Game performance on Mac OS X

Hi everyone,

I'm relatively new to mac and was wondering if anyone could explain why my iMac 24" 2.66 Intel Core Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 (bought mid last year) seems to have such a hard time running an old game like Command and Conquer 3?
I haven't actually played any games for a while now, but I had C&C 3 on my last PC when it first came out a few years ago and it ran better on that machine (which had significantly inferior specs to my iMac) on higher settings than my iMac can produce on settings that are about medium...
I went and dug up the old gamespot performance comparisons for PC hardware and it looks as though my iMac should easily handle the game without breaking a sweat on ultra high.

Is there something I should do to make it run better? I've heard that games can run on Mac, but generally perform better with the windows partition through bootcamp. Is this true?

Thanks anyone for the advice.

 

So perhaps it's just C&C3 that sucks on mac then?
The company's name appears to be Cider looking at the box. Are they any good?
If anyone can tell me how well it runs through bootcamp I'd be most appreciative.

 

That explains it then I guess. Oh well, looks like I'll be installing windows and trading the game in for the PC copy I guess.
At least I won't have to worry about running windows for the upcoming StarCraft games : ) ... though my iMac will probably barely run those considering they'll be pretty cutting edge I'd imagine.

 

Well it was a good PC for back in 2005. AMD Athlon 3200 processor with 1 gig of ram and an nVidia Geforce 6800GT dedicated graphics card. But still, that was a 32 bit processor, while my current intel core duo 2 is 64 bit, and I have vastly more ram.

 

Yes of course, but the intel core duo 2 processor is significantly faster on the mac than an AMD Athlon 3200 as far as I can understand, and my ram was 1 gig and DDR2 where as now it's DDR3 and 4 gigs.
Are you saying that it's really all the graphics card? Is the integrated 9400 THAT much weaker than the old 6800 GT in terms of performance capacity?
Also, I remember giving the game to my brother on his Dell Desktop, which was decent in 2007, but by no means as good as my custom built computer and it ran the game pretty well too. I'm pretty sure that was an integrated graphics card as well.

 

Yeah fair enough. I had an nVidia Geforce 6800GT with 256 mg of onboard ram on the old computer and that was a great card when it came out.

Just in terms of the trouble it has running higher settings though, one thing I've noticed is the game itself actually runs pretty well on high, it's simply the controls that lag... For instance my troops will react and move about relatively quickly, but the control always seems to be a step behind.