Game Selection is a JOKE!!!! - Page 2

schmittay,
wow, have a cookie, and u r of course aware that if i bought just one component, u know the one i'm referring to, u'd be eating your words right? the argument wasn't eye candy. try working on your reading comprehension. 19" monitor is what i have on my desktop, yep, your 17 doesn't measure up. try gaming on 19+ and then downgrade to your 17. there IS a difference, and most ppl don't like to make the sacrifice in screen size once they've upgraded. oh yeah, and maybe math classes would help too. what are the actual resolutions u can run in 4:3 supported games without screen res mods on a 17" widescreen laptop? and again, who wants to game on a "squished" 17" when they've had a more robust 19"+ (widescreen or otherwise) experience? the only widescreen i'd even think about gaming on would be a 20" (on the low end), remember that part when i noted that in my first post? good, glad you're catching on.

hmm, and i seem to have mentioned a 4+ hour runtime. to get the 3+ hours i'm assuming u r referring to the 9 cell battery that u paid extra for right? the one that adds to the 7.85lb 6-cell configuration? oh man, 7.85lbs for the "light version"? LMAO!!! your 9300 is also "fatter" than what i had noted. 1.6" is close, but 1.5" was noted as an upper limit and needless to say i and many others much prefer 1" over a 1.5" machine. geez, seems like all of my points still stand.

i'll make u a deal. u come into 2k4 w/ all your goodies turned on on your 17" widescreen and i'll show up on my "blown away" desktop w/ my goodies intentionally turned off and we'll see what happens. headshots are so much easier when i don't have to deal with foliage, coronas, and the like.

{tSc}Mutatio

Super breakout doesn't count lmao

element there are few games on mac, but it doesnt mean there is not any at all

look here - http://www.apple.com/games/

I am very aware of the game selection available for Macs. It's so far from PC gaming in both availability, quality and everything else the words "gaming" and "mac" should never be used in the same sentence.

For a great laugh, look at this claim that you can play Halo on a Mac Mini with it's amazingly super duper high-end ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM over an AGP 4x bus. lmao.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/graphics.html

P.S. I pwn u.

they are saying that they mac mini will perform better than a budget pc with a "intel intergrated graphic chipset" (or what ever they call them) and that is ture.

lol that 9200 won't perform better than the newest integrated Intel graphic chipsets...

a computer will 32 mb graphic ram and 256 regular ram. will run games faster than a computer than share the ram for system and graphic memeory

Element,
Hmm, availability. I'm no a guinea pig so I'm the last person to run out and buy a host of games just because they're released. Much like hardware, i look for reviews and word of mouth to help determine what games to buy. If you think having a hoarde of games available, of which u may actually only play a handfull and enjoy, then i suppose sheer numbers is a good thing. i won't argue the fact that games for Mac should be released along w/ their PC counterparts, they should. however one benefit of this process is that the games u would have ended up playing anyway on your PC, after having become bored w/ the rest of the cookie cutter renditions, most likely will be released in Mac form. the many times i played doom3 after i bought it? once. u think i'm going to complain that it didn't come out for Macs until months later? nope. now if u'd like to argue that Macs in all around fashion should be better gamers simply based on the kind of hardware they run with (excluding the 9200), i'm with you. while the PBs can get you by for many games, it'd definitely be nice to see some optimizations done to get things up to speed.

How exactly r u trying to quantify quality as well as "everything else"? please specify, otherwise ppl r likely to think that "worthwhile" and "argument" should not be used in a sentence describing your issues.

Um yeah, you go ahead and buy that mini to game on... lmao. that's pretty, well, just completely moronic IMO to even begin a Mac gaming commentary using their low end systems, much as it would a $500 Dell, unless of course you like gaming in stop motion.

Edit: after seeing your last few comments which popped up in the time i was writing this. I'd ask you to reconsider your commentary. It seems to be quickly skirting the likes of simpleton flaming commentary. If you have any constructive commentary to add to this thread, please begin doing so in your next few posts. if you aren't going to substantiate comments like: ...then consider not posting them at all. in sum, do your homework before making a performance claim. benchmarks are nice, but personal experience gaming on a specified system is even better, regardless of brand.

p.s. come play in 2k4

Halo with everything turned to high except for lens flares plays quite well at native res on my 17 inch PowerBook.

