Arguments for and against GW2 On Mac OSX

We had a few of these during the earlier GW days.
I'm in the real life position of buying a new Laptop, and I am heavily considering a Macbook Pro, however having to dualboot Boot Camp every time I want to game is not that ideal(as I am a big gamer).

I have lots of colleagues and friends who have Mac. I think many of them would want to try GW2 if it was announced for Mac. Most of them who likes to game, are looking forward to WoW Cataclysm and Diablo 3! I think GW2 would fit well on the platform.


The arguments against it would be;

- Longer development time
- Would cost more money to make(more staff... and R&D)
- It might create bugs between the windows and mac versions(?)


I don't know how Blizzard have always been so good at supporting both platforms. Blizzard games run well on Mac!


What do you think?

Blizzard is a huge company with tons of resources. It should not be surprising in the least.

Everyone should know by now that Mac's are less Powerful then PC's due to limited hardware, so assuming Guild Wars 2 is built to match the best hardware (probably not) for both platforms we'd be stuck with the best details a mac can handle.

Then again more developers are pushing for Mac support, Valve as an example just started supporting Mac and they've made a large amount of money because of it. Latest game by Valve to support mac's was Team Fortress 2.

Actually, that is incorrect. When a Mac is brand new, they usually can compete for a couple years with a PC until their hardware becomes outdated. The problem you mean is that Macs cannot be upgraded (except the Mac Pro). Take a look in the apple store and you'll see the Macs are now sporting some of the higher end Radeon HD video cards. Infact the second tier iMac right now can play new games on max settings as we speak. Plus, they've had right clicks and scroll wheels for at least 10 years now so Macs basically are laptop PC today if you understand them at all.

I would like to see GW2 on OS X because it would give me more options. I don't know what my best computer will be when GW2 comes out.

you're all sheep, linux has the answer to all your gaming needs

This.

Why?
-Upgradable hardware
-Mad hax with CPU usage (Seriously. I can run Compiz and watch a movie on each side of the cube with like 20% of my CPU usage. Compare this to Windows, watching two videos side by side freezes me up.)
-More stable
-Almost no viruses
-More secure (No worrying about getting your password haxd - Unless you're stupid, of course. But then, only BSD can fix that.)

Alternatively - Guild Wars already runs well under WINE (So I'd assume just as well on Crossover), so there's not really a reason to port it. Unless the devs are bored, of course. Just make sure GW2 runs well under WINE/Crossover and there's not a problem, is there?

(Or nVidia/ATI can stop being asses and let VM companies properly access the video card)

DirectX vs OpenGL

Lol, I'd hate to break your spirit but Mac's will never and have never competed with PC's, they're always 2 - 3 generations behind as an example when Mac's started using the G92 nvidia cards the GTX 280, etc was being launched for the PC. Don't even get me started on the price to performance ratio, for the same price as a decked out top of the line Mac I could get two equally performing PC's.

Mac's have been and always will be Overpriced and underpowered.

As an example Apple charges $2,860.00 USD for a dual-Quad Xeon System. For roughly $300 I could get a Core i7 930 which will outperform the Xeon's, hell throw in the newest Core i7 with 6 cores and I'll 12 thread all over the Mac's.

Now let's move onto the GPU offerings, GT 120's or a 4870, PC's are currently on 5890 / GTX 480's. This is roughly 3 generations behind the best PC parts and if you look at the price apple is charging ($240.00 for a 4870) and then compare it to something like the 5770 which will outperform the 4870 AND offer DirectX11 for about $170.00 you should finally realize Apple is horrible.

PS: Mac's do not offer A) Triple Channel Memory, B) Decent GPU use, C) DirectX 11, they are good for one thing and one thing only and that is a giant ass paper weight when they break and you're charged $400 to replace a Power Supply which if the said system was a PC you'd spend $80.00 and be good for another 4 years.

I'm looking for a ultraportable with serious power on the hood. The Macbook Pro 13 offers pretty good graphics, and a decent C2D, with a great display and 8-9 hours of battery life.

The only comparable ultraportable I found was a Sony Vaio Z, and that one costs around 4 times at much, clocking out at over 4500 USD with the SSD option, full HD, i7, and all that. That's a lot to give for a machine.
The MBP just seems like a great value for all the power you get.

On the apple site there seems to be a lack of information when it comes to any Mac Book Dedicated GPU's so I'm going to assume they're using an Onboard Chip, which I'm going to say will probably get smoked by any similarly priced SLI-Laptop. Hell even a GTM 280 chip would smoke a Macbook and they're not even expensive.

