cross over application for games

blascockblascock
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Hey, I want to be able to play PC games on my mac, but I don't want to sacrifice the hard drive space to install windows. I heard of this cross over program and was wondering how well it works? and if i will be able to play the latest games at relatively good speeds



thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    Crossover isn't very good at all. Some people from the open source community got together and basically decided to reverse engineer Microsoft's proprietary DirectX drivers. So far they've only got up to DirectX 7 working and at that not very well. I played Half-Life 2 right through with it but it's not all that stable and I have to lower the graphics. It also doesn't support copy protection on CDs/DVDs so installing games is a pain.



    The only games I've managed to run have been Steam games like Half-Life. I'm actually considering using Bootcamp because I installed it on someone else's machine and it is just so much better for games. I don't know what Parallels have up their sleeves for 3D acceleration but I wish they'd hurry up. If it's anything like the DirectX in VMWare then I'd say it's not worth waiting for. I would have installed Windows already but I'm out of disk space too. I would only give Windows 10GB but I only have 10 left of my 60GB drive so I'll have to free up 5-10GB somewhere first. I actually did this already but my drive is fragmented so Bootcamp wouldn't partition it and I have to format it so I didn't bother.



    I was going to go with external booting but Windows being the craptacular piece of crap that it is doesn't boot from external drives. I have an 80GB USB drive lying around that I was going to use.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    blascockblascock Posts: 153member
    Damn, I guess I'll have to just install a windows on my machine. Does Vista work with bootcamp?
  • Reply 3 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Blascock


    Does Vista work with bootcamp?



    Yup:



    http://youtube.com/watch?v=5GMebe4EQuA



    Now that the firmware on the Macs includes the old bios stuff, they behave like standard PCs when installing Windows. Bootcamp actually plays a very small part in the process. It is used to burn a drivers CD that you run after Windows is installed and it partitions your drive. The actual Windows installation happens without Bootcamp at all. When you insert an XP disc, you can boot it just as you would a Mac disc. You can actually install Windows on its own.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    blascockblascock Posts: 153member
    Does anyone know where i can find performance marks or comparisons of imacs and mac pros compared to regular pcs?



    For some reason i stil think games would run better on a pc with the exact same specs as an imac
  • Reply 5 of 6
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    The Register reported that the Mac Pro running Windows XP was the fastest PC in the UK.



    Although, at that time it wasn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, so to speak. ;-)
  • Reply 6 of 6
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Blascock


    For some reason i stil think games would run better on a pc with the exact same specs as an imac



    That reason is probably that Apple write the graphics drivers for the GPU in the Macs whereas the graphics card manufacturers write them for general PCs. However, I think the biggest difference you'll see is because Apple underclocked their GPUs so the machines run cooler. To see a performance difference of 30% between Mac and PC is not unreasonable in cases like this:



    http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6484737.html



    I think some people have reported 5-10fps increases from altering the clock speed. Also bear in mind that some tests were done using older versions of hardware drivers and most benchmarks are neither conducted properly nor without some level of bias.



    The thing about the PC will always be that you can buy a cheap GPU upgrade that will be faster than the X1600 but having used the X1600 for a number of games, the performance is pretty impressive. I played Half-Life 2 with everything on max at 1680x1050. The only things I put down were FSAA, which was off and AF, which I put on 8x instead of the max 16x and it looked and played beautifully. Someone said they ran F.E.A.R in a similar way and I'm going to get it eventually.



    Same deal with FarCry, which goes up to max. These games are among the most demanding PC games available and the fact they play this well shows the X1600 card is very capable inside the Intel Macs.
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