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PC Games Go To Boot Camp

Posted by Zonk on Mon Apr 10, 2006 01:36 PM
from the suck-in-that-gut-civilization dept.
PC Games (Games) Businesses Apple
1up has taken several of the more popular recent PC titles to Apple Boot Camp, and report back on how they handle the MacBook Pro hardware. From the article: "With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen. Annoyingly, F.E.A.R. offers a really pitiful selection of resolutions, all of which are constrained to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio -- meaning that play on the MacBook's widescreen is stretched, and kind of ugly. That's not a hardware issue so much as limited programming, and presumably anyone with a widescreen PC is in the same pickle."
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[+] Apple: Boot Camp Flaw Leaves Some Users Fuming 391 comments
Karl Cocknozzle writes "Some users who chose to install Apple's recent beta-offering of Boot Camp without basic precautions (like a full backup) have found themselves unable to boot their Macs to OS X. In a discussion thread on Apple's technical support Web site, more than a dozen users reported that Boot Camp successfully partitioned their hard drive and allowed them to install a working version of Windows, but then would no longer allow them to switch back. The download-agreement page for Boot Camp contains the explicit warning that Boot Camp is still 'Beta' software, and would not be supported if problems arose. On the whole, it sounds like the number of affected users is quite small, but may reflect a common lack of knowledge of what a 'beta' release really is: Not ready for prime-time."
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  • Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by NIK282000 (737852)
    Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop. With the screen and keyboard so close together thats a back problem waitign together. I would like to see how the mac desktops size up adainst say a dell or HP desktop.
    • I'm old school, I didn't get a degree in math, I got .0174 radians.

      1 degree = 0.0174532925 radians [google.com]

      Are we using Round-towards even, truncate, or floor?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)

      by allenw (33234)
      That's an easy one: travel.

      It's greating being able to pop open a laptop in the airport, on the plane, etc, and have a nice relaxing game of whatever. Especially when you are stuck in some hick town with no social scene at all. If I have to take my laptop anyway, I might as well get some use out of it other than doing a presentation or whatever.

      [My biggest complaint are the games that require the CD/DVD to be present when they don't actually pull anything off of the media or require it for the audio

    • Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop.

      LAN party. You know, a dozen guys and gals go to someone's house. We usually have about three desktops and about nine laptops for a typical night. Who wants to lug a desktop and a monitor over to a friend's house? Just buy a USB keyboard (maybe a gaming keyboard), plug into your laptop and go.

      • Plus, sometimes you just wanna get out of the house. Go down to the Internet coffeeshop and game there, or to the LAN-gaming place but use your own computer that has all your custom macros on it--most LAN-gaming places won't let you put that stuff on their computer.

        And there are also those folks who can't afford or don't have access to high-speed Internet in their area, so taking it on the road is the only way they can do it via high-speed at all.
  • I find it sickening that modern games do not support what should be standard screen resolutions.

    All console games these days have widescreen support. It is not hard to do.

    In this HDTV age, why don't games support the standard HDTV resolutions, too? 720x480, 720x576, 1280x720, 1920x1080 - it's not hard is it? How hard is it to populate an array with some other options?

    • Re:Sucky Resolution Support (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Onan (25162) on Monday April 10 2006, @02:28PM (#15100531)

      Well, even beyond that, why would you possibly use a hard-coded list of specific resolutions, however long?

      As soon as you support more than one resolution, you (or your libraries) already need to handle scaling and talking about your polygons in portion-of-display units rather than number-of-pixels units. That work is already done, so why limit yourself to any number of specific resolutions, rather than just scaling to whatever pixel count and aspect ratio the display happens to have?

      Do you really think that you can predict now the specs of every display that any person is ever going to use to run your game at any time in the future? This is nearly as absurd as people who chain their website design to absolute numbers of pixels.

      • Some do; most id Software engine games (like Doom 3, Half-Life 2) let you manually set any resolution and aspect ratio you wish. The only catch is you have to do it from the console (or in the config files directly). The menus still have a limited number of pre-set resolutions.
      • A friend and I were talking about this very issue recently. While I tend to agree that PC games should be entirely flexible in terms of resolution (since there are far too many display options and aspect ratios available), I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game. For example, if a game is supposed to surprise you by attacking from behind, it can't really have a third-person viewpoint available. The same could be true i
        • I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game.