I can't talk about Mac Pro as I don't know much about them, but using the research I gathered from my search for the powerful Ultraportable gaming machine I am looking forward with great battery life, I also think that lots of other things come into consideration.

- The Footprint - How much power can you fit in a small chassis? What's the quality of your fan and heatsinks, to keep the components cooled down, when they are so compressed.

- The Build Material - When you carry your laptop around, can it withstand the tear and wear by everyday life - spills, crums, bumping into people with it in your bag, carrying it around for 8-10 hours a day, having your kid drop it on the floor and so on. Quality of the chassis itself? plastic or something better? how about the display? is it reflective? hows the contrast? saturation? colors? brightness? viewing angles? what about the battery? how long can it go? how about the fan? how loud is it? hows the internal temperaturs? how good is the machine at spewing out the air?

- The Weight - If you carry it around all day, the weight matters. How light and slim can you keep it, to make it good to carry around!


It seems to me, that the Macbook Pro has a higher price because it has these things like a very high quality screen. Virtually ever LED display I've been looking at for the last couple of weeks in stores have been horrible. LED laptop displays just suck. They all skimp out, because its not that, what the consumers look at, at first.
The machine is made from aluminium - Better at absorbing heat, good build quality, there is a backlight keyboard, it has one of the best keyboards I have seen, with no flex.
And it has quite the graphics card(320m) for such a small chassis.

I don't know. It sounds like a good deal to me, based on what you get.

If we're talking about Power as in the Physical Power Supply PC's cram more into a smaller space, if we're talking about CPU + GPU combined total power PC's again cram more into smaller spaces.

The Build material is lacking on PC's if you go to low-end manufacturers, I'm talking about Dell, Gateway, etc, etc if you however compared a good company like Falcon-NW in the PC Laptop market though the Build Quality is perfect, nothing is lacking.

The Weight: This depends on how much hardware you want, sure anyone could make a light laptop but that's what netbooks are for. If you want a laptop for a gaming Replacement or for Graphical Editing on the go a PC with OS X / 7 dual-booting will smoke any mac book pro.

Mac's have a higher price because Steve Jobs refuses to allow third parties to produce anything apple, if third parties could produce Apple computers much like any company can produce PC's right now the price would be driven down quickly. Additionally buying a PC laptop and adding Mac OS X as a dual-boot is a great option, you get the Power, Reliability (Assuming you don't get Flash Hacked) and price you want.

You can't compare a Xeon system with an i7/5/3 because one is for personal use and one is for servers/workstations.

That said, it's obvious you're paying a premium for anything Apple other than certain high-end items (high-spec workstations & macbook pros usually fall under this exception). Typically, the only things they do better than everyone else are marketing and gimmicks, but there will always be people that take the bait and Apple knows this.

I'm talking about overall value for money. Heat, battery life, performance, footprint, weight and slimness, build quality, screen/keyboard/trackpad/speaker quality...


I don't know what Falcon-NW is. Probably don't have them in my country. Same with Gateway, Sager and Clevo.

My experiences from Dell's XPS 13, has just been talks of overheating, dissapointing battery life, and weak GPU performance. I heard some of their bigger laptops were supposed to be okay, but the horror stories about their customer support has scared me away. ( http://www.ihatedell.net/ )


And if you want a light and small laptop, with long battery but want the full power of a notebook? Like the Vaio with a 4000 Dollars pricetag! It's 1.4 kilos! That's light enough to carry around for 10-12 hours!


I think that's a very generalised and simplistic statement. There is much more to it than that, though I agree that they have a Iron Grip mentality that looks very monopoly - Sometimes even like they have turned into the 1984 image they tried to "fight" back then. Sort of ironic; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

From what I've seen the quality of the stuff they do is very high, and that's why they are getting increasingly popular. I suspect that's why Steam and Valve also jumped on the bandwagon!

The trend in gaming is towards consoles not other computer platforms.
So it would seem the ball is in apples court or that of third party developers to write software to enable Macs to run pc or console software and to do it well.
Either that or there will have to be a Playstation card that you can put in your computer and to be honest that's probably what will happen eventually.

Its just a fact that there has to be a platform available with a large enough number of gamers for someone to write or port a game across to that platform.
I do not believe the Mac has those numbers.
Go into a computer store and see the number of Mac games compared to Console or PC games, even the pc is losing ground to the almighty console.

