Considering Macs are more about work, and less about games, as people have said for years, is this really surprising?

Want to play games? Buy an XBox. Or a Wii, if you're bold and daring to buck the trends.

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Tiger wrote:
Considering Macs are more about work, and less about games, as people have said for years, is this really surprising?

Want to play games? Buy an XBox. Or a Wii, if you're bold and daring to buck the trends.

I intend to buy a Wii if the games are interesting enough. I see the controllers as the way all games should be played.

Vern Seward

Look, i want to work AND play and not have to pull out a different machine for each task.

And if you think Wii is bold and daring ... as in.. I should be fearful of it, you definitely weren't at E3, nor have you been chatting to gamers in Japan. The Wii is the most anticipated platform right now becuase it *is* bold and daring. The controller rocks in so many different ways it's unbelievable.

Everything else is just a repeat of everything around it, especially something like the xBox. Can you say "upgrade", not "new idea"?

funny this article doesn't menttion how this company ran the test. how much ram and so forth the computer had. i have a mac mini core solo and gameplay on there is fine for me. i played star wars battlefront and command and conqure generals and both faired well. if you really want good performance from the graphics you need more ram. this company must have used the stock 512 stick with 1 gb it is much much faster.

Geez, come on... is it any surprise that *some* mac users also want to play games <gasp> on their macs?

Saying "macs are for work only" is such an elitist comment, I don't know where to begin. For starters, I'm a product designer and my first mac was a Macintosh IIci -- now I have a G5 at home, MacBook pro and G5/30in at work, wife has an ibook which is her 3rd gen of mac, and we have a mini for guests to casually surf on.

I've gamed on the mac since Crystal Quest on a monochrome classic BUT! I also own an xbox360 and play very comfortably on a 50" wall-mounted plasma. Gaming is unfortunately here to stay -- it's a form of entertainment comparable to movies nowadays. There are many users who choose to enjoy it and to the extent it can be centered on one or two devices instead of multiple platforms, all the better.

If you choose to characterize macs exclusively as "work machines" you put them in the realm of specific-use devices similar to an Avid or Media100 video editing system - which appeal to a limited market. What do we define as work here anyway? I do plenty of sketching on my mac... is that "work" vs. "play"? The answer is the same for me as it is for the bigger question of mac gaming: it makes money and I love to do it.

However, measuring the frame-rate of the hot new game on a certain level doesn't do me nearly as much good as knowing how well the machine will perform on real world tasks, including the use of multiple applications and files that are resource intensive. Playing games is a fine persuit, but I think many spend far too much time arguing about frame-rates rather than a machine's ability to be agile while under certain pressures.

Since I've been using consumer-level machines for the past 5 years, I've all but given up on 3D gaming. But still, I would have expected these games to at least be playable on any brand-new system. 8-11 FPS is not playable. Bummer.

But then again, anyone who expected the switch to Intel to magically change the world of Mac gaming had a great misunderstanding of the situation. I guess the bottom line is that MacBook > iBook, and MacBook Pro > PowerBook. Doesn't look so bad when you look at it that way.

Because Mac hardware sucks for gaming, it's "okay" that we don't get as many games. Because we don't get as many games, it's "okay" that Mac hardware sucks for gaming. Do you see the problem here? Apple needs to end this cycle. Remember when they were serious about attracting gamers and game developers? No? Well, I can't blame you. It only lasted a few hours.

A good first step would be to allow GPU upgrades! And I mean in all their systems. Or at least make a new line that's cheap AND upgradeable. The last time we saw one of those in the Mac world was the mid-90s!

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Guest wrote:
funny this article doesn't menttion how this company ran the test. how much ram and so forth the computer had.

Check the links to the Bare Feats pages. All the systems had 2GB of RAM.

I wish they said which games were Intel-native, though. They tested four games: Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2004, and World of Warcraft. I don't think all of those are universal binaries yet. Does anyone know for sure?

Wow, great quote!! Hmm, I wonder if Apple will pick it up and put a link up on http://apple.com/hotnews?

Sorry, the forum seems to have cut off the title...

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Mikuro wrote:
I wish they said which games were Intel-native, though. They tested four games: Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2004, and World of Warcraft. I don't think all of those are universal binaries yet. Does anyone know for sure?

I think coaten has done Unreal Tournament in UB mode, but I'm sure he'll put me right if I've misremembered. However I can confirm, most happily, that WoW runs fine (in fact much better) as a universal binary.

