At Macworld San Francisco, Jean-Luc Dinsdale
of Inside Mac Games spoke to the president of Feral Interactive, David Stephen (a Mac game publisher) about the latest
product announcements to come out of Apple. According to David, in the past "part of the reason the Macintosh
gaming market has suffered has been the underpowered graphics chips that, up to now, have been included in most
consumer Macs". With a powerful dual core Intel chip and a high end ATI Radeon X1600 the iMac is potentially a
very capable gaming machine. Underpowered GPUs were previously a major
barrier to gaming on the Mac.Regarding porting games from other platforms to the Mac, David is skeptical that there will be "big improvements in game performance over existing computer models", mentioning the lack of dedicated sound cards in Macs as one factor holding back performance. Also, David doesn't see the prospect of Mac users dual booting to Windows as a major problem. There's unlikely to be any support for games running on Windows-running Macs and dual booting will be a practice reserved for techies. One thing's for sure: the next few months will be very interesting for the Mac as a gaming platform.
