It seems that every time someone mentions gaming and Mac in the same sentence, most people will say it’s a bad idea. However, in this article I will detail the reasons why it isn’t as bad as people may think.
First off, you have to find games that will actually run on your version of OS X. In my case; OS X 10. If you head into the Mac App Store, you’ll find some cool titles like Sim City 4 and Hitman Absolution, as well as a great variety of classics, like RollerCoaster Tycoon and all of the original Grand Theft Auto games. However, there isn’t a great variety of triple A titles available. Head over to OpenEmu and you’ll find support for a variety of retro consoles, such as the Sega Genesis, Gameboy and Nintendo Entertainment System, but this is an emulator for older consoles, and so you won’t find any recent releases. Jump into Origin and you’ll find Sim City and the Sims 3, along with some older games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum. However, you won’t be seeing any newer titles on the service available for Mac, such as Battlefield 4.
On the other hand, when you head over to Steam, it may take you by surprise. You’ll see some big titles such as BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider and Metro LastLight available on the service, and a lot of great indie titles. Also, all Valve games are available for purchase and play on Mac too.
At the time of writing this article, I am using a late 2012 iMac. This is in no way a gaming PC, as it’s designed specifically for graphics manipulation packages and video editing packages, such a Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. However, under the hood it does have some pretty respectable system specs. It features a Quad-Core Intel i5 processor, clocked at 3.2 GHz. 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, an Nvidia GT650M Integrated Graphics Card and a 1TB 5400-RPM hard drive.
During my tests playing games such as The Walking Dead, I achieved great results. Averaging around 50 frames per second. The game is in no way resource demanding, but when played at 1080p resolution at maximum settings, it is a very aesthetically pleasing game, with a very stylistic art style. Taking it up a notch, I tested Metro LastLight. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly as many options in regards to graphic quality that is has on Windows, being just a simple slider, which is incredibly disappointing. This does however make configuring the graphic options incredibly easy and user friendly. The gameplay is fine, but it takes a while to get used to how the mouse acceleration works on OS X10. However, once you get used to this, it’s a really solid and beautiful game to play, and the visuals are truly remarkable.
Moving on, I looked at BioShock: Infinite; A game with absolutely gorgeous and breath-taking graphics. As in the majority of videogames, there are a lot of options in regards to the graphic quality, allowing for customizable settings to allow the game to run smoother on different setups. It’s a beautiful looking game, even on last generation consoles.
Last, but certainly not least, I tested my iMac by playing Tomb Raider. On my current setup, I achieved around 40 frames per second on high detail. But when reading game ratings, it’s apparent that others with better systems easily achieved the vSync 60FPS limit. Unlike a lot of DirectX games that have moved to Open Source; this game has really retained a lot of the correct details and effects.
To be perfectly honest though, there really is nothing stopping you from buying a copy of Windows and installing it via Bootcamp. This enables you to play almost every videogame you could possibly want, but you’ll probably be surprised on how many games that can run natively on OS X just as well as they would on a PC.
Don’t get me wrong though, I love my Mac; It does what I need it to. I run a lot of more of my games on Windows, achieving high FPS without any problems. This proves that there is not a problem with the hardware achieving the same standard, but if you want and need all the great other features that a Mac has to offer, and just want to do the occasional gaming, a Mac is perfect and will do you very well. However if you are set on gaming, you could build something much better for substantially less.
For more information on gaming on Mac’s, Photo/Video editing software you take a look at some Gamer Headline’s articles on the subject you can click here!
