Being A Flexible Gamer As A Mac User

8 November 2017
 Categories: , Blog


Do you need to buy a non-Apple personal computer (PC) to play games as a Mac user? Why? Although many games in the 1980's and 1990's were on Apple computers, the modern age of gaming means either playing cute puzzle games on any mobile device or sticking to a PC if you want high definition, high-powered games. Here are a few details about modern gaming, as well as options for enjoying a wide selection of modern computer games.

Defining Gaming And Why Computer Power Matters

Gaming is a fairly bad term, coined by a small group of game players that slowly grew into a bigger industry. The modern, popular meaning of gamer is a person who plays video games on consoles such as the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and the PC platform.

There is a bit of elitism toxicity that comes with the title. At the most basic level, it's an argument for games with amazing, demanding graphics that rival and often exceed the movie industry, along with intricate gameplay modes. Quite often this comes with violent gameplay themes and challenges of reaction time and skill.

The other side of the debate states that anyone who plays any game is considered a gamer. While correct in terms of linguistics, the disagreement mostly comes from what the console and PC gamers consider valid, challenging, and impressive games.

These differences are subjective even within the "hardcore" gaming community, and while it's true that such differences are hard to prove in written terms, the gaming community isn't invested in proving their point.

For the purposes of this article, focus on the high computer resources demand part of the argument. If you want to play games that have the best graphics in the market regardless of content, you will need a computer that can handle the resource demand.

Meeting The Hardware And Software Demands

The most important part of meeting demand is having the right parts to do the job. This usually means having a fast enough Central Processing Unit (CPU, or simply processor), enough random access memory (RAM), and a video card.

Video cards--also known as graphics cards--are miniature computers on a board that are designed to handle the graphics "heavy lifting" of sorts. Instead of building every computer to play an increasingly higher level of games that only a specific part of the population cares about, video cards have been designed with specific parts to interface with games, videos, web cameras, and other video-related tasks.

Computers would be far more expensive if gaming graphics were a part of the standard system. Because of this specific design, certain things are programmed on the video cards that the computer can't read without a video card, no matter how much power you put into a standard computer.

The main problem that stops Mac players with powerful Apple computers from playing the newest games is a similar issue. Games are programming not only in specific programming languages, but in a way that speaks to specific Operating Systems such as Mac OSX and Windows. In short, the games made today can't "understand" the Mac system, and companies have to make a different version of their games specifically for Mac.

At that point, it's economics. Game companies were convinced in past decades that PC owners bought more games than Mac players. Until that changes, you can ask a Mac repair professional to add systems such as Parallels, making your Mac run Windows, or a Linux-based system called Wine.

Contact a Mac repairs professional to get help with the hardware and software changes.


Share