The Evolution of Mac Gaming

Next Generation has a piece up exploring where gaming is going on Max OS X. From the article: "Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren. Sometimes that lack of support was due to hardware and input devices that weren't competitive with the PC, but the adoption of PC standards like AGP for graphics cards and USB support for 'proper' multi-button mice did away with those obstacles. But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market."

Comments

That was for a future version of Windows...

[CreateWindowEx]

Current generation OpenGL drivers do not translate calls to DirectX. In fact, under Windows OpenGL calls go straight to the graphics driver without much Microsoft code being involved, which means that the overhead can be much less, although it also makes the drivers more work to write and maintain. There used to be a MS-supplied "Mini-client driver" which allowed smaller vendors to more easily add OpenGL support, but MS dropped support of this a while ago.

However, Microsoft has definitely been discouraging use of OpenGL on Windows for quite a while, and while I don't believe Microsoft is actually artificially degrading OpenGL performance in any way on their current operating systems, this effort probably has led to the hardware vendors devoting less time and energy to developing OpenGL drivers.

John Carmack has always acted as a force keeping OpenGL alive on the PC by coding his games (and thus also the games that use his engine) for OpenGL instead of Direct3D; however, the current reports are that id is now doing dual Xbox360/PC development of their next-generation engine. Unless Microsoft is releasing an OpenGL library for Xbox360 (highly unlikely), this probably means that he is switching over to D3D.

Since Apple tends to ship their consumer machines with non-upgradeable, lower-end 3D cards, any 3D game on the Mac is likely to be GPU-limited anyways, so using an OpenGL-to-DirectX conversion library may not be that much of a performance hit.

Re:Intel switch maybe good for OpenGL?

[MouseR]

Problem is that MicroSoft is doing everything it can to move developers off OpenGL and into DirectX. In Vista, OpenGL is actually impaired and emulated from DirectX.

So performance-inclined developers will be tempted to develop for DirectX wich isn't available (or wanted) on Mac OS X.

It's just another MS move in attempt to lock-out gaming from Mac OS X.

I bet they're nerver about mactel too.

iDevGames.com

[5plicer]

To those interested in developing games for Mac, you should stop by the iDevGames forum sometime ;)

Another similar site (which many of the iDevGames members also visit) is CreateMacGames.org.