There's more to this than playing Minesweeper on a Mac, of course. Aside from the wow factor, Boot Camp, especially when it becomes a standard feature of the Mac OS, should usher in a new era for the Mac platform. Though you'll need to pony up for a copy of Windows, your Mac will be able to run any software that its PC competitors can run, not too mention all the Apple apps that PCs can't run. With Boot Camp, for example, you can run the iLife apps and the latest 3D game, say, F.E.A.R., on the same system.
Performance remains a question and one that we are feverishly working to answer. We've completed one test though, and it shows big gains for Windows on a Mac -- compared to an application using the Rosetta translation software, anyway. Running Photoshop CS2 on the iMac Core Duo with Mac OS X requires the use of Rosetta and results in pokey performance, slower than the older iMac G5, in fact. We ran our Photoshop CS2 benchmark on the same iMac Core Duo system with Windows today and saw a drastic improvement. Where the iMac Core Duo in Mac OS X took 6.5 minutes to complete the test, the same system running Windows XP Pro took less than 3 minutes. Add the fact that Adobe isn't expected to release the universal binary version of Photoshop for Intel-based Macs until next year and Windows on the Mac looks pretty good right now. You will, however, need the Windows version of Photoshop. Also impressive: the iMac with Windows also topped two similarly outfitted dual-core PCs from Dell and Gateway.
(Shorter bars are better)
 |
Adobe Photoshop CS2 test |
We're also not shocked by the iTunes, video-encoding, and Doom 3 tests. As it was written with the Mac OS X in mind, iTunes has historically run slower on Windows PCs. The same holds true for the iMac hardware running Windows: the Windows partition on the iMac took 26 seconds longer to finish our test. Our Sorenson video-encoding test looks much better on the Windows partition than on the OS X side for the same reason the Photoshop results skewed in favour of Windows: Sorenson runs natively in Windows XP and is emulated via Rosetta in OS X.
(Lower times are better)
(Lower times are better)
The release of Boot Camp doesn't change our opinion of the iMac as a gaming system. No matter which OS you run, its weak ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip, which shares memory with the system itself, isn't going to deliver high frame rates. The iMac Core Duo performed better under Windows than under OS X (25.9 frames per second vs. an even less playable 16.2), but we still don't recommend it for serious 3D gaming.
System configurations:
Apple iMac G5
PowerPC G5 2.10GHz; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X600XT PCIe; 250GB Serial ATA hard drive; Macintosh OS 10.4
Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP)
2.0GHz Intel Core Duo; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 PCIe; 250GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive; Windows XP Pro SP2
Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
2.0GHz Intel Core Duo; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 PCIe; 250GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive; Macintosh OS 10.4.4
Dell XPS 200
3.0GHz Intel Pentium D 830, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; Intel 945G chipset; 224MB (shared) integrated Intel 950G; Maxtor 6L160M0 160GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP2
Gateway E-6500D
3.0GHz Intel Pentium D 830, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; Intel 945G chipset; 128MB Nvidia GeForce 6600 PCIe; WDC WD2000JD-22HBB0 200GB 7,200rpm, Serial ATA; Windows XP Professional SP2
Apple Boot Camp (beta)
Company: Apple
Price: Free
1%
1%
Absolute rubbish, the iMac does NOT share graphics with the system RAM. Where are the gameplay benchmarks? Did you guys fudge the last test ... did you do any original testing at all?