Game performance on Mac-native games (specifically, Battlefield 2142)

[kingofkolt]

At the WWDC keynote, some guy from EA announced they'll be bringing out several games for Mac OS X this month, including Battlefield 2142, which is a game I've been interested in getting for a while now. But I was wondering how well Mac-native games run on Macs (esp. in terms of how high/low the FPS is). I installed the Call of Duty 2 Demo a while back to test it, and the FPS was pretty low, and I'd heard some other bad things about gaming on a Mac so I'm a little concerned that BF2142 could be a similar experience. If I remember right, Macrumors had a post about how they would port BF2142 over to Mac, and I think they used the word Cider (I just got my first Mac - a SR MBP - so I'm not too familiar with Apple terminology). I'm assuming that has to do with the codebase, or the way of translating it or whatever. Does anyone know how efficient/fast games that use Cider are? Basically, I'm wondering whether I should get the Mac version or the Windows version of BF2142 (I have Vista installed also).

Thanks.

 

[applekid]

GameTap and X3 are the only games I know of that use Cider. You could give them a try yourself. The performance hit is supposed to be minimal.

 

[BKroll1223]

First off let me say that gaming (and specifically BF 2142) is the only reason that I still own a PC. However, I have to say that the release of Battlefield 2142 scares me a bit.

BF 2142 is the most unstable game I have ever seen and/or played. It is riddled with hundreds of bugs that EA has shown little care to fix. In addition to playing the game, I belong to a gaming clan that runs 4 Battlefield 2142 servers on a dedicated box. From a server standpoint, calling the game garbage is a compliment. The servers crash daily - sometimes more than once. This is a common Battlefield situation that has gotten worse from BF 2 to BF 2142 in spite of the fact that both games run on the same engine. EA has done little to rectify this issue.

Even with the many headaches that go hand in hand with playing the Battlefield games, I still spend many hours doing so. I worry though that this situation may only get worse when the game is released for Mac OS. Still, I will probably give it a try at the very least. If all goes well, than perhaps I can finally get rid of the HP in my house and get me a Mac Pro. I'm sure that BF will look great on a 30" Cinema Display.

 

[johnmartin78]

Battlefield is one of those games notorious for being hogs,but I have tested BF2 on my mbp in boot camp and to be honest,it wasn't bad at all,so I think natively it would be fine.