How to unlock your Mac’s potential and play all the games you want

In this guide, we will cover all the methods available to play games on your Mac, from the easiest, better known methods, to the more “obscure”, yet highly efficient ways.

[kB0]

Throw it out a buy a Windows PC:) Thats how you truly unlock mac's power for gaming!

[yugovega]

amen. mac is overrated

[grailly]

I having tried 3 out of the 4 methods, I don't fully agree with this articles performance commentaries. I would say native mac games run the best(I get great performance on SC2 for example) then bootcamp, then wrappers. I would imagine virtual machine has the worst performance.

the problem when talking about performance is that it heavily depends on the coding. SC2 for example runs really well in native, but ports like civilization4 run horribly, so bad you might as well run it in bootcamp.

then there are the "lazy ports" like the witcheries games that are in fact just the pc game with a wrapper.

wrappers also depend a lot on your hardware, it's kinda luck based, some games will run fine and other will be missing effect and will only be able to run at certain configurations.

what I do is I play my real native games on mac(blizzard, valve and indie games) and play the rest on bootcamp.

[ricmcgamer]

You have a very good point here but you also need to consider that even good native ports will suffer from the fact that DirectX is better supported and has better performance than OpenGL which is why in some cases, even great OSX ports will not be as fast as Bootcamp....

[Moncole]

Sell it. Use the money you got from selling it to buy a nice house, care, an amazing PC and retire because Macs are expensive and you can sell it for a lot.

[AmkOwns]

Mac's are mainly for Work
Consoles are for Games
PC's are for Viruses lol

[Amazingmrbrock]

if your getting viruses on a pc your doing something seriously wrong. It's not even a matter of being a pc geek. New windows comes with a half decent virus manager, and a little bit of searching will come up with some better free alternatives (avast, or avg).

[Dan50]

Sandboxing and HIPS should stop malware. :)

[ricmcgamer]

Oh how much hate against Macs and Apple... I love it!

I have to agree that for lots of people, Apple is "better" because Apple makes them and therefore they will look cooler at Starbucks. However lots of people also hate Macs just because it comes from Apple yet they have never tried them themselves...

Macs are more stable and even run Windows better than most PCs! (recent studies show this) They are very expensive compared to CRAPPY laptops but compare them with very high end Windows laptops and the price gap isn't that big.

[Bladesfist]

Except macs are never high end, they always use dated hardware.

[ricmcgamer]

Would you say a 15 inch Macbook Pro has outdated hardware when it is first launched?

[Bladesfist]

I would not expect to be paying over £1.2k for a dual core and integrated graphics card. The 15 inch comes with a quad i7 and a mid range graphics card for £1.8k. Mid range != high end.

http://www.notebookcheck.ne...

[bigbearsack]

I can agree with ricmcgamer. I use the adobe suite on macbook pro osx mountain lion just runs smooth. plus, working on dreamweaver with mountain lion is a breeze going back and forth between pages. Maybe I should of got a high end windows labtop, but the OS makes the difference to me. It's all about your work flow.

[Rhythmattic]

Love how this is a article is about Macs and gaming, yet all the non "sheep" chime in just to say how good their competing systems are..

Its a article on how to get the best out of your Mac if you want to play games on it....

Grow up.

[MGregory666]

Thanks for bringing abit of sanity and much needed maturity Rhymattic :-)

[LAWSON72]

Good luck playing crysis 1,2,3 or the new metro last light. That real potential will be shown on that beautiful retina display at 800x600 because that is all your intel hd 4000 can handle, probably.