I enjoy gaming on my Mac mini although its not the greatest thing to game on. I'm going to wait until the new/revision iMac is released and upgrade it to a true gaming machine. In the mean time I have a question are there any advantages of playing games in XP/Vista via Bootcamp instead of a OSX? Currently I'm playing WoW:Burning Crusade, but I want to play LOTR: Shadows of Angmar. Will there be a Mac version?
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Running XP or Vista on Mac's for Gaming
- Thread starter Stevez0r
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Well the obvious advantage to running XP/Vista to play games is the massive selection that opens up. Most games are for windows. If you want to play that LOTR game, and there's no mac version, boot camp is your ticket. I don't know what the situation is with that particular game, but I wouldn't wait around for a mac version if there isn't one out already. Ports over to OSX tend to take a while and also tend sometimes to not run quite as well as the windows version. It depends on the company that ports it. If you're talking Blizzard, they're I think the only gaming company that releases for both windows and mac simultaneously, and the mac versions of their games are great.
Sorry for blabing, but in a nutshell, bootcamp is your ticket for games. Go for it.
Cheers
Sorry for blabing, but in a nutshell, bootcamp is your ticket for games. Go for it.
Cheers
Sorry for blabing, but in a nutshell, bootcamp is your ticket for games. Go for it.
Cheers
Boot camp is the way to go for gaming, but it looks like the OP has a PowerPC based Mac Mini.
With a Mac-Mini, it's pretty hard to run demanding games, but I would go with XP since Vista has all the "aero" effects that'll probably slow your performance.
I have XP on a 120gb HD i installed on the Mac Pro, purely for 1 piece of software, and of course, the The Sims 2. Only reason we dont play the mac version is because the Mac versions took ages to come out... which isnt true now, but would cost around £100 to change the discs to Mac.
bah... anyway, use XP for gaming as its pretty solid in comparison to Vista.
bah... anyway, use XP for gaming as its pretty solid in comparison to Vista.
I believe WoW:BC is available in Universal so Windows should be avoided at all cost All of the addons I've used are based on Blizzard's use of LUA api's so they should be platform independent.
All of the addons I've used are based on Blizzard's use of LUA api's so they should be platform independent.
Aero doesn't slow gaming performance. Vista is designed to turn off Aero when running a fullscreen 3D application, such as a game. Additionally, enhancements made to low-level Vista functions and memory handling do provide speed increases in certain games. I think the main reason why some games run slower is due to driver immaturity. So to conclude, I'll have to disagree, and suggest for the OP to install Vista Home Premium.
The way I see it, the only reason to get Vista for gaming is the DirectX 10 drivers. Which you won't need w/o an nVidia 8800 or better
So XP is the way to go.
So XP is the way to go.
What?
As far as I can tell, Vista is the way to go for gaming, simply because many games are vista only right now for marketing reasons but eventually they'll be Vista only for technical reasons.
Performance is actually the same and if you are running games on a Mac then you probably aren't too picky about having 100FPS with max settings.
I say go Vista, its actually quite a nifty OS.
I'm running Vista right now instead of XP. I like it, looks better and has the Games explorer.
I went to http://www.speedyvista.com and used their service guide to tone down on the services, now I don't have very many services running (about the same as XP - maybe less!). I also disabled all my processes from starting up, so when I'm playing games only have 23 other processes running.
You should get Vista, as more games in the future are probably going to be Vista only.
I went to http://www.speedyvista.com and used their service guide to tone down on the services, now I don't have very many services running (about the same as XP - maybe less!). I also disabled all my processes from starting up, so when I'm playing games only have 23 other processes running.
You should get Vista, as more games in the future are probably going to be Vista only.
Huh?
Huh? I can only think of 2-3 games that are DX10 (Vista) right now, and they all offer DX9 (XP) operation. No game developer in his right mind is going to code the DX10/Vista while there are still 300 million XP systems in use. Even the XBOX360 is not DX10.
It will be 2-3 years before you have to worry about DX10 being mandatory. That is 2 entire GPU generations away.
Huh? I can only think of 2-3 games that are DX10 (Vista) right now, and they all offer DX9 (XP) operation. No game developer in his right mind is going to code the DX10/Vista while there are still 300 million XP systems in use. Even the XBOX360 is not DX10.
It will be 2-3 years before you have to worry about DX10 being mandatory. That is 2 entire GPU generations away.
Boot camp is the way to go for gaming, but it looks like the OP has a PowerPC based Mac Mini.
The OP talked about getting a new iMac...
Xp is the way at the moment, becasue in vista games allways performe abit worse as vista is more of a resource hogger, benchmarks in vista vs xp games on pc's show it, osX not good either if you are a gamer get a bootcamp partition with xp all them fps count when your on a macbook XD XD
all them fps count when your on a macbook XD XD