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."

Re:Hmm

[allenw]

That's an easy one: travel.

It's greating being able to pop open a laptop in the airport, on the plane, etc, and have a nice relaxing game of whatever. Especially when you are stuck in some hick town with no social scene at all. If I have to take my laptop anyway, I might as well get some use out of it other than doing a presentation or whatever.

[My biggest complaint are the games that require the CD/DVD to be present when they don't actually pull anything off of the media or require it for the audio track that I turned off anyway. Sure, there are lots of tools to get around this, but it is still annoying to have to do those extra steps.]

I understand that running Windows on a Mac ...

[kikensei]

is a new idea, but I don't get the hubbub. Once Apple switched to Intel, they began churning out typical x86 PC's. Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs? This seems to be much ado about nothing. It's great that the Apple computers have the secret DRM chip that allows for OS X x8 to be installed, the dual boot option may make this a great option for for some folks. But to bench them and remark with wonder about the results compared to any of a bijillion other Intel hardware based Windows PC's seems odd.

...and that's with an underclocked GPU

[frankie]

If you pump up the clock [google.com] with ATITool, frame rates jump 30-50% (at the cost of your Mac being unseemly noisy and warm).

Now you just need some blue neon - and maybe a carbon fiber spoiler on top - to give your iMac that Real Ultimate (gaming) Power! (tm)

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Re:Sucky Resolution Support

[Babbster]

A friend and I were talking about this very issue recently. While I tend to agree that PC games should be entirely flexible in terms of resolution (since there are far too many display options and aspect ratios available), I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game. For example, if a game is supposed to surprise you by attacking from behind, it can't really have a third-person viewpoint available. The same could be true in a 4:3 versus 16:9/16:10 situation in that the level/game designer might want to constrain the viewpoint to 4:3 in order to cause a sense of claustrophobia while enemies are off to the sides just out of vision.

In a similar vein, I could see where some people operating with their 17" 4:3 screen in a multiplayer "twitch" environment could be upset that their opponent is getting a much wider view on their 23" 16:10 screen. Then again, that kind of issue has been in play for a while now with the potentially large disparity between video cards/monitors and their available resolutions (i.e., someone at 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is going to be able to see better than someone at 800x600 on a 15" screen.).

Of course, if the only reason a developer puts limitations on resolution is because of bad programming, then that's no kind of excuse. :)

Re:I understand that running Windows on a Mac ...

[NutscrapeSucks]

There's been the argument that Apple is slacking on its OpenGL drivers. So, this is interesting in the very least because people can perform direct A/B tests.

Re:Not a hardware issue?

[aristotle-dude]

They are there. Those are options in the drivers for ATI cards at least. The difference betwen Windows and OS X is that that latter offers control for such features outside of the driver.

Re:Not a hardware issue?

[snuf23]

Sure. Like Apple doesn't work with ATI or Nvidia on any of it's drivers.
Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.
And I really wish you would tell the Mac users at my office that I support that it "just works" because they call me for support when it "just isn't working".
I use and work with OS X. It's a decent OS but it has it's problems and this bullshit "it just works" crap is getting seriously tired. It's like that "insanely great" crap all over again.

Re:Not a hardware issue?

[snuf23]

"It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not)."

So let me get this straight - it's the OS's responsibility to tell the underlying hardware what features it has? Even though the hardware may or may not support the feature? I be to differ. The driver on Windows exposes the hardware capabilities of the device to the operating system. So you don't have a situation where you have Windows attempting to force a 10 year old VGA card to do widescreen. You'd never have this problem on a Mac because you don't have to worry about old hardware. It's very easy for Apple to have the OS contain all of the information about any hardware it might need to run - after all Apple controls exactly that. ."For most hardware, you just plug it in and "it just works"."

I would change that to "for some hardware you just plug in and it just works most of the time except for when it doesn't".
Let me tell you a story about the Editorial department at a magazine a work for. We recently moved them up to OS X and guess what? All their digital voice recorders (USB devices) stopped working. Apparently there is no OS X support for them. And they are only about a year old. Wheee. It just didn't work and just hasn't worked and the staff has to just go out and buy new ones that do.
Or the staff member that was taking pictures on their digital camera and tried to move it to the Production Macintosh. Oops, no Mac support for that camera. It just didn't work. Had to plug it into a PC to extract the photos. Now by my analysis the camera manufacturer would be to blame, but by your's it's obviously the fault of Apple since the OS should handle this automagically! After all it "just works" with other cameras why doesn't it "just work" with this one? Of course the Production camera's work because we bought them specifically to be Mac compatible, but really shouldn't the OS support any camera by your logic?
Or maybe you can explain to my friend who ran a recent Apple update after which his wireless card no longer works? Would that be "just used to work"?

Do you realize how abysmally ignorant you sound spouting a marketing catch phrase over and over again? Do you work with Macs? I have 40 of them onsite here and have seen them screw the pooch often enough to realize that although the OS is good it has it's problems. It does not always "just work" and sometimes fixing the problem is far from trivial. Try dealing with font management on OS X in a print production environment. Holy shit I have I seen some weirdness.
It's impossible to have a reasonable conversation about OS X or Macs in general because of this whole starry eyed "it just works" oh thanks my savior Jobs viewpoint.
I've used Macs professionally for 16 years and am well versed in the good and bad points. Stop drooling on your MacBook and acting like an Apple marketing programmed robot.