2009 Mac Pro Steaming

[McShizzel]

Hi all,

I wanted to give Steam a try on my 2009 octo Mac Pro with ATI HD 4870 so I installed Steam into my Boot Camp partition (Windows Vista 64bit). Steam installed fine so I decided to give Bioshock a try on my Mac to see how it would perform so I downloaded the demo but when I try to launch Bioshock it will show the Bioshock banner then the screen will turn black for about a second and jump back to the desktop.

So I tried it in my XP partition in Fusion 2 but this time I hear the sounds but I get a constant black screen.

Is there something I'm missing? As far as I can tell I've heard people say that Bioshock won't work on Vista 64bit but I heard others say that it runs fine. As for Fusion, I don't know why it's not working am I suppose to install my Mac drivers from the OS disc (although I don't think it's needed unless you need to use bluetooth and/or the iSight camera, right?).

 

[jakeguy99]

Make sure your graphics card is updated and all of your drivers are installed etc through the bootcamp process. Installing the drivers is extremely important! do it. Personally i refuse to use vista. I am running xp on MBP 2.4 ghz geforce 8600M gt with no problems.

 

[McShizzel]

Thanks for the reply, this was the reason why I stopped gaming on computers a few years back, the unforeseen problems , and became a console gamer .

It's odd that I would need newer drivers since Bioshock isn't a new game and should run with the drivers provided on my Mac OS discs. Anyways I tried to install the 9.4 Catalyst Vista 64bit drivers for my card but it gets stuck trying to detect the hardware .

I could try just downloading the drivers without the control center but I don't want to waste anymore time on something that might not and probably won't work.

I guess I'm just going to give up and end my computer gaming days for now (probably a good idea ).

Although I'm still wondering why it is exactly I can only get sound and a black screen when launching Bioshock in VMware Fusion 2. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[waiwai]

try using xp 64 bit... i use it on my macbook with bootcamp and i dont get any problems with anything running on steam... well any games for that matter... i find things are usually less buggier in XP as well...

 

[spencecb]

Thanks for the reply, this was the reason why I stopped gaming on computers a few years back, the unforeseen problems , and became a console gamer .

It's odd that I would need newer drivers since Bioshock isn't a new game and should run with the drivers provided on my Mac OS discs. Anyways I tried to install the 9.4 Catalyst Vista 64bit drivers for my card but it gets stuck trying to detect the hardware .

I could try just downloading the drivers without the control center but I don't want to waste anymore time on something that might not and probably won't work.

I guess I'm just going to give up and end my computer gaming days for now (probably a good idea ).

Although I'm still wondering why it is exactly I can only get sound and a black screen when launching Bioshock in VMware Fusion 2. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I don't have experience with Windows XP, but I do have some experience with Windows 7. I installed it on my iMac earlier this week, and I have to say that letting Windows search and install drivers worked just fine for me. I'm assuming XP has this ability, though I'm not sure if the results would be the same.

I recommend trying that. I also recommend trying Windows 7. You can download it free from Microsoft and the OS will remain active until June 2010.

 

[McShizzel]

Thanks everyone for the replies, well I have Windows 7 installed via a Virtual Machine in Fusion because I don't want to install it into Boot Camp yet because I use my Windows partition for 3D work (although my 3D package seems to be working fine in Windows 7) I don't want to take the risk of installing it while Windows 7 is not yet finalized.

Either way got Crysis to work in Boot Camp on my Vista 64 . It will run smoothly with High settings but pushing it up to very high just kills the framerate. So it's probably something up with Bioshock itself.