So is taking care of your virtual family possible on a Mac? Absolutely. The Sims 2 is ported very well and the different extensions are easy to get on the Mac. The version is practically identical to that of the PC version. The only problem is that it is slow on the MacBook, but The Sims 2 can still be interesting for its quirks and jerky animation.

The last test is with Mac OS X and the influence of the virtualisation with Quake III Arena. “Why a game that is so old?” you might well think. Firstly: because it uses OpenGL on the two platforms. Secondly, because it was originally made for the PowerPC, but only Intel versions exist. And thirdly: because this game works with nearly all the solutions of our tests.

The test: methodology and results

All the tests were carried out in 1024 x 768 (unlike our other tests) with the settings to the max as well as the most recent patch. The first solution tested is in Windows in native, with Boot Camp. The second is with Mac OS X. We tested the basic PowerPC version (G3) to check if the emulation via Rosetta works. Then we went with an optimised version for the G4s (more precisely for the Altivec, an SIMD instruction game). On the Macs in PowerPC G4, we can gain between 10 and 20% of performances simply by changing the execution. Finally, a version compiled for the Intel processors was used. Then we tested Quake III in a virtual machine with VMware Fusion, then with Parallels. Finally we used Crossover and Cider to test the emulation programs.

All the tests were done on the 15” MacBook Pro, as VMware only activates the 3D with Windows XP SP2 (used on this model).

As we can see the performance differences are vast. Between the native Windows version and VMware, we find a 30 fold difference. The OS X version of Quake III, considered to be optimised, pales in comparison to the Windows version. Rosetta, Apple’s PowerPC emulation tool, manages Altivec well: we gain about 7% in performance. VMware doesn’t let you play the game, while Parallels is a little more respectable while at the same time not blowing anyone away. CrossOver does very well; the emulation is relatively fast. There is still the problem of Cider. Like with Quake 4 the game launches but the keyboard and mouse don’t work. This really stifled our attempt to actually test it… In the end, Quake III Area, an old game (it dates to 1999) is a bit greedy, we realise that it is unreasonable to expect to play it on a virtual machine.

To finish our tour of Mac games, we tried three recent games in their demo forms. The games are Crysis, Unreal Tournament III and Call of Duty 4. Of course, we only tested these in Windows. As soon as the demo for Unreal Tournament III for Mac will be available for Mac, (beginning of 2008 apparently) this page will be updated.