40ms more latency on top of ISP latency) would probably have an aweful time.
Without a doubt, if this guy has decent hardware, he should just play games with Bootcamp; we'll see though.
1. In some cases like the smallest Mac laptops yes but when you look at the Mac Book Pro's not as much. Compare the insides of the laptops and a Mac Book Pro 17" compares to a Alien Ware machine which runs just as much if not more.
2. My Mac Book Pro 17" has a excellent video card. My big complaint is it's not replacable like the Alien Ware laptops are but the laptop is also half the weight.
3. DirectX is a easy way for developers to tie into video cards without needing to worry about talking directly to them. OpenGL does the same thing and some say even better but since most developers use Microsoft dev tools they use DirectX.
4. That is the reason developers don't write games for natvie Mac's. It just costs to much money to write a game for a small user base. And with Bootcamp the benifits of a Mac OS native game are not there.
The Mac Book Pro is a excellent laptop even running Windows and compares well to the same priced Windows Laptops. But if you want to play games you will need to run Bootcamp. Desktop wise unless you really want the Mac OS I would stick with a PC. I have a self built gaming PC and a MAC laptop with Bootcamp and I really like them both.
Mainly because game programmers are well aware that putting any artificial intelligence on a Mac is dangerous and games usually have some sort of AI.
If you’ve ever seen Terminator, the Matrix, or iRobot, you would understand that if computers/robots take over, they will be running Mac OS or Linux.
A terminator running MS OS would be fail; eyes would roll over blue with the blue screen of death all the time and they’d have to wait for another Arnold to reboot them. By the time they are back up and running you’d have taken off their hub caps.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
And as we all know by now, should you ever be stranded in an amusement park where cloned dinosaurs run rampant, a solid knowledge of UNIX can save your life!
Yep my kids pc and wife's laptop connect via wireless and it even gives a warning about it not being the best choice , but as you said , the lag/gameplay for them isnt really effected as much it does lag more at times but clears up for them fast so i wouldnt exactly call it awefull, if you have the ability to play them on your own hardware that would be the best thing , but if you dont , onlive is a good substitute. Heck even if he can , 100+ instant games and growing every week for 10$ is still awesome.
The MacBook Pro doesn't go above a Radeon HD 6750M. And that starts at $2200. You can get the same processor with a faster video card for under $900 from HP:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks&series_name=dv6tqe_series&a1=Intel%20processors&v1=Intel%202nd%20gen%20Core
Yes, yes, there's a difference in build quality. But there's also a difference between $2200 and $885.
Even if you want Alienware, the base model M17x has a dramatically faster Radeon HD 6870M for $1500. If you look elsewhere, you could get a much faster Radeon HD 6990M, Core i7-2760QM, a ~120 GB SSD, a Bigfoot Wireless-N 1103, 8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3, a 1080p matte monitor, and a 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Black for less than the $2200 that that MacBook Pro costs. Apple doesn't even offer upgrades to match any of that.
MBPs are not atrocious in their hardware setup, but they are NOT anywhere near as good as what you can get in a PC for that price.
Up to $1499, the Macbook Pros use extremely crappy Intel integrated graphics (in a FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLAR LAPTOP!). At $1799, you get a really sub-par Radeon HD 6490 that wouldn't even outperform a $600 Liano laptop in gaming, and at $2199, the very first machine that's even decent, it's only about as good as a $1000-$1200 PC laptop.
An Alienware M17x-r3, for $1799, comes with the same CPU as the $2199 Macbook Pro, and a video card that's three times as fast. For $1149, you could get this machine from HP. That comes with the same CPU as the $2199 Macbook Pro, a slightly faster video card, a bigger hard drive, twice as much RAM, and throws in a blu-ray drive to the Mac's DVD drive, and it's half as much.
Macbook Pros are not anywhere near as good for the money as PC laptops.
This may not have much to do with whether the OP's iMac can play games or not, but regardless, Apple computer are a terrible value in some of their product line; we shouldn't fool ourselves there.
HUGE difference in build quality and especially customer service. Plus, some folks prefer the user experience, and that's tough to put a price tag on. There's also some software, like Final Cut Pro, that is limited to Macs. Battery life is important to some folks. My sister got a Mac because she was sick of taking her laptop to computer shops for viruses and other problems (she's not a "computer person"). She spent more money maintaining her PC than she spent on her new Mac, and she's had zero problems with it the first year.
All in all, why care about what computer brand someone else uses? It's a personal choice and it's all subjective. Period.
