Sitting on my great Mac Pro in the sky sometimes I forget that mortals use lesser machines. Some have (gasp) integrated graphics. Most can’t be upgraded.
My guess is that most people use MacBooks and iMacs - probably the mid-range ones. At the higher end of the iMac range you could quite easily buy a Mac Pro instead. I find that a bit weird. The choice is easy for me (Mac Pro), is it easy for you?
I’m on a mission to find out what Macs Mac gamers user. What Mac do you use for gaming and why?
I use a Mac Pro for my gaming with the ‘excuse’ that I need it for my photography
Sadly there aren’t that many games to play in OS X, so I find myself booting into Boot Camp to play Some Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead. If only Gabe would listen to my pleas for Vavle to port it to the Mac (I keep telling him.. I have a cheque with his name on it if he would only do it).
Haha, I’ve emailed him too!
Valve games are sure needed on the platform. More importantly, Steam is needed! The App Store for Macs!
I use a 2.8 ghz iMac with ATI HD2600 256mb and 2gb RAM and it’s just starting to show it’s age. It runs the mac versions of BF2142 and C&C3 well, as well as WoW, but when I recently installed GTA IV on Windows (through boot camp) I had to set it down to painfully low graphics settings to play at all. When I got it at the end of 2007, this iMac was pretty much top of the line and cost $3300 NZD, and looking at the Apple Store now a Mac Pro is $5600 so the difference is there for sure, especially when you factor in a monitor. My solution? I just got a PS3 Slim and have pretty much decided to just use that for gaming exclusively while using the iMac for normal tasks. I will of course have to play Diablo 3 when it comes out, and knowing Blizzard, it will run.
Black MacBook, 2.2MHz, last of the ‘Santa Rosa’ CPUs, X3100 graphics. Before I bought it (I had to because some evil Trekkie stole my 12″ G4 iBook. Long strange story there…) I was warned by benchmark web page reviews how bad the integrated graphics were. However, forum postings by those who actually used the integrated graphics claimed that this could be overcome by lots of RAM. So the first thing I did was max it out to 4GBs. So far so good. I do a lot of classic emulation (arcade, IIe, Atari 8bit & ST, DOS, Nintendo, Sega etc.), strategy gaming, and puzzle games. So no, nothing ‘hard core’. The closest I come to that is Unreal Tournament ‘99 and Quake Live. The only other heavy lifting I do is remote into my work XP box by VPN.
iMac, late ‘07 model. Sadly can’t upgrade the video card in this, but the Radeon HD2600 is good enough to run most games I care to in Boot Camp. Definitely wish there were more games for Mac OS X, and especially at more reasonable prices for what are usually old ports…
I really could use a Mac Pro for the other things I do in life (not playing games), but I prefer the all in one convenience and look of the iMac.I just recently upgraded to a 2009 iMac with the upgraded (took forever) ATi 4850. Right now it performs impressively well, but like my iMacs before it, I know that won’t last long.
WoW on my MB Pro 15′ model 2008.
And Need for Speed Undercover on my iPhone3G.
I use my latest MacBook Pro 17″ Unibody, 2.8Ghz, 4gb DDR3 RAM all that jazz (and I didn’t get that click with the HD everyone was complaining about o.O, but that’s fixed now so I’m sure it’s gone forever!). I play CoD4 for Mac, and it’s awesome, however I do realise that it runs better under Windows 7 via Boot Camp due to the ports from Direct X to OpenGL. I also have the Sims 3 played once and hated it… ran great, but I suppose I am just not into it as much as I was. But I mainly bought my Mac One) Because of OS X and Two) I do a lot of graphics ranging from 3D to film, the Mac is perfect for it.
Overall I would use Boot Camp for the majority of gaming because, I hate to admit it but games just run better under Windows. We need to make an alliance to get companies to make TRUE games for OS X not just ports!
With that I hope that game developers see the potential with OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, 64bit and the potential of OpenGL. The Mac community is reaching 100 million faster than ever, that is a fair amount of profit that the developers could be making.
It happened with the iPhone and iPod touch, it can happen with the Mac OS
Oh, and I noticed no increase in performance between Windows XP and Windows 7, all that stuff is just hype (personal opinion).
I use a playstation 3, as Macs just basically suck at gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never go back to Windows, but for gaming the Mac just doesn’t cut it. It’s basically the lack of new titles and the horrible job that f.e. Aspyr does porting them. I have had issue’s with every port they did.
Anyway, let’s hope that the iPhone as a gaming platform will persuade developers to develop for the Mac, but untill then, my PS3 does the job. (and it does it well if I may add…)
We use a maxQ - 3.8 ghz quad core, 8gb of memory with a 1 gig video card 250gts - yup running Mac OS X - woot!
I used to play with my Macbook Pro 15″ (early 2008) with a NVidia GeForce 8600m GT 512 Mb. It was a good gaming machine, but that video card failed, like most 8600m GT will probably do and the logic board had to be replaced. (Now I am trying to get rid of that machine at all costs).