          If that were the case, then they would leave the resolution set to what it is (preferably native, but that is the user's choice) and just use a 4:3 chunk in the middle. Instead, they change resolution to their 4:3, non-native one and leave the screen looking like crap. If they cared about the quality of the experience, they've just ruined it far more than allowing a widescreen v

      • Having been involved in game design projects before, yes I do think it's possible. Let's put it this way: there are 3 major screen ratios in the world, 4:3 (TV, CRT), 16:9 (the new widescreen standard) and 16:10 (some computers-only bastardisation to keep LCD costs lower or something)

        In most games you just render off to the side a little more. You space out your HUD. Since the viewport in 3D games is set out by 2 or 3 procedural functions, this is very very very trivial coding.

        Why use a fixed list of resolu

    • I find it sickening that modern games do not support what should be standard screen resolutions.

      It will probably upset Mac gamers even more than most. Since such a large percentage of Macs are widescreen, I don't think I've ever seen a Mac game that did not support them. Also, many Mac users love to bitch about the Windows platform, in general :)

      • Since such a large percentage of Macs are widescreen, I don't think I've ever seen a Mac game that did not support them.

        There are plenty of OS X native games that don't support widescreen. The last one that I personally played was Tropico 2: Pirate Cove to give some idea of how recent a game can be, yet plagued with this issue out of the box.

    • > All console games these days have widescreen support. It is not hard to do.

      Technically, no, but artistically, it is, in order to do it right.

      It's about providing a UI that looks good any at resolution.

      It's much easier to make a UI look good at 4:3, then to do "double" the work to support 16:9 or some other "oddball" configuration.

      Yeah it sucks, but as a programmer I can appreciate the amount of work an artist has to do.

      Cheers
      • They could at least support the resolution, and just stick it in the middle of the screen. I think most widescreen gamers would be happy just to not have the 4:3 image streched to 16:9 or 16:10. The problem is not so much that it's not widescreen, just that its all distorted.
      • Yeah I have HL2. It's great apart from the chat font in the Steam UI being way way way too tiny to read from 6 feet away on a CRT HDTV. And having no way to change it except for hacking resource files..
  • is a new idea, but I don't get the hubbub. Once Apple switched to Intel, they began churning out typical x86 PC's. Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs? This seems to be much ado about nothing. It's great that the Apple computers have the secret DRM chip that allows for OS X x8 to be installed, the dual boot option may make this a great option for for some folks. But to bench them and remark with wonder about the results compared to any of a bijillion other Intel hardware based Windows PC's seems odd.
  • I installed Boot Camp last week, and other than some issues with some older games running too fast or not correctly measuring the speed of the processor, it worked great. I ran out and bought Oblivion, and it installed and runs great. I found the same issues as those in the article, but they are easaily resolved with some very minor tweaking. I don't really consider myself a gamer, but I was inpressed with the distance cueing limits, etc. and the frame rate was good. I was able to play four several hour
  • A friend of mine tried City of Heroes/Villains on his MacBook [websnark.com] and was highly impressed by its performance.

  • widescreen gaming (Score:5, Informative)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Monday April 10 2006, @02:13PM (#15100394)
    Handy link to the Widescreen Gaming Forum [widescreen...gforum.com] website. It includes a listing of games that work with widescreen monitors, including hacks, patches, and workarounds to get games that don't natively support them to work.
    • And voila, from your link: How to get FEAR to support widescreen [widescreen...gforum.com].
    • I find it hard to believe that OSX video drivers have no system to display apps without stretching.

      In the Control Panel of both Nvidia and ATI drivers, there is a setting that will allow a 1024*768 game to run with the other pixels blocked out. The other 256*256 pixels become a border around the actual game. That way, everything looks OK and not all stretched out.

      This is very useful considering most LCDs are 1280*1024 and most games are designed to play at *real* resolutions; i.e. 1280*960.

  • ...and that's with an underclocked GPU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frankie (91710) on Monday April 10 2006, @02:16PM (#15100412) Journal
    If you pump up the clock [google.com] with ATITool, frame rates jump 30-50% (at the cost of your Mac being unseemly noisy and warm).