My local computer store now devotes a very small section of the store to PC software Just one small display of new titles and a similar sized section for second hand titles.
It looks really tatty compared to the huge shelf space devoted to Playstation Nintendo and Wii, give it another 5 years and maybe there will be a thread asking for the Pros and Cons of making GW 3 available for the PC.

I believe that just because there are not lots of Mac Games, that there are not a lot of people that would like to game on Mac. It's just this backwater thinking by Apples part, that they think Gaming should take less priority than Music and Video, which I think is wrong, when they are so clearly aiming for the entertainment marked as well, as the power users.

Not really a suggestion here that I can see.
That's the main reason this won't happen.

$300???

So your PC is just a CPU?

Get the sony z series you'll love it.

The only thing irritating about the z series is the vaio programs ... takes up almost half the hard disk space. so if you do decide to get this machine, you might want to consider the non-SSD drive version, the one with the non-SSD drive has a 500GB hard drive, (its also much cheaper), so you still have lots of hard disk space left. And it has a finger print security thingy <3 .

If you really want to carry around your laptop a whole lot with you, The z series is the choice, also IMHO, its the best looking PC laptop on the market right now, the rest are chunky/bulky and fat. Runs GW perfectly, hopes it will run GW2 as well...

Mac = work
PC = Play

As far as the MBP 13" goes, it was still running on last gen hardware (core 2 duo etc.) while the 15 and 17" got updated with more recent hardware. If i recall correctly, the 13" has something like a GeForce 9400 (not sure about this one though). The new larger models come with 330M videocards. When it comes to gaming, these will run GW fine, but will have a hard time with more recent games on high settings and resolutions.

I recently changed my laptop and for a time i considered the MBP. However, a few things made me choose a PC instead.
1. High price tag for the components even taking into account the style battery life etc.
2. You cannot remove the battery. Now this is a big issue for me since most of the time the laptop is plugged in and i don't want to wear down my battery due to repeated use for nothing. Leaving it plugged in when the battery is full can ruin your battery and lithium batteries have a fixed amount of charging cycles before they start to loose their efficiency.
3. The decision to use 330M GPUs while the last gen had 9600M (which at least was decent for gaming)

As far as the iMacs go i can't comment, but i'd assume it's probably similar when it comes to hardware vs price. To sum it up GW on mac: yes, only if it does not affect how the PC version will look.

EDIT: A PC would have suited my needs more, but my research department was only willing to pay for a laptop...

From what I have noticed over the whole development of Apple Computers they see Gaming as something that's nice to offer their customers as a relaxation option from the real work their computers do but by no means a speciality.
They have cut out a niche market and stuck with it, and its the very opposite of PC design.

PCs seem to do everything with brute force, the thinking seems to be if you take a fast enough processor, a halfway decent graphics card add Lots of Memory you can do anything.

These days Apple seem to be moving the company away from the Apple Macs connection with Music and Design and getting more into Multimedia and Communication.

Immersed as I am in the PC world I would love an Ipad

Considering that the current Macs ARE PCs in every sense of the word, that should mean that Apple is no longer confining itself to it's little niche, and is indeed brute forcing it's way through everything just like the beige boxes do?

The only thing keeping Apple from being a gaming platform is it's OS and corporate obstinance.

Boot camp, install Windows, no need to waste limited dev resources on a Mac version of GW...

Most games that are available for PC and Mac run better on Windows on the Mac anyway, so meh.

You can though, can't you?

Touchscreens suck. That is all.

OFGS! (oh, for god's sake) not another GW on Mac thread!

It doesn't matter a rat's ass what anyone thinks about whether an OSX version of GW2 is possible, likely, and/or worthwhile. It only depends upon whether or not ANet (or whoever) thinks it would be worthwhile to do it - which is not likely.

It seems to me that anyone who is willing to pay the extra money for a Mac should be willing to shell out for Win7 as well - or at least, some emulator.
At least the OP had sense enough to ask about an OSX version, instead of simply if GW1/2 would play on a Mac.

The bottom line is (still) - a Mac is essentially a "PC" hardware-wise. The best way to run GW on a Mac - for the best fps and graphics - is to install Windows. Next best is to run Crossover Games, Wine, or some other emulator under OSX, for reduced performance.

Btw, although most people will "dual boot" OSX and Windows using Bootcamp, you could just install Windows and not use OSX at all.

Considering they are ruling the mobile world and will soon (I can't even lie, considering how rapid technology is growing) take over general altogether, you are soon going to be surrounded by them. I'm not saying Mouse and Keyboard are dying, just touchscreen is getting some real ground here.