I remember when I was a kid, designer jeans were all the rage. They were basically twice as expensive as a good pair of Levis, but I had to have them so I would be "cool". Unfortunately, they didn't do much to increase my coolness, but it did prove to others that I was a sucker who was good at wasting money on a lame attempt at increasing my self-worth.
But hey, I was an ignorant kid and kids are supposed to do dumb things. Eventually I grew up.
What excuse do Mac cultists have?
The HP I linked advertises considerably superior battery life to the Macbook Pro, so even accounting for differences in measurement (and I believe HP uses a typical battery benchmark with wifi on, so it's accurate enough), at WORST, it has a battery as good.
Build quality is better on the Macbook pro, because they're built by Asus but build quality isn't worth considerably more than double the price. The HP I linked is considerably superior to the $2199 Macbook pro, and probably roughly a wash with the $2499 MBP. HP notebooks do have a higher failure rate, but when I can go out and buy two of the HP for the price of one MBP, and still walk away pocketing cash, clearly it's not that big of a difference.
Customer service with Apple is pretty decent, but $1000 decent? If you use your computer correctly, you should rarely have to deal with customer service to begin with. In fact, if you use it correctly, then you'd only even ever have to deal with Newegg customer service (which is what would cover DoA), and Apple's customer service is not, in my opinion, better than Newegg's. NE has bent over backward, exceeding their own policies' requirements to help me out on more than one occasion. I once bought a video that took a huge price cut only days later, and they threw me the difference in cash just for asking, out of no obligation on their part.
So that leaves the UI, and honestly, UI preference is purely subjective, and Apple's catering to the less computer informed, which is about the only thing I can think of that's worth Apple's 2-3 times markup.
So unless you're remarkably computer ignorant, which is what's required to actually have problems on Windows 7, there's no non-subjective reason to pay Apple two to three times as much for the same machine.
Besides, from a purely "stick it to the man" sort of perspective, I hate the idea of paying Apple 2-3 times what an MBP is worth, especially if it's just because my own computer ignorance lets them put me over a barrel.
You know what that's called on Apple's part? "taking advantage". I'd rather go out and simply educate myself (and I think if it means saving $1000, it's MORE than worth my time to learn the basics of using a computer), than to let Apple take advantage of my own ignorance.
I've been working on Macs professionaly and using PC's privately for ten years now. This is maybe why I hate Apple. Guilt by asociation.
But also their vendor-locking practices are appaling.
Never a bad idea to keep business and fun separated anyway ^_^
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The ironic thing is that Mac users aren't the ones that typically act like cultists. The anti-Mac people are way more obnoxious.
So again, why do you care? I really want to know.
I'm just as happy with my MBP as I am with my custom PC gaming rig. For some tasks I prefer one, and vice versa. I'm sorry if that offends your good senses somehow. LOL. I promise you I won't lose any sleep over it.
Mac should give up the fight already, PC has won the battle, and it's been that way for years. They should stick to making flimsy easy to break electronics that are also sub-par, overpriced, and easy to break when compared to other similar items. I'll admit it. I got an original iPhone when it came out. Spent insane amounts of money. I dropped the thing ONCE on CARPET and the screen busted. My Samsung Galaxy I've dropped multiple times, even on concrete, except for a few chips of the paint, (the pastic under is black, so you can't really see it unless you look close) the thing works perfectly fine. I've also owned a iPod as well. I went jogging one day, the clip came off my beltline and hit the ground...guess what....never worked again...I think this is how mac makes thier money. They overcharge, and hope you break it so you buy another lol. Now i just use my Samsung Galaxy II to listen to music when I jog...(Yes I'm a clumsy guy, I got the scars to prove it lol)
I've got an older macbook that I bought for school. It works well for its intended purpose, but I could have had a pretty bad assed windows based laptop for the same price (at the time I spent 1500$ for my macbook). IMO Mac's are not really capable of, nor should they be used for gaming, but thats my opinion. It's great for surfing the web, doing school work, business work, some minor photo/video/music creation or editing etc. Due to the Macs hardware and software limitations I see gaming on this platform as an exercise in anger and futility.
Over priced, under powered.... Yup it's a mac....
I bought one to see what the deal was, why everyone loved em.... I like it don't get me wrong... but they ARE NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES worth the money. I don't care if you won the damn lottery, paying 2-5x the price of a windows based laptop with equivalent hardware specs, is straight up fucking retarded. Any individual that claims they are worth the money should have some kind of pschological evalutation performed, as they either know nothing about computers, are following the latest trends/media hype, or just riding the bandwagon.
Not built for gaming, if you wish to use it for such... good luck friend.