    Now you just need some blue neon - and maybe a carbon fiber spoiler on top - to give your iMac that Real Ultimate (gaming) Power! (tm)

  • Played FFXI on my MacBookPro (Score:3, Interesting)

    by falcon5768 (629591) <Falcon5768.comcast@net> on Monday April 10 2006, @02:21PM (#15100461) Journal
    and even with everything turned up and running a Dynamis Xacrabard (where there tends to be a huge number of monsters at once along with 50-64 player characters) I didnt have one instance of a slow down or a lag which even some of my friends with nice systems couldnt brag about.

    Of course its a older game, but its much more prossesor heavy than you would think based on how SE botched up the coding for PC.

  • Half-Life 2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by aftk2 (556992) on Monday April 10 2006, @02:35PM (#15100577) Homepage Journal
    Cabel (of the Mac software shop Panic [panic.com]) has put up a quicktime video of Half-Life 2 running on his Intel iMac. In two words, it looks friggin sweet:

    http://cabel.name/ [cabel.name]

    (With apologies to his hosting provider.)
  • After all, you have a triumverate of "evil" going on here. After all, it is an Apple machine with Intel chips running Microsoft software.

  • OS X gaming largely unaffected... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Faust7 (314817) on Monday April 10 2006, @03:14PM (#15100882) Homepage
    All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.

    So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
    • no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable
      Not true. If they can make MORE profit by doing something else, they will shut it down in a flash. This happens all the time in software and other things. Just because your 50 developers can make a small profit on Product A, doesn't mean you'll keep them going on that - make Product B and it can make a huge profit with the same 50 developers.
  • I don't have a MacBook Pro (so I haven't given this a shot) but people wanting to wide-screen F.E.A.R. should look here [widescreen...gforum.com]. It's a pretty easy hack to get the game running properly on wide-screen displays.

    The Wide-screen gaming forum [widescreen...gforum.com] has tons of simple fixes for quite a few games.
  • These benchmarks of Windows games running on XP on an Intel Mac are all very interesting - I mean who would have thought that a standard Intel laptop with an Apple logo on it would have performance roughly equivalent to a standard Intel laptop without an Apple logo on it?

    But so far no-one seems to have gotten around to benchmarking the Intel Mac running a cross platform game under both Windows and OSX.

    I just don't understand that. Is it possible that OSX would score too highly and the Apple crowd don't want
    • ... But why should the widescreen folk have a better view than the 4:3 folk? Imagine playing a game online, and you have a 4:3 screen. It's great, it looks good. But then someone else you are playing against has a 16:9 widescreen and he sees not only what you are able to see, but more (on the sides). So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?

      Blame the industry for lack of foresight, meanwhile, me and my widescreens will enjoy the extra peripheral viewspace.

      To note
        • True. In my LAN gaming group, we used to play with open speakers for all to hear. It was common habit that if you were searching for someone, you would jump, and listen for their speakers to make any noise.

          This worked well to your advantage until people started bringing surround sound systems and could target you based on the 3D positioning information afforded them. Sure you know that they heard you jumping, but now they know which direction you're in, and you don't.

          Of course, all that stopped once we s
    • The graphics shouldn't stretch. Quake3 doesn't have widescreen support, per se. When I play Quake3 on my Dell FPW2005 or on my Powerbook, it puts black bars at the sides. it doesn't stretch and distort the view.

      It's a matter of properly programming the video code to compensate for strange resolutions. ...spike

    • Re:Kind of offtopic... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Monday April 10 2006, @02:21PM (#15100459)

      So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?

      Imagine a gamer with a great video card and monitor. With the better resolution and size he can make out objects that are further away. Shouldn't all games be restricted to 640x480 and at a certain size on the screen, otherwise some characters can see further and in better detail than others. Some people might have two monitors allowing them to reference a map, IM with other players, or view cheats at the same time as the game. Games need to detect and turn off multiple monitors. Also, some gamers use joysticks and trackball setups that allow them to click buttons faster. Games should only support standard keyboards and mice; lest some characters have better reaction times than others.

