Five things Apple can do to bring gamers back

"Apple's hardware is much faster than almost any standard Windows PC out there-- just ask any Photoshop or Final Cut guru."

ERRRRRRRRR...... what the frick are you talking about.. PC's a more powerful in general - what a bold and retarded statement you have made! MACs are always one step behind PCs, like MACs getting each gen Intel chip later than PCs .. every single time.. oh dear!

Photoshoppers use MACs a lot cos they look good and Final Cut only runs on MAC's - go into any hi-end video edit suite and they'll be running custom build PC's. Trust me on that one.

Please stop telling your readers lies in your cheap articles.

Thank you.

I dearly hope Apple does none of the things suggested in this blog. A hardware controller? For games? No.

Personally, I'd feel a bit relieved to know that Apple is or would be working on a tablet than a paltry game controller.

And if it [the controller] resembled anything like the picture given, Dear God... truly save the queen. And the rest of America and foreign consumers.

About issue number 3: The big problem isn't OpenGL so much as the version of OpenGL that is included in Mac OS X. Last time I checked it was about four years behind current and that was well over a year ago.

Another huge problem is in driver optimization and platform optimization of the game code though the second one should be somewhat less of an issue with the switch to Intel.

Personally I say if you want to play games just get a console or boot into Windows. We do have some good shareware games on the Mac though.

"Apple needs to give people more video card options. Even on the Mac Pro the options are slow, mediocre and $1650 workstation card.

Somebody please tell me why Apples can't use "regular" video cards."

The reason Apples can't use regular (off-the-shelf) video cards is likely due to the fact that they want to keep the amount of hardware that they have to support as small as possible. After all, when Nvidia doesn't write a proper driver for Vista, people have this tendency to blame Microsoft for breaking their video cards. And you're not going to find Nvidia or ATI jockeying for position to rewrite drivers for computers that hold 7.6% of the home computer market.

However, I will agree with several of the commenters that hardware is a major sticking point with the Apple lineup. The current set of Intel graphics processors are nice, but they lack in-hardware transform & lighting and support for shader model 3.0. The next iteration of Intel's graphics processors will support these, as well as a number of other features, and it's a lack of this chip that kept me from buying a Macbook after the last revision. Maybe next time around.

I do not agree, though, that Apple should necessarily make it any easier for people to change their graphics cards on, say, an iMac, as that's just inviting the sort of disaster that nearly befell me when I had to switch out the hard drive on my 12" iBook. To make larger amounts of hardware user-swappable would only hurt the design of the computers, and I can tell you for sure that Apple cares more for their design than for your desire to play Quake Wars on a two year-old computer.

As an FYI, Doom 3 was "announced" on a Mac back when Jobs was showing off the Geforce 3 and saying Apple would have it available before any other hardware vendor. Not only did just about every PC manufacturer have a Geforce 3 available before Apple, but iD and Activision released Doom 3 on Windows and waited about a year before letting Aspyr do a port to OSX.

Hauling a game developer out on stage to spout off on Apple's gaming cred is an old trick. Apple hardware will not be a force in the PC gaming world until major publishers are doing simultaneous release on Macs. Given that PC games in general are losing out to consoles, and Apple makes up a shred of the PC market, it ain't happening soon.

@ JeffDM: The $400 Dell (Talking about the E521 on the Walmart page) has a Geforce 6150 and an Athlon X2 in it. I've had one of those video cards before - a putt-putt of a card by modern standards but it'll run a lot more than the Intel 950. Doom 3 ran on it as did Quake 4(slugishly but I could get it up). More importantly, that $400 Dell has a x16 Pci-E slot so I can put in whatever card I like. I have to stop talking about it though or I'll end up owning one :).

@shawn (#22) Have you tried upgraded to the UB of warcraft 3? My Macbook will play it though it staggered until I got the UB. You just have to install War3 and connect to Battlenet. It'll upgrade to a Universal Binary version. Warcraft3 and ioquake3 are some of the only games I've gotten to run on the Macbook.

Paul (#21)-
That is the controller to the Apple Pippin, a "game console" Apple released in the the mid 1990's. According to wikipedia, it was just a cheap computer that ran "Runtime environment derived from Mac OS" and booted from CD (i.e. the game you put in it).

The controller looks like a mix between one of the prototype "boomerang" PS3 controllers and an N64 controller.

Paul (#21)-
That is the controller to the Apple Pippin, a "game console" Apple released in the the mid 1990's. According to wikipedia, it was just a cheap computer that ran "Runtime environment derived from Mac OS" and booted from CD (i.e. the game you put in it).

The controller looks like a mix between one of the prototype "boomerang" PS3 controllers and an N64 controller.

Grrr.... This Direct3D is better than OpenGL FUD really gets old.

Yes, for a while D3D did have more features as standard (e.g. standardised shaders), but the balance has always shifted between the two APIs (D3D was awful before V5). One is not better than the other unless you listen to Microsoft (who have done a wonderful job of locking all the game developers into a proprietry API).

OpenGL speed is poor on the Mac for two reasons. It's not a priority platform for Nvidia and ATI, so driver optimisation is poorer; and it's next to impossible to get a decent card in an affordable Mac.

Justin (#3): Would a $400 Dell have anything but an Intel integrated graphics chip?