ARR and Mac

[Millerna]

Well yea I am clueless on macs, They are nice machines but I dont think they are worth the money. What if you want to upgrade your video card can you open it and change it out? or do you have to spend another 2k for a new one? I like pcs better cuz I know an upgrade wont cost me an arm and a leg.

Depends on the Mac. For their laptops, they're going more and more for a closed design with no easily user replaceable parts. Of course, upgrading a GPU on a laptop isn't easily done on most laptops in the first place. Things like batteries are also no longer replaceable.

iMacs have also been getting more difficult to upgrade parts, and currently I believe only the 27" allows adding RAM (it's a well known fact that buying RAM at Apple is stupid, and very few people do it). In reality though, iMacs are nothing but a laptop pasted on the back of a big screen (a very nice screen though)

Mac Pro is easy to add hard drives, GPU, RAM etc.

While I do have quite a few Apple products, I'm not really an iSheep. I don't HAVE to have every new iPod, iPhone, iPad and whatnot. I have an old Macbook Pro (approaching 7 years old now, my mother still uses it for gaming of all things ...) which I got as a bonus from work. I have a Macbook Air which I carry on the train to work every day and use as my main machine for coding. I have an iMac, which I also got as a bonus from my new employer and which is used in the hobby room for the most part, and I have a 5 year old Mac Pro, which I use for 3D modeling/rendering when needed as well as for gaming. In those 5 years I only added more RAM (it has 10Gb now) and a new GPU, and it runs the games I play just fine with high settings.

Before I bought the Mac Pro, I build my own machines. The last one I built I spent about 2 months just researching and gathering hardware that was proven/designed to work together, With the various upgrades over the 3-ish years I used it, it actually cost me a lot more than the Mac Pro. These days I just don't have the time to keep up with all the hardware and build my own machines, although I've been thinking of giving it a go again if the Mac Pro decides to call it a day.

Personally, I've used DOS, Windows since 3.11, Linux since before popular distributions made it easy, I even used BeOS and OS/2 for a while. In the end, for the work I currently do (and have been doing for quite a while), I feel most comfortable working in OSX, which is why I use it. On the other hand, I'm really interested in one of those Surface Pro tablet from MS, with it's Wacom licensed pen input, it should be great for quick sketching

[Laraul]

Well yea I am clueless on macs, They are nice machines but I dont think they are worth the money. What if you want to upgrade your video card can you open it and change it out? or do you have to spend another 2k for a new one? I like pcs better cuz I know an upgrade wont cost me an arm and a leg.

Here's an old video showing a video card upgrade on an older model MacPro. It shows just how easy these things are to upgrade. If you choose to boot into Windows it doesn't matter if you use a card from Apple or a card from anyone else as Windows runs naively. The cards firmware doesn't need to be designed for Mac Intel EFI. The same is true for MacOS X versions 10.7+.

If you do choose to use a video card intended for use in PCs in a Mac, you will see nothing on the monitors (connected to that card) until either Windows or OS X boots.

[Alhanelem]

The primary argument against macs- price- is reasonable. It's not a matter of ignorance. Apple charges a massive premium for the same hardware (literally the same hardware) as in a Windows PC. I have little against Mac OSX itself, but I will never buy a Mac because to me, it's just an overpriced PC with a shiny casing and a different operating system.

[Laume]

The primary argument against macs- price- is reasonable. It's not a matter of ignorance. Apple charges a massive premium for the same hardware (literally the same hardware) as in a Windows PC. I have little against Mac OSX itself, but I will never buy a Mac because to me, it's just an overpriced PC with a shiny casing and a different operating system.

I don't think Altena is talking about that particular argument. We can all agree that, if we price it just by hardware costs, a mac costs significantly more than a PC. There's been a few arguments that said that a)bootcamp is just a bad virtual machine (which isn't true.). b) apple does some sneaky things in updates (which is true, but not any more so than windows.). c) an argument that sounded like all macs are cheaply designed. (which wasn't the argument at all).

I can understand that stance on not buying macs. My macbook was bought second hand. I just needed something small and apple to toy with.

But let's face facts. We're not apple's target audience. Neither you or I would ever buy a prada bag or eddie bauer SUV's. Meteor survivor t-shirts, however...

[Zehira]

I am a MBP owner hoping to see an answer from SE for the Mac version in the future.

I can understand why BOOTCAMP isn't that good and Windows 7 had to take 2GB out of my RAM but ARR is still playable. I don't see why they are against OS X since it's based on UNIX like many features you see from Linux. If SE is making the game for the PS3 with OpenGL then it would not be that much problem for a established game company to port it to OS X and Linux.

