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- Your Mac's Specs
- 13'' MacBook Pro (Mid 2012)
I'm curious to know how well Boot Camp works with Mac generally. Is it good for gaming? If so how smooth does it run?
Well, I think it helps to understand what Boot Camp actually is - I say this because nothing actually runs "under" Boot Camp. Boot Camp is a set of utilities that helps facilitate the installation of Windows in a parallel fashion to Mac OS X.
Modern Macs with Intel processors are not very different from a typical PC. In fact, you can pop a Windows 7 disc into any Intel Mac and install it without having to do anything special, completely eliminating Mac OS X and essentially making it identical to your run-of-the-mill PC.
Boot Camp is just a fancy name for two things - a partitioning utility to split the drive into two partitions and a set of hardware drivers (so that you don't have to source these on your own, if Windows doesn't automatically configure drivers for things like your graphics card and sound card, amongst others). Finally, it contains the Apple Software Update program for Windows and a Control Panel applet for tweaking settings for the Apple-specific hardware features (like the iSight camera, Mac-specific keyboard, etc).
So, when you run Windows, there's no "emulation" layer per se. As far as Windows knows, it's running on any other PC and so the only limitation is the power of your hardware. In short, it will run exactly the same as it would run on an equivalent PC of the same specification. So, if a game runs great on a Dell with an i5 processor at the same speed and Intel integrated graphics, then it would run the same way on a similar Mac.
Make sense?