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No love for PPC anymore. On the other hand, I dunno how my G5 would handle something like Half-Life without bringing its fans up to rendering speed.The rig plan to build this month when Fermi comes out will have an i7-980x, 3 GTX 480s, 12 GB RAM and three 24" monitors. Now THAT'S gaming!
I hope I'm not getting you confused with someone else, but aren't you the guy that says he isn't into multiplayer gaming? None of which you could pay me to buy, but that's another discussion.
Not to mention expensive as fuck.
But for Valve at least I imagine that this will make them a bit of cash.
Not a chance, won't happen. Normal PC builders can hardly be bothered to put proper hardware into their computers, and I'm not expecting Apple to do the same with their mainstream lines. That's why I build my own gaming PCs.
That said, most mid-range and high end Macs are able to run most games quite well. My two year old Macbook Pro can run Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 perfectly. It'll run Starcraft 2 great when it comes out in a few months. This is a two year old machine, so the current and upcoming MBPs will play them even better.
Look at the stats from the Steam hardware survey. I suspect that a big reason why Valve finally comitted to OS X development is that a good chunk of Macs (Macbook Pros and mid to high end iMacs) are well above the spec of most PCs that are surveyed. Being able to enter an open market in OS X like they did with Windows in 2003 is one thing, but the hardware also needs to be able to support it in order for it to make sense.
Either way, Valve is finally joining Blizzard, the other major proponent for PC gaming, on OS X. No more Boot Camp for me!
I'm assuming that all Source-powered Valve-developed games are going to be making the move. What I'm wondering is this: will we need to buy Mac-specific versions if we already own the PC version?
Valve seems to understand the importance of marketing. The way they're building an interest is, from a marketing perspective, elegantly executed. There's the existing interest and there's the interest you can create via an effective marketing campaign, and that's what Valve's kicking into gear right now. It's generating a pretty impressive amount of excitement despite the current campaign only being six reasonably simple images distributed to six websites -- never saw anything like that from D2D.
No hate at all btw, its just that the point of high end rigs is generally to eke out extra frames to stay competitive when things go crazy (either that or crank settings down). People who only play single player are almost always more lax with their rigs because you can still get great looking games for well under $1000 without monitor. So yeah, you're an odd case in terms of games you like to play and the rigs you spec. Benchmarks for all of the GPUs that it uses are out there. Both the 4670 and 4850 benchmark very well in Source games: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4770,2281-9.html
Whatever you do, get the best GPU available for your display size, you don't want to be stuck with a 9400M at 1920x1080.
Sorry, I meant running it natively under OSX - not in Windows.
