I don't honestly know how anyone can claim Apple cares about gaming on the Mac at this point. I saw so much defense of Apple on the gaming front in here it honestly made me laugh.
Here's every single currently available Apple product and why it's not good for gamers:
- MacBook is completely incapable of running the vast majority of games. It's about as fast as a low-end 2011 MacBook Air, which was already so low end that barely any games ran.
- MacBook Air is capable of running games at the bare minimum settings with terrible framerates. It works, but it gives a poor experience.
- The MacBook Pro fares little better than the Air due to a terrible integrated GPU from Intel. Only when upgrading to the ridiculously expensive top-of-the-line 15" model will you get an external GPU. You can get better GPU's in laptops with similar form factors even from expensive brands like Razer.
Note that all these laptops have VERY high resolution displays in addition to their crappy GPU's. There's no way in hell any game will run at 60 FPS at maximum resolution even at minimum settings on any of these machines.
There is simply no viable MacBook gaming product available. At all. It doesn't exist.
Moving on to the desktops:
- Mac Mini is about as capable of playing games as a MacBook Air - which i to say not terribly capable.
- The iMac is probably the gamer's best bet from Apple. Unfortunately, it's a non-upgradeable laptop in the disguise, meaning that it's overpriced for the performance and isn't future proof.
- The retina display iMac is so high resolution that, even with a top of the line mobile GPU - which Apple for some reason got from AMD which was a terrible decision in this particular case - there are very few games that will run at a decent clip at native resolution. However, to be fair, iMac's will play games somewhat well regardless. It's a viable option, but overpriced due to its design.
- The Mac Pro is the only Mac that really delivers the kind of performance a gamer wants. Unfortunately, it's professional grade hardware with a price tag to match. In addition, even though it has two GPU's, the CrossFire bridge is disabled in OS X, cutting performance squarely in half unless you install Boot Camp. This makes the Mac Pro ridiculously overpriced for the performance. It is also non-upgradeable on the most important component: The GPU.
And that's just the hardware. The software fares no better, with the current version of OpenGL on Mac OS X Yosemite being about 4 years behind the times. The performance is so bad that most porting companies have elected to simply not update their games to OpenGL 3.0, let alone 4.0, including Blizzard Entertainment. The performance difference can be up to 2x in favor of Windows regardless of whether the test hardware is a real Mac or not.
In addition, the OS X OpenGL implementation is reluctant to frameskip, and will often attempt to slow the game down instead to get all the frames rendered instead before giving up. This is particularly visible with VSync on. While this does cause less stutter in professional rendering, for realtime rendering in gaming this is beyond terrible.
This is on top of a mouse acceleration code that actually delays the mouse's response time by at least 20ms, so even if we assume we had a powerful Mac that could run the latest games at 1080p60 at maximum settings, the Mac would STILL be a terrible platform for pro-gaming. You can disable this with some very eloborate applications, though.
I really hope they improve this situation substantially - because I do like my 2011 15" MacBook Pro otherwise, and I'd like to buy an Apple Laptop next time. But if this keeps up? No way in hell.
iOS is another story, fortunately. Gaming on iOS is great.
EDIT: I have no idea why my post got posted twice. Oh well, it's gone now.
And yes, I know these alternatives to Macs skimp on other hardware components to get the cost down, and that this is why they can deliver great gaming performance to price ratio. Their hardware is not overall better in many cases - but for this very specific case where gaming performance is important, they suck. Utterly and totally suck.