[Laume]

I don't see why they are against OS X since it's based on UNIX like many features you see from Linux.

Oh, I can answer that one. It's because it's freebsd. Compared to the largest linux distro (ubuntu, which is a shoot off of debian) a lot of the commands that are in freebsd are either old or don't have the same features as other "newer" linux distros. My pet peeve is that tcpdump on my mac and on my debian box have different options and different flags. Another is that linux comes open access to you. Nothing is closed sourced. Nothing is hidden, which, admittedly, isn't true with macs. As I mentioned before, I don't get on a computer without at least 1 or 2 shell sessions open so I'm much more a linux person. But with that said, I take my macbook to school when I need a good compromise between commercial supported software and *nix tools.

If SE is making the game for the PS3 with OpenGL then it would not be that much problem for a established game company to port it to OS X and Linux.

Not that I've looked into it extensively, but doesn't FFXIV use a lot of directx's stuff? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. (not that I wouldn't love to play this on a debian machine.)

[Zehira]

Not that I've looked into it extensively, but doesn't FFXIV use a lot of directx's stuff? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. (not that I wouldn't love to play this on a debian machine.)

DirectX is a collection of APIs for handling tasks, especially game programming and video on Microsoft platforms. It's not possible to port the game to other platforms if they picked DirectX. In my opinion, if SE sticks with OpenGL then it would be easier to port to other platforms including Windows versions. I think it's a stupid move when they not choice OpenGL over DirectX since they can't port it to the Xbox 360 due to the policy agreement made by Microsoft. I mean why the hell does DirectX install every time I buy a game off Steam? Thanks to Valve, they opened Steam to OS X and Linux because they believe that OpenGL is more faster than DirectX. I downloaded some games on my MBP I bought from Windows do not require any software driver to play a game.

Now, like I said if they are making the game for the PS3 with OpenGL (correct me if I am wrong because that system does support OpenGL.) They could build a launcher for Mac machines with Windows-based graphics and texture data packages. Like how Blizzard made WoW for Windows with DirectX and for Mac with OpenGL. Honestly, ARR don't use a lot of DirectX stuff, they don't look like what Halo can do though. I think it's still using DX9.

It would be smart for SE to look into that and answer us if they will do it or not.

[Millerna]

I am a MBP owner hoping to see an answer from SE for the Mac version in the future.

I can understand why BOOTCAMP isn't that good and Windows 7 had to take 2GB out of my RAM but ARR is still playable. I don't see why they are against OS X since it's based on UNIX like many features you see from Linux. If SE is making the game for the PS3 with OpenGL then it would not be that much problem for a established game company to port it to OS X and Linux.

There's nothing wrong with Bootcamp, and it doesn't do anything to decrease performance in Windows. Basically, nor does it affect RAM used. All it does is emulate a BIOS so that Windows can install/boot.

As for not porting to OSX and/or Linux, it's quite simple, the potential market is too small for what it would cost to make a decent/native port. Many of the games available on OSX are Cider ports, and Cider affects performance quite a bit. The OSX clients of WAR and SWtOR for example are Cider ports, and their OSX performance is far below their Windows performance on the exact same hardware.

ARR on Windows most likely uses DX10, and they're planning on adding DX11 features after release (this has been mentioned in interviews and/or YoshiP's letters)

ARR on PS3 uses Sony's custom OpenGL version (PSGL, based on OpenGL ES 1.0), and thus isn't directly compatible with an OpenGL version in OSX/Linux (or Windows for that matter) ..

The only easy/cost-effective port (for OSX at least) would be a Cider port, but then there'd be much complaining about how performance is inferior to the Windows version.

[Laraul]

There's nothing wrong with Bootcamp, and it doesn't do anything to decrease performance in Windows. Basically, nor does it affect RAM used. All it does is emulate a BIOS so that Windows can install/boot.

No, there's no emulation of anything. Boot camp is just a tool to help assisting in creating a bootable windows partition from MacOS X. That's it. There's nothing unique about PCs that allow Windows to boot. Nor is there anything unique about Macs that prevent Windows from booting. It's like installing Linux on a PC with Windows already installed.

[Millerna]

No, there's no emulation of anything. Boot camp is just a tool to help assisting in creating a bootable windows partition from MacOS X. That's it. There's nothing unique about PCs that allow Windows to boot. Nor is there anything unique about Macs that prevent Windows from booting. It's like installing Linux on a PC with Windows already installed.

Depends on various things.. Windows prior to Vista doesn't support booting on EFI hardware, and starting with Vista supports booting on UEFI hardware. Not all Macs have the latest UEFI, but older EFI, in which case there needs to be a BIOS emulation for Windows to install.