In a discussion on digg about Apple’s Bootcamp software (which lets you run XP on an Intel Mac via dual booting), someone on digg asked:

from the site:
For your convenience, Boot Camp burns a CD with all the Mac-specific drivers for Windows:
Graphics
Networking
Audio
AirPort wireless
Bluetooth
The Eject key (on Apple keyboards)
Brightness control for built-in displays

If those video drivers are any good, what else do you need for gaming?

Here’s what I have to say about Mac, “what else we’d need for gaming” and the Intel transition:

We’d need the Intel desktops out with some nice and generic nvidia card like the ppc macs had with the dual-dvi 6800. The mac mini shares system memory with the video card (so I’ve read), really strange. The macbook has a mobile 1600 ati. A huge improvement but gamers won’t spend the cash for a laptop unless the travel all the time. Small PCs are bigger bangs for the buck. You have to sacrifice something for portability (power, money, expansion). Gamers typically want 1st or 2nd gen cards which aren’t in the Intel macs yet.

The Intel Mac tower is what I’m waiting for. Throw in an after market 7900gs for $350 and hope nvidia has some unified drivers out for OSX. Combine that with the experimental 10.5 threading stuff posted earlier and OSX might be able to make these single thread games sing on 4 or 8 cores, without an app rewrite. In this sense, Mac might have a platform that really pulls ahead for gaming in terms of performance. They’ll have equal hardware and maybe superior OS software.

The only thing worrying me as a gamer is, most of the time Apple stays behind on graphics drivers on purpose or by process. Usually their driver is based off of drivers that would be considered old in the PC world. This is my observation and the observation of some graphics programmers I’ve talked to.

Opengl 2.0 was launched on 8-10-2004. OpenGL 2.0 was pretty complicated, lots of hands in the pot. Nvidia was able to release a driver that had “OpenGL 2.0 support” starting with Forceware release 75 around Feb of 2005. IE, probably all of the 2.0 extras would work, it was completely up to spec. Apple still really can’t say that (AFAIK). They have OpenGL 1.5 with some extras on top, it’s their own creation. You can’t just go to nvidia and get your own driver with the latest bells and whistles. Now saying OpenGL2.0 is better than OpenGL1.5 isn’t fair. Apple runs Doom3, Doom3 has lots of shaders in it and overall looks the same as the PC version (ignoring frames per second). So Apple gets the same results. But they still can’t say “we support opengl 2.0″. They don’t. They don’t have all of the tasty features that OGL2.0 has.

I don’t know if this is by design or just practice. Maybe they figure gamers aren’t their market. Maybe they’d prefer to keep their drivers stable. Maybe the drivers don’t really add much. As a PC user, I usually upgrade video drivers for version number’s sake. Forceware 80 had some video en/decoding acceleration, some other versions have added a reported 5% performance gains to some games. Maybe all that isn’t worth instability to Apple. I can only guess.

Is Mac a gaming platform? No. Sure it runs games but it’s just not there yet. Considering the year-lag (and counting) on full OpenGL 2.0 support, the lack of a Intel desktop, lack of titles … it’s no wonder I still keep my XP machine around for gaming only.