General Discussion

Honestly it doesn't make any sense to me at all.  More people would be playing from day 1 if they were allowed too with their Mac's, plus it make the experience shareable to everyone. How come they havn't decided to do this yet? Any clues?

mac where never really ever a popular gaming format.

With the advent of Bootcamp... I think a lot of developers won't even bother since you can make most games work for the mac anyway.

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Originally posted by GLJames
Really only MMO's I see that are Mac and Windows are WoW and few small MMOs

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Actually it mostly boils down to 2 words:

Lazy Developers

DirectX is excessively simple to make games on, incomparison to OpenGL/AL/Input... even though Open is faster, more powerful, and cross platform... it comes to "ease of development".

That's why you see the big guys (id, Maxis, Blizzard) making it in OpenGL... less porting process.

That and blizzard got it's start by porting games to Mac.

Not enough market share.

Macs are weaker then a PC when it comes to parts.  When you include macs in the lowest common denominator when determining system specs, you have to lower it compared to the PC.  Also DirectX does some things far better then other open solutions like OpenGL.  In many scenarios DirectX is faster, its also smaller in texture size.  DDS is one of the smallest file sizes with good compression.

Because no one wants to hear Mac users boast about something else they can do with thier Mac.

1) User base. There are more people running Vista x64 than are running OS X. There are more people running VIsta alone than all the Macs EVER sold or used in history. (These are BIG numbers)

2) Hardware. Apple pretends their hardware is consistent, but the video cards alone between various models would give you 4fps to 30fps in the same game, and this is the same model of Mac.

3) Development platform. Yes OS X has OpenGL, but the way OpenGL hooks into Darwin is very weak. The Aqua (Apple UI) is no where close to be being capable of a doing real gaming. So when devleopers are dropped to OpenGL, they are shoved to a nightmare of problems, many that are specific to OS X.

For example, the whay OS X handles and hands off OpenGL rendering is clunking at best, it is not a fully integrated model, that you get on Windows. (Windows even has better OpenGL support than Linux and other OS X, because of the duality of the DirectX rendering and the driver model in VIsta is far more advanced than either Linux or OS X.

Even if OS X gets a game like WoW, users flip to bootcamp and run it under Windows because the performance is that dramatic of difference.

There are many technical OpenGL issues with OS X and why gaming takes a back seat. From the LVMM tie in to the double bufferinf othe Aqua composer that ties up twice the RAM and is slow to writing to the screen because it does a full double buffer of the image before it it is written to the screen.

XP doesn't have this, as it doesn't have a composer, and VIsta's composer is smart and doesn't suck twice the RAM. Vista's composer also uses a shared memory and texture concept that allows games to run inside a Window with no 'overlaying' at full speed.

There are also locking problems with Darwin at the kernel level that do not exists in Windows (NT Specifically). This means it has less granularity, and gaming is very multi-tasking heavy, so the kernel level lockscause problems in high perofrmance gaming. (People make fun of Windows, but the NT kernel is truly more advanced architecturally than Linux or BSD/OSX)

The Apple display driver model is another problem, as they implemented their own variant to try to reduce the inherent monolithic problems of BSD, but these raise other issues, like the OpenGL tie in and and other things mentioned above.

OpenGL support in OS X, like the GPU drivers are FULLY CONTROLLED by Apple, so that even if NVidia worked with a game provider to get around issues, they would have to petition Apple to support the updates, and THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN VERY OFTEN. This is where hard vendor/hardware lock in like Apple and OS X hold poses problems for their users. (It makes the signed x64bit drivers for Vista look like child's play when comparing this to get Apple to fix something for a video driver or a game)

I could also go into no consistent API platform for gaming beyond OpenGL, where MS provides everything from native (latest version ICD support) of OpenGL, to DirectX for VIdeo, DirectX for user input handling, to even API sets for handling voice, messaging, gaming communication, and even sound. To develop for OSX you are workingwith a mix of APIs that often don't work well together and mostly come from the OSS world, as Apple provides NOTHING substantial for gamers.

OS X is just not designed for gaming.Linux is better equipped for gaming, and it has many inherent issues as well.

Microsoft on the other hand has focus on gaming since the early 90s,and the constant Dir