Playing PC Games on Mac

Ok I am planning on buying a imac 24 inch. I am going to upgrade it to 2 gigs ram. Also I am going to upgrade the video card to the Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT. This is the best graphics card supported by the 24 inch imac. I want to play games on this mac but, I need to know something. Can I play PC games on a mac using the Boot Camp or Parallels software? Will there be problems or slowdowns? Thanks for any feedback.

I have a 2.0 ghz macbook with 1gb of ram. I've used both crossover and bootcamp both have far exeeded my expectations for gaiming, and thats just using the peice of crap graphics card. I've currently installed hl2 and counter strike source with crossover which work unbelievably smooth with moderate settings. I've installed San andreas and battlefield 1942 on bootcamp both of which work fine. I doubt you'll have anyproblems good luck

Espescially with the Nvidia and that much very doubtfull you'll have any problems. Just stay away from Splinter Cell: Double Agent, it has MAJOR MAJOR bugs, espescially with Dual Core processors. Otherwise, knock yourself out. I have a 2GhZ iMac 20" Intel Core Duo w/ 1gig ram and ATI X1600 graphics card. I can play games with ease.

Just go with Boot Camp if you are wanting to play games.

Thanks a lot for answering my question. Will my mac play game like Half life 2?
It says you need a 2.2 ghz processor, but is that for a Pentium 4 processor or does this apply for the dual core 2?

Use Boot Camp, Parallels isn't ready for prime time as far as games are concerned.

Parallels doesn't support Direct3D and emulates your video card to a fairly low-powered feature set. It doesn't matter what kind of video card is in your computer, Parallels will run games the same: poorly.

In BootCamp, your computer is a PC for all intents and purposes. It will run like a Dell, IBM, HP, etc. of the same spec.

Choobus said:

Thanks a lot for answering my question. Will my mac play game like Half life 2?
It says you need a 2.2 ghz processor, but is that for a Pentium 4 processor or does this apply for the dual core 2?

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It'll run fine, just don't expect it to run at the native resolution of that 24in screen.

on my Mac Pro, i use Bootcamp to switch between Mac and PC mainly because of Wavelab and PC Games.

all i had to do was make sure to update my video driver, get all the windows updates (all the usual PC things one would do). and it runs like a dream, no issues, i love it.

the kinds of games i play on Windows using Bootcamp are Unreal, Mech Warrior. i'd fully expect if i installed anything else it would run just as well, all with the graphics settings at full. great frame rates and response times, it's amazing.

I also played games on my 20 inch iMac with bootcamp & i can say that i was
with good results....

It appears that bootcamp is the answer for playing PC games on a MAC but I don't see anyone saying they play MMORPG's on a MAC. Anyone have good or bad experiences trying to play one of the HUGE games such as World of Warcraft on a MAC?

Steve-H said:

It appears that bootcamp is the answer for playing PC games on a MAC but I don't see anyone saying they play MMORPG's on a MAC. Anyone have good or bad experiences trying to play one of the HUGE games such as World of Warcraft on a MAC?

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It will run just like it does on a regular Windows machine of the same/similar specs.

You can actually run World of Warcraft under OS X.

mynameis said:

It will run just like it does on a regular Windows machine of the same/similar specs.

You can actually run World of Warcraft under OS X.

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Thanks for the quick response! Now all I have to decide is...do I wait for Leopard before taking the Mac plunge!?

World of Warcraft works quite nicely on my ibook G4, with 512 mb of ram. (I would prefer to have 1gig for WoW.)

dewyjuhl said:

I have a 2.0 ghz macbook with 1gb of ram. I've used both crossover and bootcamp both have far exeeded my expectations for gaiming, and thats just using the peice of crap graphics card. I've currently installed hl2 and counter strike source with crossover which work unbelievably smooth with moderate settings. I've installed San andreas and battlefield 1942 on bootcamp both of which work fine. I doubt you'll have anyproblems good luck

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So does Crossover perform as good or better than Bootcamp?

Hey all, first post! I'm thinking about a 20" or 24" iMac w/ the 256mb graphics card (or Nvidia for 24") and the faster processor option. Maybe 2 gig of ram. I'm only going to use it for Hl2 and steam. Also as a Mac desktop (only using xp for Hl2). Has anybody used this (or similar set up) with success? Or any reccomendations? Thanks.

I got a 15" MBP a couple weeks ago and I got Parallels with it since after rebates it ended up costing me about $10. I don't really do a lot of notebook gaming, but the only thing I'm bummed about so far with Parallels is that it doesn't seem to take full use of the hardware (i.e. video card) when Bootcamp would. On the other hand it's cool that you can run both OS's at the same time with Parallels. Does anybody think that Parallels would get to the point of being able to at least take full advantage of the video card? I'm waiting for my extra 1gb of RAM to show up so that XP would have it's own gig of RAM to work with, but not being able to use graphics to its full potential kinda blows. Not sure I want to split my HD into two partitions for an OSX/XP Bootcamp scenario either. It's not fair!

Parallels doesn't support 3d graphics yet, so if you wanted to play any decent games, you'd have to use bootcamp.

StretchR said:

Parallels doesn't support 3d graphics yet, so if you wanted to play any decent games, you'd have to use bootcamp.

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or crossover

I recently bought a 24" iMac with 2GB of RAM and the 256MB Graphics Card. I installed Bootcamp and have been playing Battlefield 2 on it. So far, I am very very happy with how well it has been working. Quicker load times, not a single crash, and the performance is outstanding even at the highest resolution.

The only problem that I have that I cannot figure out is I cannot run the native resolution (widescreen) of 1920x1200.