“Gaming on the Mac, even after the Intel switch, is often still perceived as a joke. Although id, Epic, and Blizzard have worked diligently on their own titles in the past, gaming on the Mac today is still widely seen to be in the same state as it was 5 to 10 years ago: stale and unmoving, aside from the occasional crossover hit. Graphics cards on anything but Apple’s professional-level (read: very expensive) Macs are still unimpressive and unappealing to anyone who takes gaming seriously. “For people with the high end gaming rigs, Mac hardware can still be a joke,” one reader complained to me recently,” Jacqui Cheng writes for Ars Technica.
“But for those who are able to make do with the Mac’s limited selection of supported graphics cards, it’s the state of the ports that seems to really be holding things back. Ports of games to the Mac just plain suck; they are usually slow, buggy, and ‘half-assed’ compared to their PC counterparts,” Cheng writes. “This is due in part to the fact that that many games are now DirectX-based, Microsoft’s Windows-centric gaming API. Porting a game to OpenGL is difficult, and the number of game developers working natively in OpenGL seem to be getting smaller every day. The end result is that developers throw together Mac-compatible versions as an afterthought, and are also constantly playing catch-up to release those versions after their superior DirectX counterparts.”
Cheng writes, “The good news is that where EA goes, others may follow.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Michael” for the heads up.]