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Unreal Engine 3 Comes to the Mac Platform
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Just gimme a 21" iMac with no optical drive and a 6970! 27" is too big for me (and I expect I'm not the only one). Make it half an inch thicker if you have to. Its a desktop. It isn't going anywhere!
24" is a nice comfortable size.
I do agree that 27" is huge. I had to work on an iMac that big at my last job. I really wanted a smaller screen, the massive size of it was giving me headaches.
Is there really any decent Mac exclusive games lol? Decent PC games are crippled by the terrible Mac hardware.
I wish i had bought one of the 24"s with the Nvidia 8800GS in. That card was great for Apple at that time. I dont see them changing from 21.5" and 27" now though. Im really hopeful about the removal of the optical drive in the new machines.
don't get too excited. there are also lots of games which don't use Unreal Engine as well. gaming on Mac is still tiny portion of market which don't make any profit at all. what news says is that they just announced Unreal Engine for mac. that's all. it doesn't mean that suddenly mac users will take advantage of all gaming experience. it's not. trust me.
I know people have been saying want new games rather than old games ported, but the way I look at it is we want the old games ported.
The reason is there would be very little outlay in terms of cost/man power to get an old game moved over to OSX, now this would give the studio/publisher an indication if it is worth developing future games on the OSX platform.
Kimbie
The reason is there would be very little outlay in terms of cost/man power to get an old game moved over to OSX, now this would give the studio/publisher an indication if it is worth developing future games on the OSX platform.
Kimbie
Macs ARE much better for gaming these days. Where we are right now is so much better than say 6 years ago and hopefully macs will keep moving in the right direction. I remember trying to play WoW on a 64mb graphics card with my dual-processor 867mhz g4 and I went and bought a gaming rig pretty soon after (THEN HAD 2 WIND TUNNELS SAT NEXT TO EACH OTHER, IT WAS LIKE BEING ON A PLANE AWAITING TAKE OFF).
Being able to work and game semi-decently, all on my macbook-pro saves me ££££'s
Being able to work and game semi-decently, all on my macbook-pro saves me ££££'s
I think you mean apples computers have "mid-mid" and "Low-High" graphics, when compared with what desktop PCs can have fitted, even the 27"iMac with a 1GB 6970 is still only packing a mobile GPU which is running last genereations desktops architecture when compared to a true dedicated PC graphics card.
Macs GPUs are like settling for last years basic model of car the day the new model is released with added bells and whistles.
bottom line, macs are NOT for much more than casual gaming, its WAY easier and cheaper to drop £800 on an expandable gaming PC (That blows away on performance and graphics my Mac) to sit along side my £1700 Mac that i prefer to use to manage my itunes library (3.4TB of tv shows and movies and growing) and do "work" on.
I wonder whether the Mac version will be much slower than the same thing running on Windows. I notice that even something as undemanding as Civilization (IV) runs much much more smoothly in Windows than Mac OS X, (on my 2010 iMac). Hehe, yeah, "Mac's can game", hehe.
Gaming used to hugely suck on a Mac, especially in the PPC era.
Now we have Intel Macs and Boot Camp did give us the possibility to run Windows natively and play big-time on a Mac. All you needed was a Mac Pro with the better grfx option, or the high-end iMac...
I do get the impression that, partly tnx to 5-year-old-consoles, the majority of new games nowadays do not require the top-notch newest and best grfx horsepower that new games of a couple of years ago needed. I remember when Doom 3 and Half Life 2 arrived, you really needed the best grfx ATi or nVidia had to offer alongside a good CPU, and even then you struggled to get 30 fps at "ultra" settings.
IMHO, when you buy a new game today the grfx requirements are less steep. That plus the fact that Apple had put decent grfx in the iMac and the Mac Pro line-up is all right in grfx, gives is that gaming on Mac is not bad.
Even the games ported over to Mac OS X (Steam games, Dirt 2, etc.) run fine, even on Macs a couple of years old.
Back in the G4 and G5 days, ported games would never have run well on a Mac that was at least one year old.
Now we have Intel Macs and Boot Camp did give us the possibility to run Windows natively and play big-time on a Mac. All you needed was a Mac Pro with the better grfx option, or the high-end iMac...
I do get the impression that, partly tnx to 5-year-old-consoles, the majority of new games nowadays do not require the top-notch newest and best grfx horsepower that new games of a couple of years ago needed. I remember when Doom 3 and Half Life 2 arrived, you really needed the best grfx ATi or nVidia had to offer alongside a good CPU, and even then you struggled to get 30 fps at "ultra" settings.
