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General discussion

RE: what kind of hardware do i need?

Jan 15, 2007 12:41AM PST

this is in reply to your question about playing CS source on a Mac. I had technical difficulties so I had to make a new post!

welll i understand your confusion and now i will clarify all your doubts as i am a gamer who wants to switch to a mac!

first things first. the discussion about the internet connection is a non-issue. because by have an 'Internet Connection' the manufacturers means that the program needs to be able to connect to the internet. so you need to get your ISP and stuff. your part.

mac mini will surely not be able to run your game properly. forget about gaming on a macbook or mac mini. this is because it does not have a dedicated graphic card which a game needs. most probably the graphic card does not even have directx.

the processors on a mac and pc are now exactly the same. gone are those days when intels cpu hit speeds of 3 ghz. they have brought a new core architecture which makes stuff happen faster at lower clock speed. just like AMD. a current 2.33 ghz means more than 4 ghz for the netburst architecture(pentium). thats my estimate. must be faster.

your game looks like one that is 2 or 3 years old. you certainly dont need a mac pro to run it. an imac will be able to run it beautifully. the imac comes with either the ati x1600 or nvidia 7300 or 7600. all of them most probably have directx9. the 7600 surely has it. the rest surely have atleast directx7. so theres no probz. dont think of running games on the intel graphic card that comes with the mac minin or macbook or low end imac.

simply put macs and pcs have the same hardware and so you NEED to compare them like you would compare two PCs from different manufacturers. maybe you didn't know but the imac can easily run battlefield 2 so it can easily counter srtike source. all you needed was a PC gamer switching to mac like me. so feel free to ask as many questions as you like as i am quite 'thorough' with PC knowledge and the mac help can come from other people over here.

go to dell or some website and you can see that they have the same processors and stuff as a mac. Just remember that macs and pc hardware is now the same so compare them like you would compare PCs.

Goodbye

Discussion is locked

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Direct X
Jan 15, 2007 1:34AM PST

The Mac does not use DirectX at all. This is a MS product for running high speed multimedia and games on a PC.
Once the Mac is booted, via BootCamp, into XP, DirectX Runtime, which is included in XP, is installed.

This is not something that is on the graphics card, it is a series of API's in the OS that allow developers access hardware. DirectX Runtime is included in Windows XP and can be updated via a download. As to whether the nvidia 7300 or 7600 supports it, is another matter.

The system requirements for the game did not mention any need for a special graphics card.

BTW, the discussion about internet access was all tongue in cheek.

P

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codeweavers
Jan 15, 2007 2:14AM PST

i checked out there website and in the list of apps that they are trying to run on a mac includes directx. you are right about the api thing but just to keep the discussion simple i referred to it as being on the card. the game does require directx 7 but 9 would be better. as far as i know the 7300 and 7600 do support it.

side note: directx 10 coupled with 2 nvidia 8800s in sli will blow me away.

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Codeweavers
Jan 15, 2007 7:48AM PST

are trying to run Windows apps on a Mac without the need for Windows, and that's a whole different ball game.

I think you will find that if you boot into XP with BootCamp, your will be able to use DirectX with the installed card or, possibly, the onboard Intel Graphics chip.

You are probably right on the side note


P