Apple didn’t release Boot camp until the hacker community managed to solve the puzzle of installing Windows XP on Apple’s Intel machines. It seemed it was living in denial and didn’t want believe that an official software for installing Windows XP on a Mac would be necessary. One of the reasons may very well be the known limitations with Mac OS X, more precise performance and then especially in games. That a Mac has never been a gaming rig is no secret, the performance of a Mac has always been worse than that of a PC. But earlier Apple has been able to blaim the hardware, but now with Apple’s Intel Mac and Boot camp you can actually do a “fair” comparison of the performance in Windows XP and Mac OS X with the same hardware.
At Penny-arcade they’ve done exactly that, alas using some less scientific tests, and concluded that Mac OS X really is considerably slower, at least while playing WoW.
“I’m running WOW at 1440 x 900 with all my graphic settings jacked all the way up. I’ve got spell effects and textures and all that good stuff up as high as it can go. With these settings under OS X I hovered between 15 and 20 FPS. It was just barley playable but for raids and stuff I’d drop down to a lower resolution and take off a few of the fancy effects. Now on the same laptop, but running under Windows with the same crazy settings I averaged between 35 and 40 FPS. That’s a pretty fucking big difference in my book. It was even able to maintain that frame rate in major cities and in a raid out in SS.”
That game developers spend less time optimizing its games for Mac OS X is perhaps an explanation, but Boot camp at least offers gamers the opportunity to peek at Mac, which is, of course, the big deal here as the absence dual-boot has been one of the biggest obstacles for many while peeking at Mac.
Source: Penny-Arcade
