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Arms Race

Entry 413, on 2006-10-24 at 16:15:29 (Rating 1, Computers)

Owning a computer good enough to run modern games is like being involved in an arms race! As the computers get faster, the games make use of the speed and do more, so the computers need to be faster, perpetuating the cycle. The latest games require an extraordinary amount of processing power to support the graphics, sound, network activity, and artificial intelligence they have. I have a few older Macs at home that we run games on that are a few years old: Warcraft III, Age of Mythology, Command and Conquer Generals, etc, but its becoming impossible to find a current game that will run on them, and I don't want to dedicate newer, faster machines just to playing games.

The problem is partly because I use Macs. Many Mac games are ports from the PC version which means the performance often isn't as good because the original was tuned for speed in the PC environment, not the Mac. There are many exceptions, of course, but it does make running games on older Macs more difficult. The other issue is that Mac games tend to be more expensive because the market is smaller. In fact, although I'm a Mac fan, I would prefer a PC just to play games, but we use our computers for many other purposes, so a PC is not really an option, because I refuse to put up with constant viruses and an inferior user interface and operating system.

In the future when I can pick up a few Intel Macs cheap for games the problem will be solved because I will be able to use the PC environment for games and the Mac for serious work, but at the moment I'll just have to hunt around for some older games which might still run OK. Many of the older games have good game play, although the flashy graphics often isn't there. The positive aspect of this is that many of the older games are also cheaper!

I guess the arms race will just continue though, and we will have to put up with updating the hardware every few years. Its just part of being a serious computer user: its both fun and frustrating at the same time!

Comment 1 (272) by Stuart on 2006-10-28 at 22:12:17:

To play the latest games you need a fast PC, so its not just because you use Macs. Buying a faster PC is cheaper though, so maybe you should get one... just for games!

Comment 2 (274) by OJB on 2006-11-14 at 22:05:04:

I'll have a dual 2.3 GHz 64 bit core processor Intel Mac laptop soon, so that should be fast enough for most of what I want to do!

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