Gaming on a PC or Mac

[u2ace]

I've been curious about the best performance when installing a game such as The Sims 3 or Diablo III on a Mac. I currently have a MacBook Pro and when I install these games they run just fine, however a friend of mine told me that if I create a bootcamp partition, install windows on my computer and then those games, they would run better there because since Mac has to emulate windows at some point (if you show the content on the installed game you will come up with a directory such as Crogram files\The sims 3\game); how true is this?

Thanks.

 

[miles01110]

Doesn't sound like your friend knows much about computers. If you have Mac versions of those games you do not need Windows.

 

[MacDawg]

Your friend is misinformed

 

[lannisters4life]

Doesn't sound like your friend knows much about computers. If you have Mac versions of those games you do not need Windows.

Sorry captain, but you shouldn't be so quick to put this guy's friend's knowledge down, because he's half right. Some games are written to "natively" run in OS X, Diablo III is one of them, with no emulation, but the huge majority aren't, they're ported by third parties like Feral or Aspyr, or simply packaged beneath a more generic emulation layer, like Wineskin. But in all cases, games will run better in Windows, there's an enormous number of benchmarks to show this. Diablo III running on a Windows bootcamp partition will have a higher FPS than it would running on OS X.

Edit: Shame on the two people above me. Thirty seconds of Google found that the Mac version of The Sims 3 uses a compatibility package called Cider that "translates" on the fly from a game's code written for Windows to a set of instructions for OS X. Running The Sims in Windows would eliminate this step, and in turn improve performance.

 

[arashb]

I've been curious about the best performance when installing a game such as The Sims 3 or Diablo III on a Mac. I currently have a MacBook Pro and when I install these games they run just fine, however a friend of mine told me that if I create a bootcamp partition, install windows on my computer and then those games, they would run better there because since Mac has to emulate windows at some point (if you show the content on the installed game you will come up with a directory such as Crogram files\The sims 3\game); how true is this?

Thanks.

It's true but how much better a certain game will run on Windows just depends on what the game is and how it's developed. I use to run all my games on Windows even if a Mac version was available but the constant need to reboot isn't worth it, and I have an SSD so it's not the reboot times I'm talking about. If you're running it fine and you're happy with it then leave it, I don't think a game like Sims 3 is worth rebooting into Windows just to play for a few FPS more.

Diablo 3, on the other hand, is a Blizzard game and it seems like Blizzard is one of the few developers that know how to make a Mac game :].