Hackintosh Gamers - a question

[tma87]

Right now my hack has a 4870 in it, but i've noticed that OS X is slower than windows for games. This is to the best of my knowledge a limitation of apple's open GL implementation, but i'd just like to know what card i'd have to be running to be able to bridge the gap and get decent performance at either very good or ultra specs for blizzard games.

I think the graphics performance difference between OS X and Windows may have something to do with the competitiveness among GPU companies. It's in their best interest to optimize the hell out of their Windows drivers, as there is a large market of gamers who want faster, faster, faster. How much of that effort actually ends up in their OS X drivers, I don't know. On Windows, I'm pretty sure they have special optimizations, or "shortcuts", that are triggered when the system detects a specific game is running, to make it perform better and faster. On the OS X side, I'm not so sure they have anything similar.

Anyhow, as far as I'm aware, the currently best-performing and OS X-compatible GPU is the GeForce 580. You can head over to one of the "Unigine Heaven" benchmark threads and see for yourself. Personally, I would wait until GTX 680 support arrives (or Radeon 7xxx, for that matter), if I were to build a brand new system. I don't know how long that's gonna take, though.

 

[tma87]

As far as I know, Apple isn't directly involved in the graphics driver development. See this interview for more info: http://themacgamer.com/2009/01/17/inter ... -from-amd/

It seems plausible to me that there's something in the OS, somewhere, that is an obstacle to achieving graphics performance on par with Windows. Now with Diablo III around the corner and a steady influx of new Mac games, maybe Apple will be try to do something.

 

[Ommudra]

planning to do my first ever build late summer, after things are sorted out w Mountain Lion and the Z77 mobos. my intention is to do build an audio production/htpc on OSX, but dual boot to windows for gaming.

i've used OSX exclusively since 2002. but i've concluded, if you're a serious enough gamer to want big 3d games on ultra setting (hence a GTX580 or 680), why use OSX for gaming? all the most serious games available for OSX are oldish (eg Arkham Asylum, Knights of the Old Republic, Portal) or buggy ports (eg Skyrim in a wrapper), or simply not that graphics intensive (eg Civ 5). you can easily procure a copy of windows to get any game and utilize the full power of your machine.

THAT SAID, the apple related gaming community has been picking up a lot. Valve has been trying to enter the OSX space, which will probably ramp up in months to come. so getting an OSX compatible GPU will be smart. just recommend considering dual booting for the best experience with games like Skyrim and others.

 

[Ommudra]

here's a much more technical analysis of how gaming via OSX is sub optimal. the same games professionally ported and offered via Steam work 50%-80% better on Win7 than OSX on the same builds.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve- ... 10432.html

that said, user cowfodder had a different experience: his Nov 10, 2011 post here
viewtopic.php?t=940
i would say, though, it's rather an anomaly that a game wrapped with Cider would be working more efficiently than on its native platform.

 

[8nablator8]

here's a much more technical analysis of how gaming via OSX is sub optimal. the same games professionally ported and offered via Steam work 50%-80% better on Win7 than OSX on the same builds.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve- ... 10432.html

that said, user cowfodder had a different experience: his Nov 10, 2011 post here
viewtopic.php?t=940
i would say, though, it's rather an anomaly that a game wrapped with Cider would be working more efficiently than on its native platform.

and wait till Valve's Projekt Steam'd Penguin will launch in the next Years for Ubuntu^^
Mac OS X will become the only OS without serious Games, but like everything this brings benefits others don't have!

 

[star-affinity]

and wait till Valve's Projekt Steam'd Penguin will launch in the next Years for Ubuntu^^
Mac OS X will become the only OS without serious Games…

”Serious games” will not all of a sudden be available for Linux just because Steam gets released for it. It will still be a lot of work for the game developers to port things to OpenGL and all. I think it will take time before gaming takes off on Linux. Also, how is it driverwise on Linux? I'm not sure the drivers for new graphic cards gets released as quickly as for Windows. Anyone knows?

Anyway, it will be interesting to see. I think it's sad Apple hasn't more focus on gaming performance. At least it would be great if the games that gets released performed somewhat equal to Windows. Will be interesting to see how ”bigger” games perform under Linux.

 

[Koalaman]

I wish there was "gamebooster" for mac.

 

[8nablator8]

from what i heard, they got even better performance and fps with L4D2 on ubuntu than on win7. I'm really looking forward to this..since i'm using linux in my daily mobile driver.

 

[Koalaman]

^ Yup. 11% faster as of last week.

 

[ggeorge]

and wait till Valve's Projekt Steam'd Penguin will launch in the next Years for Ubuntu^^
Mac OS X will become the only OS without serious Games, but like everything this brings benefits others don't have!

The only games I've heard about under this initiative are ones based on Valve's own source engine, which is pretty old at this point.