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PC Games Go To Boot Camp

Posted by Zonk on Mon Apr 10, 2006 02:36 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.

  • 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, @03:28PM (#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.

      • 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

  • 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.

    • Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs?

      The debate about whether Apple or typical PC laptop has raged for a decade. The debate about OS X versus Windows for speed has not slacked either. Now, we can actually benchmark them. They seem to be benchmarking about the same as the top of the line PCs. This is good news for Apple customers, since it means they are functional using both systems, especially for game

  • 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, @03:13PM (#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 that's with an underclocked GPU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frankie (91710) on Monday April 10 2006, @03:16PM (#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, @03:21PM (#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, @03:35PM (#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, @04:14PM (#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.
    • ... 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
    • 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, @03:21PM (#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.

    • 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
          • 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
              • "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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