games on mac...

hey guys,

i have white macbook 2.1 ghz santa rosa.....i wanted to know if i can play games on my mac. like on OSX itself. if yes, then can u gimme few names?

 

Not sure if its out yet but Call of Duty 4 is going Mac. Warcraft III has been Mac also.

 

As someone else here says (don't remember who):

"For $10 I'll type something into Google for you and tell you what it says."

 

Haha thats good.
There are many games out for macs. Look on apples site as a starter, EA has made some.

 

gaming on the white macbook? world of warcraft and that about it. lol. older games of course. but for some reason my macbook pro lagged on doom 3 and medium graphics. mac =/= good gaming.

 

Mac OS sucks for games, plain and simple. Believe me, I've wanted very badly to get games to work as well in Mac OS as they do in Windows. It's largely because Apple has a terrible OpenGL implementation. Hell, Vista does a better job at OpenGL than OS X.

I currently own both Mac and Windows versions of Oni, Bloodrayne, Doom 3, and Halo. I also just played the demo of the recently released Penny Arcade game. Only the latter two games run even remotely well on OS X. Switch over to Boot Camped Windows XP and performance is light years better. It's no contest.

And this is on a Macbook Pro. A Macbook with an Intel chipset is going to fare even worse. You want to play any games? Install Windows on your machine. It's the only way to go.

 

I have no problems playing WoW on my MBP, although on the same machine in XP I can gin an extra 10fps. I still OS X because the performance is more than adequate.

You have 2 limiting factors. One is availability. There just aren't many games that are OS X compatible. Two is performance, and just because of OpenGL, but rather the Intel GMA the MacBook has. Windows or OS X, integrated graphics won't perform well in most games.

 

There are some mac games that are very fun but not graphics intensive. Here are a few that i like.

-Quinn (fun tetris game)
-Armagetron Advanced
-DoomLegacy
-Gate 88 (one of my favorites)
-Marathon 2
-Marathon infinity

Some very very fun physics engine games
-Phun physics
-OE-Cake

Feel free to ask me if you can't find a game. But you should be able to find most of them with google.

 

What a ripoff! I charge only $4.99.

If it's an older game, and you want to run through windows, the IGP should be fine. Case in point, I successfully ran Klingon Academy in vista with a GMA x3000 (desktop), and it ran great even at 1024x768. Although it's a really old game, it was very demanding for it's time (circa 2000).

 

the GPU are downclocked by Apple in Leopard, so if you want to game, do it in bootcamp/windows.

 

when is COD 4 coming to mac, i originally heard may then i heard about a delay until summer?

 

Even the intel GMA?

 

probably not for GMA, it's not hot nor powerful.

 

What, now there's competitor pricing? Gah!

Really!?! I had no idea about this. Not that I'd game on Leopard anyways but this is something I didn't know. Neat factoid, thanks.

 

I think only the 8600's are downclocked to prevent overheating. But you can change the clock speed in windows and with a laptop cooling pad you should be fine.

 

Last time I looked, almost all notebooks downclock their GPU's at least a little. Perhaps things have changed in the last few months, but I don't believe so. Apple does tend to downclock a bit more than others though.

 

Apple downclock much more than other notebook manufactures on MBP; for example, my X1600 has 313/300 in leopard but over 430/430 in windows.

 

Em. Pretty much the only GPU that Apple has used on Intel Macs that has been significantly overclocked is the X1600 and even then that was only in iMacs and first-gen MBPs. The 2nd Gen Core 2 Duo MBP like what I have, dynamically clocks the X1600 up to 423MHz core/450MHz memory under load in both OS X and Windows. Dynamic clocking is a video BIOS feature so it shouldn't matter what OS you are using.

The 8600M GT in the MBP is also clocked perfectly reasonably at 470MHz core/635MHz memory for the 15.4" MBP. The official specs from nVidia are 475MHz core/ 400MHz for DDR2 or 700MHz GDDR3 so the 15.4" MBP in line. The 17" MBP is actually overclocked on the core at 520MHz under load, which people don't seem to point out.

The HD Radeon 2600 Pro used in the iMacs is actually a Mobility Radeon 2600XT clocked at 600MHz core and 685MHz memory making it equivalent to the PC desktop HD 2600 Pro clocked at 550MHz core and 700MHz memory. Similarly, the 8800GS in the iMac is actually a fully clocked 8800M GTS.

I really don't think Apple downclocks GPUs that much anymore, the first-gen X1600 models were probably the only ones due to heat issues, and seeing how hot my friend's 17" Core Duo MBP was, I think it was justified.

 

ltcommander_data I have the 2nd gen of MBP, 2.33ghz, 256MB x1600

 

Yes, the 2nd Gen 15.4" MBP with X1600 should dynamically clock based on load.

http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html

The 17" MBPs with X1600 have always dynamically clocked, even the original Core Duo model. Only the first-gen 15.4" MBP with X1600 didn't dynamically clock and remained underclocked even under load.

And trying it myself I can verify that it is indeed true.
Normal on my 128MB X1600:


Load:

 

I know what is dynamically clocking, however, 313/300 was what I got in game.

 

That's strange then. I took my readings by running Homeworld 2 in windowed mode, and let it run for a minute to make sure the GPU has time to detect the change in load and act accordingly. I just apple+tab to Graphiccelerator and go to Show ATI Frequencies under Misc and took the picture in my last post. I had to let the game run for a bit since it doesn't upclock immediately. It's strange that you aren't detecting any change.

 

it doesn't matter anymore since I bought a new laptop already. glad to see apple fixed this issue.