Main Rig --- i7 920 @ 3.6ghz//6GB Patriot XGS DDR3 1600@1804 mhz CAS9//HAF 932//Corsair HX1000//ASUS P6T Deluxe//2xMSI GTX570 Twin Frozr II SLI//64GB Patriot Torqx SSD// 1TB Seagate HDD
Secondary --- Macbook
Apple have been good innovators, and their main strength is to release innovative products (sometimes based on old concepts) in a clean, polished, plug and play, and easy to understand way - most often pricier than the competition too (competition often lagging behind). They drove the market forward in several occasions.
However, their strategy is also to be control freaks (which certainly helps to the stability of their products) thus the general non compatibility of Apple products with generic products (e.g. iTunes and iPhone/iPod, Mac CPUs, etc.).
Which is why I tend to not buy Apple products, since I am not normally a gadget-addict and a fashion-leader (I'd rather have the generic product, more flexible/tweakable/modifiable/breakable and less user-friendly in a way that is released 6 months after Apple release their product).
I have several Macintoshes. I've gamed on them some, but they do have limitations for gaming that can't be overlooked - mainly the lack of GPU options and upgradeability.
Yes, they have a premium price. Don't buy one if you don't think it's worth it.
Personally, I do think the build quality is worth the premium price. There is something about a finely designed machine that "just works" that I am willing to pay extra for. Even when it's not running anything it looks good sitting on a desk.
Is it a fashion statement? Yes. But the design appeals to me, and I'm willing to pay the premium for it. Could I get more hardware for less money? Yes, but it's not all about hardware - I don't need a whole lot of horsepower to check my email, browse the web, and create a few Word documents or Spreadsheets for work.
I can understand that not everyone agrees with that - to each their own. I do recommend Apple to people who are more or less undecided or agnostic about their computers for two majors reasons:
a) "It just works." And if for some reason it doesn't, you can just go down and walk into the Apple Store, and they will fix it or show you how to make it work. They give free classes, they do one-on-one training, the Apple Store is an amazing resource. They also have several How-To videos on their web site, and the community at large is generally very helpful. You don't really see that with Windows.
b) AppleCare. 3 years of pretty bulletproof warranty coverage. It breaks, for any reason, you can mail it in, have someone come to your home, or just walk it into any AppleStore, and get it fixed. It's the least amount of hassle out of any technical support program that I've ever seen. AppleCare isn't free, but if you ever need to use it, it will more than pay for itself.
So, maybe you are paying for more than just hardware with an Apple: I'm totally fine with that, and I think I get a bargain for my money. But then again, if it weren't for all of those extras (the appealing design, the build quality, the community, the resources, AppleCare), it would be just another PC and not worth the money.
But for gaming, I have a PC. Sure, I'll fire up Warcraft from time to time on my MBP, and I've tried Bootcamp before, but I like to tinker with hardware as a hobby, and there isn't anything like a custom built PC to scratch that itch.
Mac hate is funny some times. First, the 'extreme minority' statements are starting to lose value. Will Macs ever over take PCs? Nope. But A LOT more are being sold, a lot more people are converting and a lot more developers are starting to notice. They are just taking their sweet ass time with it.
Mac is enjoying the 'Halo Effect' from their iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc.. People buy those things like they're the last pieces of food on earth, enjoy what they see, think the computers are largely the same (which they are..) and that's it.. One new Apple computer user created.
As for gaming, for years it has been a technical barrier or DirectX vs Open GL. Now more developers are embracing OpenGL due to its ability to be used on far more platforms than just a Mac or PC. But that's a slow process.
I personal have owned nothing but Macs for the last 5+ years. And I have NEVER had an issue playing any game I ever wanted. I've played every new major MMO release. People can complain about the graphics cards all day long, but many people don't need 9000000 FPS to watch their WoW character run across the screen to consider it playable.
(reference for below, I have a couple year old Mac Pro.)
Sadly, directly installing game clients isn't always an option and to play the latest 'Windows Only' titles you need to think outside of the box a little.
I'm currently playing Rift, in a VM of Windows 7 running in Parallels, full 2560x1600, High Res Render at between medium - high settings. And that is in a Virtual Machine.
LOTRO is even better. I can play same resolution, Ultra everything and maintain 40+ FPS, without Boot Camp. In a VM.
If I actually swap over to Windows w/ Boot Camp, there's nothing that is off limits, but it is usually a pain just because closing down my work and programs is 30 seconds of my life I could spend gaming perfectly fine in OS X.
So, tell me my computer sucks, don't care, tell me how stupid I am as a Mac owner, don't care, tell me how much money I've wasted, I have plenty, don't worry about me. I'm playing games just as well if not better than half the people who post on these forms on my 'silly game-less hardware'!
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