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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Hardware, Software, Apple

Current and future gaming on the Mac

MacNewsWorld has a pretty good in-depth overview up about Mac gaming: where it's at and where it's headed. The basic story is that the three things that have historically held Mac gaming back behind PCs (the technology differences, the OS, and the smaller installed base) are slowly disappearing. With Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel, the introduction of Boot Camp and increasingly easy development in OS X, and the growing popularity of the platform, gaming is actually bigger on the Mac than it's ever been.

But there is still a huge obstacle, and that is DirectX. Though there are ways around it (Freeverse actually mentions the Unity engine in the article), many developers are stuck developing in DirectX, and that leaves the Mac platform out of the loop. And there really isn't anything comparable to it in OS X, either. Graphics hardware remains a problem, but that just harkens back to the biggest problem of getting games on the Mac: support from Apple. Some developers say that there aren't games on the Mac because Steve doesn't want them there, and until Apple shows evidence to the contrary, PC will always be the gamers' platform of choice.

[Via IMG]

Filed under: OS, Software, Productivity

Parallels Desktop 3 officially released

After teasing us by announcing a release candidate for beta testers (and a sale that is now over) and posting videos of Quake 4 - a very resource-intensive game - running impressively well in Parallels, this powerful new v3.0 of the leading virtualization suite for Mac OS X has been released. Offering significant new features like we already mentioned, such as the highly-anticipated 3D acceleration (XP for now, Vista to come) and SmartSelect for specifying files types to open in apps across virtualized OSes, this could easily be called the most significant release of Parallels since the advent of Coherence Mode.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 sells for $79.99 and is ready for download now, with 15-day trial keys are available to those who already used trial keys for previous versions.

Tip of the Day

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