It really irks me when people so cavalierly tell other to buy such and such console if you want to play games, as if "games" was a monolith. NONE of the games benchmarked are available on CONSOLES!!! Another thing, you don't have to be a so called "HARD-CORE" gamer to want to play 3-D games once in a while. The new MacBooks took a giant leap backwards in one CRUCIAL (imho) area. I'm sure the next cavalier remark will be, "well, then don't buy one!" Yeah. Thanks. You are right, I won't buy one, and I am by far not the only one who won't. Apple has lost many sales to PCs with the decision to use intel graphics.

Did any of these games play well on the iBook G4? You should be comparing the MacBook to the iBook, not the MacBook Pro that costs almost twice as much.

I find it interesting that people seem to have glossed over a significant item here and instead turned to talking about console systems. My comment to those talking consoles is go to the proper forum. As for these Bare Feats tests, there are two interesting things here.

First of all, the G5, which should be slower than the intel core duo systems according to apple, was faster. While the immediate question would then be universal binary vs emulation, the test was done with Apple's own software, which sure as rain should be optimised for the platform. So the question is, has the intel chip fallen short in performance, or has apple not optimised all of it's bundled applications?

Second, why was the G5 not tested in the games test? If we're doing some hard comparisons here of current mac systems and their processing and graphics abilities, why leave out the G5 in this set of tests? My curiosity now is, would the G5 also have beat out all the intel systems in this arena? I don't know if the games tested were universal or running in emulation, and certainly that would be a point for ponderance, but to leave out the G5 in these tests was irresponsible.

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Guest wrote:
First of all, the G5, which should be slower than the intel core duo systems according to apple, was faster. While the immediate question would then be universal binary vs emulation, the test was done with Apple's own software, which sure as rain should be optimised for the platform. So the question is, has the intel chip fallen short in performance, or has apple not optimised all of it's bundled applications?

Apple has never directly compared any of their Intel machines to the Power Mac G5. They compared the new iMac to the old iMac, but keep in mind that the old iMac was NOT as fast a Power Mac G5. It only had one processor (with only one core).

Also, as far as I know, Apple didn't offer any real-world performance comparisons of the Intel vs G5 iMacs. They offered SpecMark scores, which are...well, only useful for marketing, really. Always take a company's own benchmarks with a grain of salt; they'll obviously be putting their best foot forward.

Multimedia, which is where the G5 beat the Intel machines in these tests, has always been the PPC's strong point. It's no surprise that it still dominates in that area. If it didn't, Apple would probably already be offering Intel-based pro towers. Wait until July or August, when Intel's desktop-level Conroe chip comes out. That should be the true successor to the G5 in Macs.

That said, there have been real-world tests where the Intel machines do in fact beat out dual G5 towers, by significant margins. But these are for things like compiling applications in Xcode, not manipulating multimedia. And I'm not sure how much they have to do with the processor and how much they have to do with other things, like RAM.

Bottom line: The G5 is not the dog people like to pretend it is. It's always been an incredible chip. If all Apple made were pro systems, they probably wouldn't have even switched to Intel. The G4 was the weak link of their line, not the G5.

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other Guest wrote:
Another thing, you don't have to be a so called "HARD-CORE" gamer to want to play 3-D games once in a while. The new MacBooks took a giant leap backwards in one CRUCIAL (imho) area.

From what I've heard, the integrated graphics in the MacBooks still beats out the ATI card that was in the old iBooks. Sure, the integrated graphics sucks by today's standards, but I'm not sure you can really say they took a step back. The old iBooks didn't even support Core Image!

Aside from that, though, I agree completely with everything you said. Again, I think Apple needs to offer some options and upgradability in this area.

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Guest wrote:
Second, why was the G5 not tested in the games test? If we're doing some hard comparisons here of current mac systems and their processing and graphics abilities, why leave out the G5 in this set of tests?

They have some other gaming tests that compare Intel Macs to PM G5s. See http://barefeats.com/kak4.html and http://barefeats.com/imcd2.html

G5 Tower, and shut the F*#k UP!
Or SUFFER the fool;)

Low-end Macs aren't very well suited for gaming?

Neither are low-end PCs. Or even mid-range PCs. Not from manufactures like Dell or Compaq.

So what's the problem? It's not like PCs have a leg-up, or anything.

Ok, shared video memory tested for game performance? who thought this one up?