Thread: Are macs good for gaming?

Hi I was wondering if Macs are good for playing computer games? My friends said that they arn't but I was hoping someone here play MMO's on a mac and could tell me if they have any problems.

Only if it is World of Warcraft.

I want to close with a comment on why Apple's culture is so mixed on the subject of games. I think it's a recognition by Apple's management that this is a fact of life for most of its younger employees. But amongst many more senior managers, including Steve himself, I suspect there is some lingering concern about the essence of the game market. Computer games, as we've come to know them, are mostly (not always) about aggressive behavior, conflict, battle, wars of power, domination, and sometimes, in the worst cases, some very unwelcome social behavior. To put it bluntly, death and destruction.

Apple's public culture appears to celebrate, on the other hand, creation and life. When you have several hundred senior managers at Apple who are most likely married and typically have children, you'll find a culture of affirmation, family, and life. There have been many instances of Steve doing a keynote and demoing, say, iMovie, in which children are involved. More than once, I heard Steve say, after editing one of those movies on stage, "This is why we do what we do."

http://www.macobserver.com/columns/h...20060605.shtml

Macs are about LIFE!

Hah...

No, they are not as good as PC's in playing video games.

If you can get yours to emulate XP, sure they can hold their ground a bit.

Not really. If you want loads of games don't use one. If you only want it for MMO's only... maybe.

Oh, ok I was just wondering because my school is releasing our macs to us in January. I have only used a mac at school so I didn't really know how they worked with games.

No, or at least not yet. Even then I suspect they will always be inferior to PCs.

My friend used a program called bootcamp or somthing to run xp on it, that really is about it.

You could play almost every game, but don't expect great results

The number of games which you can play on a Mac (parallels and boot camp excluded) is much lower than on PC. If you get one of the desktops and run parallels or boot camp though, then you're completely set for a good gaming experience. The laptops lag a bit more on some games unless you upgrade the RAM though. That's especially for a Power PC based one (the old Macs).

It also depends on the games you like to play. The whole FPS thing with insane graphics may need to have some of the graphics turned down unless you're on a MacPro desktop, but otherwise they're fine. Hey, I can get 4 connected players on open source Saurbraten (screwed up the spelling there) at 45 fps on my school's sucky internet on an old but upgraded PPC iBook G4. :]