Did you know that your Mac is an excellent gaming machine? You don't need a PC to run League of Legends! Find out how to optimize your Mac for games and learn where to go for the best game titles in 2014.
Back in 2010, finding a game for your Mac was sparse at best. Times have changed with the onset of Steam and the Mac App Store. Valveâs Steam has opened the door for digital distribution of commercial and indie games that often work on the Mac. With Steam, users only have to buy one license of a game across the Windows / OS X platform. Steam also allows gamers to save their progress on the cloud, called cloud saves, something even the Mac App Store has yet to adopt.
While the Mac App Store allowed for game publishers to get instant distribution of their games, this tends to serve the âeverydayâ gamer, not your hardcore, graphic âintensive MMORPG gamer. Nonetheless, game developers saw a business opportunity and it has spawned a wave of budding entrepreneurs. Some leading Mac game publishers in the market today are Aspyr and Feral, with a company like Transgaming that helps PC game publishers port over to OS X.
As you would expect, the vast majority of game developers still launch their product for the PC gamer in mind, particularly for those that require faster frame rates, and then port over to OS X months later. However, seeing how the PC hardware market is dying while the Mac continues to show steady growth, PC developers now realize that the average MacBook Pro is probably one of the best hardware devices out in the market today for a Windows operating environment.
Thankfully, Apple tends to agree. Probably one of Appleâs less known utilities is Bootcamp. This allows you to partition your hard drive so that it can natively run Windows on your Mac. As it happens, by playing the same Windows version of the game on Bootcamp, it actually runs faster than it would on OS X! This is in large part due to the Windows-based graphics drivers.
Itâs likely you bought your Mac for any host of reasons other than for gaming. However, that shouldnât stop you from taking advantage of whatâs out in the market today. Your Mac, in large part, can probably fare very well in the battle arena! And of course, donât forget to upgrade your RAM if you plan on giving it a whirl! Gaming can be very memory intensive. If youâre uncertain about how much RAM your machine can handle, please visit our Ramjet Plus page and find out if your system can accept more RAM than is published by Apple.
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