IMHO, when you buy a new game today the grfx requirements are less steep. That plus the fact that Apple had put decent grfx in the iMac and the Mac Pro line-up is all right in grfx, gives is that gaming on Mac is not bad.
Even the games ported over to Mac OS X (Steam games, Dirt 2, etc.) run fine, even on Macs a couple of years old.
Back in the G4 and G5 days, ported games would never have run well on a Mac that was at least one year old.
So when the Mac Pro was released over a year and a half ago the graphics card on it was very good. However, some of you are complaining that a last-gen computer due for a refresh any month now has last-gen tech in it. Of course it does. Tautologically. Apple doesn't, or very rarely, update its tech mid-cycle in a product. It has yearly (or longer) refresh cycles and that's that. When the new Mac Pro comes out, then you'll see new high-end desktop graphics cards for the Mac, not before.
iMacs are all-in-ones. They should be compared to all-in-one performance and the new ones do pretty well in that regard. Laptops are laptops are laptops.
As for Mac graphics drivers being bad/causing problems - well a lot drivers seem to be crap on Windows 7 too. I can't even quantify the sheer number of threads there are complaining about bad AMD/Nvidia drivers causing problems. It's simply too huge.
The real bottom line is that Apple, at the moment, simply doesn't have a true gaming machine which is obviously perfect for that purpose - something with power in-between a Mac Pro and an iMac which is where such a gaming machine would fall. Macs are great as computers that also happen to play games in addition to doing whatever reason you bought the computer for. And in the past, given the offering for the Mac platforms, that was fine. However, given the popularity of gaming on iOS devices and increasing Mac sales, Apple has developed a base to start attracting more game development.
If they want to push the Mac as a gaming platform, and it remains unclear if they do, then Apple has a couple ways of doing so: 1) The rumored, smaller 3U form-factor refresh of the Mac Pro may better allow gaming variants as well as the traditional server/workstation variants. 2) Getting rid of the optical drive in the iMac and putting in a desktop GPU and required extra cooling. 3) Eventually more external GPUs will become available turning almost any computer with a thunderbolt connection into a pretty reasonable gaming rig. There may be a few issues with the number of memory channels, but those aren't huge by some Anandtech tests (will look for link), and can be ameliorated by later thunderbolt iterations.
Of course Apple will have to push/adopt newer OpenGL standards as well in its OS if it wants to pull business away from DirectX-Windows/XBox-only development. But even a lot of graphics intensive games on Windows don't even take advantage of the latest greatest DirectX version - e.g. The Witcher 2 is still DirectX 9, not 10 or 11. So getting the right form factor for games is a higher priority than adopting the latest OpenGL standards. OpenGL versus DirectX is a different battle and not one that Apple has full control over.
iMacs are all-in-ones. They should be compared to all-in-one performance and the new ones do pretty well in that regard. Laptops are laptops are laptops.
As for Mac graphics drivers being bad/causing problems - well a lot drivers seem to be crap on Windows 7 too. I can't even quantify the sheer number of threads there are complaining about bad AMD/Nvidia drivers causing problems. It's simply too huge.
The real bottom line is that Apple, at the moment, simply doesn't have a true gaming machine which is obviously perfect for that purpose - something with power in-between a Mac Pro and an iMac which is where such a gaming machine would fall. Macs are great as computers that also happen to play games in addition to doing whatever reason you bought the computer for. And in the past, given the offering for the Mac platforms, that was fine. However, given the popularity of gaming on iOS devices and increasing Mac sales, Apple has developed a base to start attracting more game development.
If they want to push the Mac as a gaming platform, and it remains unclear if they do, then Apple has a couple ways of doing so: 1) The rumored, smaller 3U form-factor refresh of the Mac Pro may better allow gaming variants as well as the traditional server/workstation variants. 2) Getting rid of the optical drive in the iMac and putting in a desktop GPU and required extra cooling. 3) Eventually more external GPUs will become available turning almost any computer with a thunderbolt connection into a pretty reasonable gaming rig. There may be a few issues with the number of memory channels, but those aren't huge by some Anandtech tests (will look for link), and can be ameliorated by later thunderbolt iterations.
Of course Apple will have to push/adopt newer OpenGL standards as well in its OS if it wants to pull business away from DirectX-Windows/XBox-only development. But even a lot of graphics intensive games on Windows don't even take advantage of the latest greatest DirectX version - e.g. The Witcher 2 is still DirectX 9, not 10 or 11. So getting the right form factor for games is a higher priority than adopting the latest OpenGL standards. OpenGL versus DirectX is a different battle and not one that Apple has full control over.
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Awesome. Good to see they are starting to take Mac gaming a bit more serious lately.