      You could argue this for all sorts of hardware, but it does not really matter. People who spend more on the best hardware and connection will gain some slight advantage. That's life. In any case failing to deal with widescreen monitors and distorting the picture is pathetic. I thought all games checked for this and at worst put some black bars on the right and left, like the ones at the top and bottom for widescreen movies on a standard TV.

        • But widescreen monitors just aren't the majority of monitors being bought.

          You're right and at the same time, not quite right. You see this article is for/by people running Macs and most Macs have widescreen displays. Aside from ibooks, I'm not even sure Apple sells any non-widescreen systems. So current Mac users (the most likely users of bootcamp) Are used to everything, including games dealing with widescreen. I've never run a game under OS X that did not handle widescreen, that I recall. It seems lik

    • Having the widescreen stretch the view out seems like less of a programming issue and more of a gamer-fairness issue.

      If it's about fairness, then everyone should be given free top-of-the-line PCs and high-speed internet connections. That, or you force everyone down to the lowest common denominator framerate, resolution and bandwidth. Because frames per second is an advantage in first-person shooters and people have varying qualities of hardware and network connections, they're unfair to begin with.

      Worryin
    • They used the same excuse with Starcraft and why it was limited to a terrible resolution.

      One simple solution that solves the whole thing. Server side settings.

      The server can determine the max resolution, the resolution types and pretty much every other setting anyone is linking up with. As long as you program that in to the interface for online gaming there should be no limits on how great you can make things look.
    • Having a Cable modem when everyone else was on dialup was unfair.
      Having a laser mouse vs the old style mouses is unfair.
      Having a computer that can run the game at 60fps vs a pos machine that runs it at 12fps is unfair.
      Having a 21" monitor playing against a kid with a 15" is unfair. (Mostly because the 21" guy can see better with his eyes whil ethe 15" is having to look at less detail and may not see the other person move).

      So computer gaming is all unfair like this... Otherwise I suggest a console. Or maybe
    • Weird, I never had trouble with 4:3 resolutions on my 8:5 HP f2105 monitor, I find it odd that Apple failed to include options such as the following on their wonderful hardware:

      Notebooks don't have on screen displays for LCD settings.

      But ignoring that, Apple's hardware and OS properly support their displays, making the OSD controls you mention unnecessary.

      In other words, you're asking why Apple doesn't have kludgey workarounds for a problem that doesn't exist on the Mac. It's not Apple's fault for not inclu
      • "It's not Apple's fault for not including unnecessary hacks, it's Windows'/F.E.A.R.'s fault that they need them."

        You may not be familiar with how Window's works. You see third party companies make the hardware - not Microsoft. ATI in this case makes the video chip in the MacBook Pro. So first stop for blame should be ATI for not implementing this. Although as the other poster noted, it is in fact implemented in the ATI video driver. Now if the game manufacturer for whatever reason decides not to support wid
        • You see third party companies make the hardware - not Microsoft. ATI in this case makes the video chip in the MacBook Pro.

          How is that different with Mac OS? ATI still makes the card, either way.

          So first stop for blame should be ATI for not implementing this.

          No, first stop for blame is Windows for not taking care of this sort of thing. This is exactly what OS's are supposed to do.

          So you've clearly missed my point. It's this sort of thing that make Macs "just work". If MS doesn't take the initiative to make W
          • Sure. Like Apple doesn't work with ATI or Nvidia on any of it's drivers.
            Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.
            And I really wish you would tell the Mac users at my office that I support that it "just works" because they call me for support when it "just isn't working".
            I use and work with OS X. It's a decent OS but it has it's problems and this bullshit "it just works" crap is getting seriously tired. It's
            • Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.

              Because you aren't paying attention. It has nothing to do with the video driver, and everything to do with what services the OS provides.

              It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not). Windows, apparently, doesn't do that. But
              • "It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not)."

                So let me get this straight - it's the OS's responsibility to tell the underlying hardware what features it has? Even though the hardware may or may not support the feature? I be to differ. The driver on Windows exposes the hardware capabilities of the device to the operating system. So you don't have a situation where
    • They are there. Those are options in the drivers for ATI cards at least. The difference betwen Windows and OS X is that that latter offers control for such features outside of the driver.

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