The second machine a 15” MacBook Pro is also a laptop. It is essentially the basic version with a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo (Santa Rosa with a 800 MHz bus). The 15.4” screen in 1440 x 900 is animated by a Nvidia graphic card: a 128 MB Geforce 8600M GT. Apple have modified the card’s frequency: it works at 504 MHz (GPU) and 635 MHz (memory) while Nvidia recommend 600 MHz (GPU) and 700 MHz (memory) . The second interesting point is that the card has more memory under Windows (512 MB). The reason is simple: the graphic card is TurboCache (this feature allows it to recover some video memory from the live memory via the PCI-Express) but unfortunately the Apple driver doesn’t handle that technology. As we will see, this will have an impact sometimes. The Windows tests were carried out with Windows XP Home (SP2).

The third test machine is a 24”iMac. It is the more costly version, with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor (800 MHz bus) and 2 GB of RAM. The graphics card which animates the screen (in1920 x 1200) is an Ati Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT. As the name suggests, it is a card originally intended for laptops. Apple paces its card at 600/680 (GPU/memory). Ati recommend between 600 and 700 MHz for the GPU and between 700 and 750 MHz for the memory. The desktop version works at 800/1100 MHz. The card is accompanied by 256 MB of video memory. The tests in Windows use Windows Vista Ultra Edition.

Mac OS X has several advantages: the system is stable, the installation is simple (you just need to copy the contents of the CD onto the hard disk) and these games are usually best-sellers. A small hiccup is that they often come with a small (or sometimes big) delay. Another interesting point is that Mac OS X uses OpenGL to accelerate its graphic interface, the graphic cards supports this API very well and the performances are generally good.