Thread: From Mac to PC
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Luca
ಠ_ರೃ
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2004-10-04, 15:00

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chinney
On a more serious note, I posed a question once, in another thread, about the degree to which this gaming performance issue is largely a matter of poor gaming software ports to the Mac OS vs. an inherent issue of current Apple hardware's ability to handle gaming. The question was not really followed up by anyone. Any thoughts?
It's almost certainly the software. If you were to compare an Athlon XP1700+ (1.47 GHz) to a 1.47 GHz G4, and they had equal video cards, RAM, hard drives, and so on, the PC would still kill the Mac. The problem is that almost all Mac games are ports, and ports never run as well as they do on their native platform.

There are a few game companies, like Bungie and Blizzard, that develop Mac versions in-house. Those are generally the best-performing Mac games you can get. But most games are ported by Aspyr, and not to knock those guys too hard, but I'd say over half of them are poorly done. Actually I think Aspyr is just the publisher of the Mac version, and they hire subcontracters to actually write the ported game.

Anyway, you'll see games published by Aspyr that cost twice as much as the PC version, because they're charging launch prices for the Mac version when the PC version is down to $20 or $30. Sadly, it's the only way they can make money. They also have to wait a while to even determine if it'll be worth it to port a game, and once they decide they will, the porting house is on a tight schedule to release the game in a timely fashion. Personally, I'd prefer fewer games to be ported each year, but that those games are of higher quality, but I guess I don't have much say in the matter.

So I decided to solve the problem by just not getting involved with it. I ditched the Mac for gaming and got a PC instead. Now I can play all sorts of games, and they run well.
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