A potentially revolutionary way to stream next-gen video games to hardware technically too underpowered to run those titles natively, thin client OnLive might be the best thing to happen to gaming since, well, the Internet. Essentially, the technology works by making a game into an interactive, streaming video, rendering all the gameplay on a beefy

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OnLive thin gaming client runs “Crysis” on the iPhone, iPad to follow

The Game Developers Conference for 2009 is just underway, and already there’s some big news which has particular relevance for that rare and frustrated breed, the Mac gamer. I’m a Mac gamer myself, and have pretty much given up the OS X side of things and just decided to do all my gaming in a Windows Boot Camp partition. My days of option-booting may be drawing to a close, however, thanks to a new venture that could make gaming a lot more democratic, much to the dismay of hardware manufacturers. The service in question is called OnLive , and it will basically offer game streaming to whatever machine you happen to have. You can either get it via a very small set-top unit that attaches directly to your TV, or through a desktop software client. That’s when the magic happens. OnLive uses server farms to do all of the heavy lifting for your computer, so that your resources aren’t important. That means my Eee PC can handle Crysis , though I would never actually use that tiny machine for gaming. More importantly, my MacBook and my Mac mini can both handle Crysis without breaking a sweat. Which means I’m belatedly glad that I didn’t spring for that MacBook Pro or Mac Pro desktop. I can hear your concerns, because mine were the same. This sounds too good to be true, right? Won’t it suffer by being only a marginal company, lacking support?

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OnLive Will Make a Hardcore Gaming Machine Out of Your MacBook

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion , Gaming , Hardware , Software , Odds and ends , Apple Finally, someone with more money that I have (I want a new MacBook Pro, but haven’t yet convinced myself to shell out the dough to replace my old yet trusty G4 12″ Powerbook) has put the new MBP and those shiny graphics chips to the test, and drummed up some real benchmarking numbers in Boot Camp. It turns out to be PC World, strangely enough. And the verdict? Well, it’s not quite so great. The good news is that the MacBook Pro is faster than ever, and graphics have significantly improved. And trust us, any improvement over the old chips is a step in the right direction. The bad news is that in a practical situation (like playing the Crysis demo , which is actually about a year old at this point), a MacBook Pro in Boot Camp at the highest settings isn’t actually playable, and the 15 fps you might squeeze out of it on a good day still can’t compare to the 50 fps you can get out of even average video cards in a Windows PC. If the graphics are turned down, it’s a different story — we’ve seen a new MBP run games well in Boot Camp already, so it’ll play, but Apple still has a ways to go to be competitive with brand new games. But let’s keep this all in perspective — it’s very good news when you compare the new MacBook Pros to the old ones. Apple is at least realizing that 3D performance needs an upgrade in their units

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New MacBook Pro benchmarked within Boot Camp