PC Games Go To Boot Camp

1up has taken several of the more popular recent PC titles to Apple Boot Camp, and report back on how they handle the MacBook Pro hardware. From the article: "With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen. Annoyingly, F.E.A.R. offers a really pitiful selection of resolutions, all of which are constrained to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio -- meaning that play on the MacBook's widescreen is stretched, and kind of ugly. That's not a hardware issue so much as limited programming, and presumably anyone with a widescreen PC is in the same pickle."

Hmm

[NIK282000]

Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop. With the screen and keyboard so close together thats a back problem waitign together. I would like to see how the mac desktops size up adainst say a dell or HP desktop.

Re:Kind of offtopic...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?

Imagine a gamer with a great video card and monitor. With the better resolution and size he can make out objects that are further away. Shouldn't all games be restricted to 640x480 and at a certain size on the screen, otherwise some characters can see further and in better detail than others. Some people might have two monitors allowing them to reference a map, IM with other players, or view cheats at the same time as the game. Games need to detect and turn off multiple monitors. Also, some gamers use joysticks and trackball setups that allow them to click buttons faster. Games should only support standard keyboards and mice; lest some characters have better reaction times than others.

You could argue this for all sorts of hardware, but it does not really matter. People who spend more on the best hardware and connection will gain some slight advantage. That's life. In any case failing to deal with widescreen monitors and distorting the picture is pathetic. I thought all games checked for this and at worst put some black bars on the right and left, like the ones at the top and bottom for widescreen movies on a standard TV.

Re:Sucky Resolution Support

[Onan]

Well, even beyond that, why would you possibly use a hard-coded list of specific resolutions, however long?

As soon as you support more than one resolution, you (or your libraries) already need to handle scaling and talking about your polygons in portion-of-display units rather than number-of-pixels units. That work is already done, so why limit yourself to any number of specific resolutions, rather than just scaling to whatever pixel count and aspect ratio the display happens to have?

Do you really think that you can predict now the specs of every display that any person is ever going to use to run your game at any time in the future? This is nearly as absurd as people who chain their website design to absolute numbers of pixels.

OS X gaming largely unaffected...

[Faust7]

All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.

So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.

Re:Sucky Resolution Support

[n8_f]

I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game.

If that were the case, then they would leave the resolution set to what it is (preferably native, but that is the user's choice) and just use a 4:3 chunk in the middle. Instead, they change resolution to their 4:3, non-native one and leave the screen looking like crap. If they cared about the quality of the experience, they've just ruined it far more than allowing a widescreen view would have. There have been widescreen monitors now for over half a decade. At this point, it is just lazy programming.

Re:Not a hardware issue?

[node 3]

Weird, I never had trouble with 4:3 resolutions on my 8:5 HP f2105 monitor, I find it odd that Apple failed to include options such as the following on their wonderful hardware:

Notebooks don't have on screen displays for LCD settings.

But ignoring that, Apple's hardware and OS properly support their displays, making the OSD controls you mention unnecessary.

In other words, you're asking why Apple doesn't have kludgey workarounds for a problem that doesn't exist on the Mac. It's not Apple's fault for not including unnecessary hacks, it's Windows'/F.E.A.R.'s fault that they need them.

In case you're wondering, this is what Mac users mean by "it just works". Why should a person have to worry about something the computer is fully capable of correctly doing itself?

Re:OS X gaming largely unaffected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe, Microsoft etc. aren't going anywhere. Pro OS X users aren't going to stand for being forced to boot into Windows to do their day-to-day work, and developers would be more likely to lose a large base of paying customers if they were to do so. Mac users are a vocal minority (and some might argue trend-setting), and for Photoshop or Office to drop out would leave a gaping hole for someone else to fill, which would threaten their position as the "standard" application of their field. Look at the damage Quark did to itself by shrugging their shoulders at OS X, they let Indesign walk in and take a huge chunk of, if not take over completely a field they once completely dominated.

Also... Apple's been on a development tear themselves lately, and if a critical application does drop out they may fill the gap themselves.

Games, that may be a lost cause, but they were never really there to begin with (and I can't see MacPlay or Aspyr going down without a fight.) The biggest danger is losing "boutique" apps, but for the most part these were never ported to begin with.

The benchmark I want to see.....

[Slashcrap]

These benchmarks of Windows games running on XP on an Intel Mac are all very interesting - I mean who would have thought that a standard Intel laptop with an Apple logo on it would have performance roughly equivalent to a standard Intel laptop without an Apple logo on it?

But so far no-one seems to have gotten around to benchmarking the Intel Mac running a cross platform game under both Windows and OSX.

I just don't understand that. Is it possible that OSX would score too highly and the Apple crowd don't want to embarass the Windows users? That's got to be it.