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Benchmarks: Direct X (Windows) vs. Open GL (Mac)

-BigMac-

-BigMac-

macrumors demi-god
Original poster
Apr 15, 2011
2,478
2,805
Melbourne, Australia
Hi guys.

I'm curious to know how much performance (in games especially) varies between Bootcamp and their Mac counterparts.

If you have a game on windows and also on your mac partition, could you please post the FPS of each one below.

I suspect the Direct X will perform better, but want to know just how much of a drop to expect if i move all my games from windows versions, to mac versions.

This question should apply to a lot of people.

Thanks a lot :D
 
throAU

throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
8,817
6,985
Perth, Western Australia
This is a bit of a moving target, and OS X video performance has been improving significantly as of late.

I haven't done benchmarks, but as a casual gamer, my MBP2011 with 1gb 6750 is "good enough" to not bother with dual boot for me.
 
dusk007

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
Here is a not too old thread about it.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1710069.html

It seems still quite crappy. Last time I gave it a shot bugginess and poor performance put me of. Even on equal settings the DirectX version looks slightly better and is much faster. Civilizations V was and still is imo unplayable on my MBP, while it works just fine in Windows on mid settings. But not just that it crashed my system so often it got unhealthy.
Even if speed and quality would be good enough I still don't like my mouse under OSX. The Logitech Windows drivers seem to somehow make it more 1st person shooter worth. With a good framerate in OSX with low enough settings it still doesn't feel good enough. Not really an issue for strategy games but they just were too buggy.

If you buy games on steam you can install them on both platforms if they are available. You don't have to buy them twice all you need is the space to install them. Just try it out. I guess some games might be quite okay already. I don't hear many complaints about Starcraft or Diablo. The big ones are more likely to have the ressources to deliver a proper OpenGL port.
 
-BigMac-

-BigMac-

macrumors demi-god
Original poster
Apr 15, 2011
2,478
2,805
Melbourne, Australia
dusk007 said:
Here is a not too old thread about it.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1710069.html

It seems still quite crappy. Last time I gave it a shot bugginess and poor performance put me of. Even on equal settings the DirectX version looks slightly better and is much faster. Civilizations V was and still is imo unplayable on my MBP, while it works just fine in Windows on mid settings. But not just that it crashed my system so often it got unhealthy.
Even if speed and quality would be good enough I still don't like my mouse under OSX. The Logitech Windows drivers seem to somehow make it more 1st person shooter worth. With a good framerate in OSX with low enough settings it still doesn't feel good enough. Not really an issue for strategy games but they just were too buggy.

If you buy games on steam you can install them on both platforms if they are available. You don't have to buy them twice all you need is the space to install them. Just try it out. I guess some games might be quite okay already. I don't hear many complaints about Starcraft or Diablo. The big ones are more likely to have the ressources to deliver a proper OpenGL port.
Click to expand...

thanks a lot for that reply :)

I completely agree, the mouse feels different under Mac as it does under windows, every mouse ive tried has this feeling..

I will download Left 4 Dead 2 tonight, see what the difference is like.
On windows its amazing.

The reason i asked you, the community to answer the question was.. it takes up 12-16gb of download to download one of these games. Something i would rather avoid if the community has done that already in the past.

Thanks a lot for the replies :)

:apple: :apple:
 
dusk007

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
It is not just DirectX it is a lot in the drivers too. Nvidia and AMD spend a lot of time and money on drivers. Apple writes a lot of the GPU drivers themselves which usually means they are worse. Also the GPU guys update their drivers often and add optimizations for specific game engines to speed it up on their architecture. Apple doesn't do that. They optimize for their little animations and scrolling and such stuff.
 
ThatGreekMacGuy

ThatGreekMacGuy

macrumors member
Jul 12, 2012
77
0
Sparta, Greece
I ran Geekbench 64bit and got a score of 10960) but the score details are many and I cannot screen capture it all. So, I also ran a NovaBench test and this is the results I got (you can see the results by having a look at the image I attached). For some unknown reason, NovaBench always displays my CPU clock wrong as you can see. It recognized i7 2000MHz, but what I really have is a 2930MHz i7 CPU. Many people have found out that NovaBench displays CPU clock wrong, but anyway that's not the case her; it is just a bug. NovaBench score.jpeg
 
dusk007

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
This kind of benchmark is meaningless when discussing OpenGL vs. DirectX and the games in their respective versions.
At the very least you'd need to provide the windows benchmark for comparison. That would still mean little as it might be also OpenGL based or just a shader heavy generic benchmark that doesn't show the real picture. In games most of the optimizations go into how textures are being streamed and how the execution units stay fed.
Cinebench is well optimized for both platforms and shows about the should be difference, yet a comparison still ignores how bad engine ports and lacking driver optimizations are for the average game.
 
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