Can you play Halo on a Mini with everything turned on? No. But you can play it and it will play a lot better than it would on a low end PC with integrated graphics.

did you check out the powerbooks multi-tasking abblity, that is one of it main strong points.

dr150...

On a Mac, work with some video...

BUT...

Also rip some cds, listen to music, copy and paste a few gigs of information, have Photoshop and Illustrator open and running, a few browsers going, maybe even some Word documents, and some Quicktime files...

Then, try that on your Dell.

You'll see the difference that people speak of.

ditto, hell, throw some video encoding at it as well and do what u want on it. no more "encoding thru the night" projects bc the computer (windows system) becomes largely unusable while performing said function. not so, on my lowly iBook.

yeah macs can take app spamming, while i have had my powerbook no matter how much i do run or spam mac os x never crashes.

dont be fooled though, mac os x might not crash but applications crash, i have had firefox crash on me and msn it might be rare but it does happen a way to crash a mac is to open the termianl and start kill certain processes or unloading important drives (yes i have intentionally crashed my computer just to see what a kernal panic looked like).

but applications that are poorly ported form another platform are prone to crash and/or run slowly (such a certain games).

I've been on the PC side games are about all they're good for. Play games, yeah PC are better. But in general everyday tasks, my 900mhz G3 iBook kills that brand new PC the family just bought. In my opinion, all the crap I had to put up with to get that extra power wasn't worth the effort. Call me when the PC gets an OS that works.

I just couldn't resist a wonderful jab at Apple. I like how they look, but nothing I do can be done on a mac except browse the web (thanks Firefox) and use MS Word.

I was reading a macworld article onb Doom 3 here and noticed that the reviewers were bluntly honest and at the end I found this lovely paragraph:

I just want to ask ya'll here if the first thing you thought when reading this sentence here:
...Macs have ADD. That's right, Macs have attention deficit disorder.

See ya later, I'm off to get my mac mini some Ritalin so it can focus better on what I'm trying to get it to do.

it makes sense in a way... that the game might not get the resources it needs bc of the system's multitasking abilities. for example, the processor load on a video encode changes swiftly in response to other system activity. video encoding can take a hit temporarily, as well as during the time that newly opened apps r running, yet when those apps r closed the load appropriates back to the encoding as swiftly as it was reduced, something u don't see in windows. lets hope the gaming issues get solved. that said, i'd make the analogy that perhaps windows machines suffer from "autism", in the sense that they r able to perform well and intensely on one thing very well, but when u ask it to do anything else intense it'll sh!t the bed.

it is ironic however, that the thing which irritates the sh!t out of me re: windows, could be the thing which makes Macs shine in the OS, yet be hindered in games. i.e.-the only way to get somewhat reasonable OS functionality in XP when doing anything resource intensive, is to manually lower the processor priority for the app(s) in the task manager. in OS X, u don't have to do this, as the OS is doing what it should be doing, managing your workload.

I don't buy that. Mac OS X is built on top of Unix (BSD in this case). BSD allows for 40 levels of process priority, easially allowing an intensive game to get the attention it needs. If the developers aren't taking advantage of this, it's not Apple's fault. For example, most pro video encoders can set their background encoding process lower on the priority food chain then the user interface to allow the user to continue to edit.

Windows on the other hand only offers 6 levels.

Yes, but the problem is the Max OS X won't let the game(s) have total priority of all system resources. There may be 40 different levels, but the ability of the Max OS to delegate tasks reguardless of the user's wishes is the root of the problem. I'm sure that buried somewhere in the code is the option to manually set the priority to maximum, but then the system stability would degenerate (you know like how supposedly Windows is unstable). Plus another user here mentioned the autonomous process as a bonus as opposed to manually setting priorities in XP via the System Manager. Personally, my computers are beefy enough as it is that I don't have to do that, but on machines with insufficient resources, that may actually need to be done.

The fact remains that Apple computers can multitask very well, however OS X wasn't designed to be forced to limit all of its attention to one and only one program. From what I've seen using Macs, doing a task alone vs doing that same task and another one uses roughly the same amount of resources (the repeated task) because the Mac OS will not scale the resources fully because it has to hold back in case the user decides to suddenly do something else at the same time (or in some cases, the mac is doing something else without the user being aware of it). This is the consequence of designing software that thinks for you not with you. You might be able to disable some of this, but then it wouldn't be a Mac.

Hopefully with Tiger and with Apple hiring new OGL developers game performance will increase.