How well does the MacBook Pro 2.0Ghz run games?

Unreal Tournament 2004 plays "like butter" with all the settings at maximum, 2X anti-aliasing (could probably go to 4X). Be sure to download the Universal patch first, however - vastly faster than playing under Rosetta.

Problem right now isn't the hardware, which is as good or better than any other laptop out with one or two exceptions, but the software which hasn't been ported to Universal Binaries yet in many cases.

im a game too.
i like to play counter strike source as well.

on my new macBookPro i've installed world of warcraft which is availabe as universal binary. the gaming speed is okay. like on my pc notebook (1 year old asus). one poor thing is the 5400rpm harddisk. if you looking forward to playing games on your macbook pro,.. buy a 7200rpm harddisk. the loading produces some lag's.

greetings
--
jonas


(sorry 4 my english)

cant you just rip the game from the dvd to your hard drive? like with my modded xbox. games run slower when playing on the DVD but when i rip it to my xbox hard drive and play its so much faster.

Macs until this January ran on PowerPC CPUs, but the switch is on to bring them all into the "Intel inside" world. Apple realized this transition would be very hard for software vendors who would have to recode their products for the new CPUs so they basically bought a company called Transitive for its translation technology, which Apple calls Rosetta.

Under Rosetta PowerPC code is translated to Intel code. This means there is considerable overhead on startup and when new code is needed by the application during use, but it's much faster than emulation which is basically a virtual hardware machine made out of software within the OS - pretty technical, and not fast.

Anyway what you need to know is that PowerPC programs, the vast majority of them, run just fine under Rosetta, but at somewhat of a performance penalty. In something like a text editor this would be almost undetectable, but in a 3D FPS it could really drag down frame rates and overall performance.

The answer is Universal Binaries: programs that are compiled to run natively on both Intel and PowerPC. More and more are released every day. UT2004 patch 3369-3 (I believe it is) is a good example; it's over 100MBs but contains code for both PowerPC and Intel Macs, making the game "hardware agnostic" and giving you great performance on either CPU.

Hope this explains it.

Do you know where there is a list of all the programs/games that
are being ported for universal binaries or already ported?

http://guide.apple.com/universal/

This gives an overview; there's a link at the top-right that'll show you all the Universal Binary apps (at least those from developers who've registered them with Apple).

do you think it will always take the 'back seat' so to speak?

For a while, yes, for three reasons:

Apple has ignored the gaming market for a long time, putting underperforming graphics cards in most if not all of its models; this is changing, tho; the X1600 in the Intel Macs is a very nice performer in 3D games.

Market share. While the Mac market seems to be growing fast it's still tiny compared to Windows, so developers will naturally write for Windows (and XBox etc.) first. Also the installed base of Intel Macs is a subset of a tiny set; it'll take a while to reach critical mass.

Third I've read that technically there are issues with the way OS X writes to graphics cards that present unique challenges to game designers. This may be changing as well.

This could all change overnight, however, if somebody breaks the barriers and figures out how to boot an Intel Mac directly into Windows. For gamer Mac users this would be a huge plus.