Gaming on Macs

Gilga

New Member
I've been a dedicated PC-platform guy for gaming ever since I had a Mac in college and basically Civilization was the only game available for Macs. However, Apple's coming out with increasingly awesome-looking stuff, so I'm considering making a switch. No small part of even considering such a decision comes from having observed several of my uber-WoW-playing co-Redeemeders playing on Macs, so it must work *somehow*.

My specific questions are:
1) How's it work for Blizzard type games that do offer Native Mac support? Presumably the game itself is fine, but something like WoW that is addon-intensive for the full experience ... how's that work? Is there a Curse-Mac addon? Do addons even work?
2) How's it work for non-Mac supported games (e.g. GW2)? Is the whole bootcamp/vine/etc setup a total kludge, or relatively effective?
3) What types of games just don't work well at all on Macs relative to PCs? Anything?
4) With my old Mac (decades ago), PC gaming was the main thing I felt out in the cold on .... I didn't really miss anything else in terms of what PCs could do. Assuming gaming's in a much better place now ... what things do Mac users "miss" these days?
 
1) Addons work without issue. I never ran into any problems with addons on mac.
2) Bootcamp is just windows on your mac hardware. Running GW2 in an emulator would really stink. I don't know, but you can use a program called crossover for certain games. It mimics the windows API, and lets you run some games at native speeds without rebooting.
3) I never have liked playing Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2 on my mac.
4) Still native games. Up until recently, we missed using Quicken. Now good alternatives have arisen.
 
I have limited experience. I have had a mac and a mac book air at that. I would say this about Mac's and gaming. They are not designed to game. That does not mean they do not handle gaming. I believe if you are buying a computer only for gaming do not get a mac. YOu are paying too much for a machine designed to do many other things.

Case in point- A good mac will run about $2,000. A good gaming rig will run you under $1,000. For an old foggy like me $1,000 is a lot of shiney cash in my bank.

However, if you are getting a Mac to do other things and game on the side (see Tree). A Mac is a good alternative or primary choice.
 
I'm not liking this constant reference to Fish as being old, I'm only a couple years behind! o_O

Everything will run great in bootcamp, which is simple these days. Wow will run great in macOs with no addon worries. The brand new macs with retnia screens got a big boost for gaming, but the cost is through the roof.
 
Stick to PC if you want to be able to play everything imo. but there is a fun debate in the subject that is ongoing in my WoW guild, as the guild leader swears by his apple, and the rest of us raz him about wow burning out his graphics card on him 3 times in 6 years. Of course then he gives us a hard time about all the viruses our systems can get. He has had issues playing things like TOR if he has had to use his old version of windows that he doesn't want to pay to upgrade...but then....I wish my system would have lasted 6 years with minimal incidents so....

Oh and Icthus is old.....er Ewoks
 
I made the switch completely a few years ago and only use a Mac. Blizzard games work great, no problems, are are mainly what I play. There are lots of excellent games on Steam for Mac (Portal 1 & 2, Counterstrike Source, Half Life 2, Civ5, etc) as well as a much in the Mac App store. I've had no problem with anything I've purchased through either service on my mac.

I played star wars the old republic via bootcamp, which as was already pointed out, is just running Windows on mac hardware - no emulation. It worked great.

As for virtual machines (I used VMWare and have also used parallels), some games work better than others. I played the original guild wars in a VM and had no issues. You do get better performance running through bootcamp. Honestly though, I find that I just prefer to stick with the games that run directly in the Mac OS.

Of course in the end, as with PC, it all comes down to the quality of the hardware in your Mac. The cheapest Mac with a slower CPU, less ram, and intel video card won't run games as well as a more expensive mac with a faster cpu, more ram, and a better quality video card.
 
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