Gaming on a MAC

This is my first post and I will be buing my first Mac next month.

I am looking at getting a 20" imac with 2gig of ram and a 256meg video card. When I hear some of you talking about playing video games on your mac are you talking about Mac specific games or PC games using boot camp or Parallels? Also if you see a PC game that does not come in a Mac specific version does that stop you from buying it or can a Mac handle PC games with Parallels??

Mostly id imagine its a mac with windows in bootcamp for gaming, i played a couple of games on my mini when i had it in bootcamp and it worked a treat! There arent really that many top of the range games for mac itself so bootcamp helps alot!

World of Warcraft

Parallels = inadequate for gaming, does not support the Direct3D calls that most modern games require for their graphics

Boot Camp = great for gaming; your computer is essentially a PC with the same processor, HDD, RAM, graphics card, etc.

native OS X = ideal for gaming; you just have to find games that are Mac-compatible and preferably UB (Universal Binary; they run equally well on PPC- and Intel-based Macs). I would also expect in the near future a bunch of games ported from PC to Mac which are only going to work on Intel Macs.

I think the going tip on this site is if you really like gaming stick to PC's, but I may be wrong on that. I play wow on my mac, and I love it.

Some games that are ported to Mac (like WoW) will work just fine.
Still, Windows-based computers are the best for gaming. BootCamp is nice, but if you are a serious gamer, then BootCamp isn't for you. If that is the case, then stick with the Windows machines for gaming.
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D3v1L80Y said:

Some games that are ported to Mac (like WoW) will work just fine.
Still, Windows-based computers are the best for gaming. BootCamp is nice, but if you are a serious gamer, then BootCamp isn't for you. If that is the case, then stick with the Windows machines for gaming.
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That pretty much sums it up.

As for gaming, it's a PC world out there. All the great games are written for the PC and as I might have mentioned before some games that are ported for Mac are just horrible. Very few are written from the ground up for the Mac.

Sachsr1 said:

I think the going tip on this site is if you really like gaming stick to PC's, but I may be wrong on that. I play wow on my mac, and I love it.

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I am not a big gaming guy. I just like a few car driving games and possibly a flight simulator. The kids games I have are not 3D and are fairly simple games they like (for now).

Windows is the platform for games since most games use DirectX and its not available for OS X. There are games that are ported for OS X, and even fewer are made exclusively for OS X. If you want to game on your Mac bootcamp is the way to go. You can run Windows in all its glory... eerrr ugliness, and games will run great.