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Any game that would normally work well under those specs? Short of the underclocked video card, which can be fixed with the proper utilities, there's no reason why any game would not work well under BootCamp.

TheOipedOne wrote:

Battlefield 2 runs perfectly well with bootcamp- 2142 should as well.

Sweet!

Interestingly, the 2 demos I've tried on my MacBook in BootCamp have been Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War and Half Life 2. Both run surprisingly well considering the integrated graphics. HL2 does crash whenever it autosaves while loading a new level, which is annoying, but man does it look great.

Last edited by Apelock (2006-10-10 12:37 pm)

Aqua OS X wrote:

akb825 wrote:

Any game that would normally work well under those specs? Short of the underclocked video card, which can be fixed with the proper utilities, there's no reason why any game would not work well under BootCamp.

Breaking news,

Windows application runs in Windows!

news at 11.

Well I was just pleasantly surprised, because games like Halo: UB Mac run like crap on my Mac Pro at 1680 x 1050, but Half-Life runs probably twice as fast.

macmenace wrote:

Aqua OS X wrote:

akb825 wrote:

Any game that would normally work well under those specs? Short of the underclocked video card, which can be fixed with the proper utilities, there's no reason why any game would not work well under BootCamp.

Breaking news,

Windows application runs in Windows!

news at 11.

Well I was just pleasantly surprised, because games like Halo: UB Mac run like crap on my Mac Pro at 1680 x 1050, but Half-Life runs probably twice as fast.

Ya, but Halo is fairly notorious for being a crappy Windows port and an even crappier Mac Port.

ScifiterX wrote:

I'm hardly surprised. Halo is more or less Microsoft game. Except for the ones made for the Xbox and Xbox 360, games are hardly big money for Microsoft. Windows and Office are their money making products and Microsoft is going to program their non-console games to reenforce their big money products' dominance.

Well...

Anita Frazier from NPD Group gave a truly fascinating talk loaded with stats about the U.S. game market. The current installed base for game systems is over 100 million in the U.S. That's 34 million PS2s, 33 million GBAs, 14.5 million Xboxes, 11.2 million Gamecubes, 5.6 million Nintendo DSes, and so on down the line. However, there's a huge amount of overlap, so household penetration of consoles is only 40%. That leaves a lot of clear room for growth. The 140 million game-capable cell phones dwarfs the installed console base, though.

The truly great untapped market is PC games, though. The penetration of PCs, worldwide, is maybe higher than any other game-capable device. PC sales is stronger than the retail sales data would suggest, because (NPD estimates) 400 million in sales in the U.S., annually, goes toward online purchases through digital distribution or subscriptions for online games. Microsoft is pushing gaming as one of the core attractions for Windows Vista and is backing it with a renewed and refined presence at retail (demo kiosks, unified branded "Games for Windows" packaging, stuff like that). There will be a Games for Windows logo program for games that adhere to Microsoft's recommended "best practices" for PC game development. Most of the required stuff is very straightforward, yet somehow is something that game developers in the PC market don't bother to do. Clean and efficient installation is one thing, and so is putting shortcuts in the right place and producing a proper Game Definition File (used by the Games Explorer in Vista to show box art, ESRB data, support parental controls, and so on). Game devs hoping to get the Games for Windows logo need to test that their game runs with under a standard user account in Vista, works properly in both x86 and x64 versions of Vista, supports parental controls, and so on. If a game chooses to support game controllers, it has to support the Xbox 360 controller for Windows (which will be the standard upon which most first and third-party PC controllers are based).

The push to treat Vista like a games platform on par with the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, or other premium modern consoles is a pretty big deal. Microsoft projects that they will sell 80 to 120 million copies of Vista in the first year alone, and with Vista's more robust hardware requirements (especially in the graphics arena), they should all be pretty capable game-playing machines. That's an absolutely enormous market, and has the potential to eventually make the PC the largest single platform for game sales. A game console would be lucky to sell 1/10th that number in its first year. Many of the talks at Gamefest were about instructing producers in ways they can make PC games all behave in predictable and unified ways (with regards to installation and removal, patching, error reporting, and so on), with the ultimate goal of bringing the PC up to the same "it just works" level of console systems.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 … 543,00.asp

Good all-round article. Recommended.

That certainly doesn't disagree with what I said, Bat. While there's potential for big money is games on PC's is there it's just been relatively untapped by Microsoft outside of being a marketing tool for the Windows.

As far as companies like id Software, I'm starting to think the bulk of their profits are split between selling games and shared profits from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD. It would certainly explain why everything they produce, while good, seems so bloody resource hungry.

That's not to say for some companies like Valve, it isn't about the games though. It almost seems since games are the major source of revenue, they have to focus on them and just make them good so they sell on as many systems as possible.

ScifiterX wrote:

That certainly doesn't disagree with what I said, Bat. While there's potential for big money is games on PC's is there it's just been relatively untapped by Microsoft outside of being a marketing tool for the Windows.

As far as companies like id Software, I'm starting to think the bulk of their profits are split between selling games and shared profits from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD. It would certainly explain why everything they produce, while good, seems so bloody resource hungry.

That's not to say for some companies like Valve, it isn't about the games though. It almost seems since games are the major source of revenue, they have to focus on them and just make them good so they sell on as many systems as possible.

id is a bit different, they make games that look good at low settings for people who can't afford the greatest in hardware every few months just for new games. Half life falls in there as well. Most of id's drive is simply to make games look better. But when you can crank up the settings they look beautiful. Games like Fear i swear are only to get people to buy new hardware.

Last edited by Avari (2006-10-12 9:02 am)