Camping Out Ideas

If I get a new Mac w/ a dedicated graphics card, can I run fairly new 3D games for PC under boot camp?

I'm thinking of getting a new computer, and I'm kind of leaning twords a mac at this point, but one of the things I want from the computer is gaming. I know macs aren't known for their graphical power but with boot camp and a mac with dedicated graphics (ie not a macbook or mac mini) can I run 3D games such as C&C3, SW Battlefront II, KOTOR, C&CTFD (not really proccesor intensive games like DOOM) under boot camp? If not, would it be possible to run them under virtulization (VMWare or parallels)? I don't want to get the mac version of games because they seem to come out several months later than the PC version and I already have several PC titles I'd like to keep. Thanks so much for your advice, I really appreciate it.

Public Comments

1. hopefuly yeah
2. I can't speak to those specific titles, but I run UT04 and Supreme Commander with bootcamp without trouble, and I know a number of people who game quite heavily through it. I would strongly advise against trying to game through virtualization. Parallels and VMWare are pretty good these days, but there's no getting around the fact that you're running two OS's at once on finite system resources. Virtualization an option (and I've played 3-4 year old games in Parallels without too much trouble), but if you want to play high-end games, I'd strongly recommend just booting straight into Windows (ie, bootcamp). One thing to note - bootcamp is now built in to OS 10.5.