The single best thing to happen to Mac gaming in years was porting Steam to OSX. I think this announcement is akin to the Cider announcement a couple years ago...I'll believe it when games using the new Unreal Engine are actually running on OSX (and not at 20fps).
Then Apple needs to let them update them monthly like they do for Windows.
The only UE3 game in that list is borderlands and the performance isn't that great for the price paid for the hardware.
Gaming on Apple computers works a lot better than most of you would think, assuming you have a non intel card.
Sure, you can get a better gaming rig for the same price buy buying or building a windows system, but that's irrelevant. Saying you can't game on a mac is preposterous.
My friend's 1 gb 15" MBP runs games just fine, on high or max settings.
My 4 year old imac runs starcraft 2 surprisingly well.
The problem with pc gamers is that they get their panties in a knot if they don't have the absolute latest and greatest graphics hardware in their rig. Which is fine if you want to be that picky about your gaming, and if that's the case buy a custom windows rig. That's what they are for.
The mac has NEVER advertised itself towards the gaming market, as that is not their primary market. At all. They do (correctly) state that you can run many games quite well on it. They never say that you can run every game ever at max setting.
Some of you gamers should use your brain a bit, and consider what it is that you're buying, which for macs, is a great, super efficient computer that's fantastic for doing work and play, that's also usually decent or better for gaming. Mac's were never intended for the ultra high end of gaming.
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE it if Apple put better cards in their systems. But to say that you just can't game on a mac is ridiculous.
Sure, you can get a better gaming rig for the same price buy buying or building a windows system, but that's irrelevant. Saying you can't game on a mac is preposterous.
My friend's 1 gb 15" MBP runs games just fine, on high or max settings.
My 4 year old imac runs starcraft 2 surprisingly well.
The problem with pc gamers is that they get their panties in a knot if they don't have the absolute latest and greatest graphics hardware in their rig. Which is fine if you want to be that picky about your gaming, and if that's the case buy a custom windows rig. That's what they are for.
The mac has NEVER advertised itself towards the gaming market, as that is not their primary market. At all. They do (correctly) state that you can run many games quite well on it. They never say that you can run every game ever at max setting.
Some of you gamers should use your brain a bit, and consider what it is that you're buying, which for macs, is a great, super efficient computer that's fantastic for doing work and play, that's also usually decent or better for gaming. Mac's were never intended for the ultra high end of gaming.
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE it if Apple put better cards in their systems. But to say that you just can't game on a mac is ridiculous.
^^ no one said you cant game on a mac. What gamers are saying is that gaming on a mac sucks. You may be satisfied with <30fps at med/low settings.. great, but thats not what's going on over on the PC side.
Oh and everyone who's saying imac should be compared to other AIOs...No it shouldnt. Its a consumer desktop computer, so it should be compared to other desktops.
Oh and everyone who's saying imac should be compared to other AIOs...No it shouldnt. Its a consumer desktop computer, so it should be compared to other desktops.
Yes to other all-in-one desktops. You compare form factor to form factor. An all-in-one is a different form factor from a tower with different (tighter) constraints on size and heat. To claim otherwise is disingenuous. Gaming on a mac sucks no more than on its pc counterpart when you are comparing a device to its actual counterparts. Again, the bottom line is that Apple doesn't have a gaming form factor like a PC - you either get a workstation (Mac Pro) or a consumer desktop (iMac) with nothing in between which is where a gaming form factor would fall.
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for the price that apple charges for the imac, i would expect a good video card. for significantly less you can get a much faster computer, for, you know... gaming and real work.
Point me to another 'all in one' with a faster video card. This was covered earlier in the thread. You want something in between an iMac and a mac pro. You can't just 'stick a better video card into an iMac'.
Isn't that the same thing we were told in respects to Apple using desktop CPU's? Couldn't be done due to space and cooling, yet here we are with desktop CPU's in the iMac...
When talking about Apple gaming, don't forget the controllers. No serious gamer is going to touch Apple mice, and other brands have some problems with drivers, acceleration and whatnot.
The PCs are much more open in that regard. You can set your USB port to 1000Hz report rate if you like, you can still use ps/2 keyboards which are better for gaming, you can get rid of mouse acceleration without using ugly hacks (that don't even work most of the time) and your choice of gaming controllers is nearly unlimited.
Apple still has a long way to go if it wants to bring serious gaming community to the platform.
The PCs are much more open in that regard. You can set your USB port to 1000Hz report rate if you like, you can still use ps/2 keyboards which are better for gaming, you can get rid of mouse acceleration without using ugly hacks (that don't even work most of the time) and your choice of gaming controllers is nearly unlimited.
Apple still has a long way to go if it wants to bring serious gaming community to the platform.
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