Gaming on a Mac

Hi,

I have always been a PC gamer, but am looking for a laptop for work and those MacBook Pros look very inviting....

If I were to use the PC emulator on a Mac, could I expect similar performance to an equivalent PC using the same hardware (i.e Intel Dual Core, ATi Radeon X1600)?

 

Using an emulator, like Parallels or VMWare? Or course not; you're not only running the emulator in the background but an entire additional operating system as well. Using Boot Camp, however, which is a native dual-boot solution, yes, performance between an equivalent PC and the MBP would be roughly the same.

 

Its not a bad laptop to game on, even while boot camping into windows to play them. If its a route you're considering, note the minimum vista version requirement to have it boot on boot camp, as well as the fact that an x1600 isnt a high end 'gamer card' either.

 

Parallels doesn't support graphics actually...so you can't game using it. Only way you can play PC games under Windows on a Mac is by Boot Camp.

And as the above poster suggested, the ATI Radeon X1600 isn't the best graphics card either.

 

Thanks guys,

I am aware that the X1600 isn't the fastest graphics card, but in the lighter end of the market it is one of the faster cards. I am not talking about running FEAR at max resolution - I just want to be able to unwind with a quick game of Total War or Counterstrike, but while retaining that "mmmmmm" Mac quality. Thanks for the posts.

 

You should be fine; I briefly owned a C2D MBP (I ended up returning it to save the money for the Santa Rosa platform though, and hopefully LED backlit screens), but I did a fair amount of gaming on it. The X1600 actually seemed to perform quite well, and I was able to play BF2142 and CS:S pretty smoothly.

At this point, I think I would probably hold out if I could for the upcoming MBP revision though (which might also have some slightly better GPUs), if you can wait a few more months.