Today I am using a GeForce 9600m GT 256 Mb from a unibody Macbook Pro 15″ (2.66 Ghz). I just hope it does not have the same problem as its earlier cousin. I couldn’t afford the higher 512 Mb model.
I usually play Spore, Rise of Nations, OpenTTD and Simcity 4.
Mac Pro 2,8 with 8800GT. Because I want to play Crysis
The iMac is nice but you can’t play the latest games at high settings. You can also change the graphics card on the Mac Pro. I play almost entirely on Boot Camp. Mac games are hard to find in Greece (Except for the Sims…)
Macbook Pro, 2.4GHZ dual core with 4GB ram and the 256MB video card.
It works well for Mac games, tried using VMWare for playing games in Vista, but VMWare runs far too slow.
Here’s waiting for Diablo III.
‘08 Mac Pro - quad 2.8 with 8800GT. The only games I play on it are WoW and CoD4. I keep a Windows PC fairly up to date as well, that has better specs, but I can’t be bothered to power it up most of the time unless a big PC-only title is released.
I do not do gaming too much and for most games that interests me my mac mini intel core solo works well. Of course I would enyoj 3D shooters and racing games but I can skipp them. I would sit in front of comp too much.
And it would be much better when artickle woudl contain a pool on what people use mac for (buyed for) and when for gaming whitch one. commnts are too long to read.
Mac Pro 8-core 3.0 GHz, Radeon 4870, 12 GB RAM, Cinema 30″. Used only for WoW. No Windows on the machine.
Mac Pro 2xdual3Ghz ATI X1900, work mac, gaming secundary, on Mac (Civilization 4), mostly PC boot camp
Mac Mini dual2GHz NVIDIA GeForce 9400, multimedia mac for on the tv, gaming PC boot camp
Not that I actually game a lot (too busy with a baby and work), but the gaming I do, I do on my Core i7 Hackintosh with GeForce 9800 GTX+. It’s pretty decent
Right now I only play Heroes of Newerth though, which isn’t exactly the most demanding game in the world.
Macpro 1,1 2,66 with 8800GT for Crysis
Macmini normally for everything and multimedia.. with my 37″ 1080tv…
and then some easy game… even try with call of duty 5 in bootcamp
9400 is not so bad… but is not enough for Fall out 2 (mac version) is a pity!
Mac Pro 1.1 2.66 with flashed and overclocked ATI 4890.
WoW in OSX and BF2142 / Prototype in Windows atm.
Unibody MacBook Pro: 2.66 GHz Intel C2D w/4 GB RAM.
I mostly play World of Warcraft and Wikipedia in OS X; mayhap Boot Camp into Vista come next year when Star Trek: Online comes out.
On the other hand, I might give the “bottling” program this website uses in their “Does it Play on a Mac?” series: http://technochubby.com/category/does-it-play-on-a-mac/
This is a great thread! I feel like a luddite to still be using my G5 PowerMac Dualcore 2.3 with the 23″ Cinema Display as my primary computer, but I’m bound and determined to get 4 full years of solid use out of it. (That day is coming very soon!)It still runs Neverwinter Nights and Aquaria real well, but in the last few months I find myself more and more playing Civilization Revolution, first on the XBox 360 with the Vizio 42″ plasma and now on my iPhone. Reading this thread I am surprised how many of us are gaming in Boot Camp. I’m not sure how to feel about the trend away from Mac OS gaming, but “It is what it is!”
I have a unibody Macbook 2.0 GHz, I play CoD 4 & Spore on the mac side of things and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Shadow of Chornobyl and Clear Sky), Cossacks, UT3, TF2 & Counter Strike on Windows.
Other than my MB I have a PSP (I play GTA on it) and an iPhone (Modern Combat, Real Racing, Gangstar, NFS)
Well, all this makes me feel sad somehow. Why we can have a cpu that we could change the video card? please. I use a Mac Pro after using for some time an iMac and still have to buy a really video card to play fair.
I use an older iMac with a 1.83GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 (128MB of VRAM).
Macpro 1,1 2,66 with 8800GT for Crysis
Macmini normally for everything and multimedia.. with my 37″ 1080tv…
and then some easy gane… even try with call of duty 5 in bootcamp
9300 is not so bad… but is not enough for Fall out 2 (mac version) is a pity!;
I have always owned a PC. I am currently considering buying a Mac. I still want to use this Mac for playing games like Day of Defeat, Battlefield, Diablo, Warcraft, etc. - online. Does anyone have any advice for a “Mac-Virgin” on what I should look for in a Mac-System that will support online gaming?
UK or US? New or pre-owned?
HoN > Dota, lol. I am a big time DotA player, too. But for all the stuff that DoTA doesnt have HoN has and improves.. love HoN..
Would you mind if I quote a paragraph or two from your post? I’m finishing up a paper for school. Thanks a lot!