On this day, once upon a time, the first commercially successful video game launched! Pong "Beep Bop Beep" : marking the beginning of using computer technology for interactive digital entertainment!
The computer history of gaming a back and forth story between the first GUI Mac and the humble IBM PC emblematic of the bouncing brick breaking ball in Pong, perhaps with a shade of irony therein.
Today people wonder why no Mac computers can properly accelerate VR hardware like the HTC vive and Oculus Rift. Apple's most powerful computer the Mac Pro more than 1000 days since a hardware refresh, the once powerful hardware it sports now hopelessly under powered in the era where a Pascal Architecture NVIDIA GPU of 980 or better is required to pump the pixels in a properly designed VR headset that goes further than the interesting party trick of Google Cardboard on your newer smartphone!
Intel & AMD exist as a lovely high tech duopoly of CPU manufacturing technologies, they both of course do a lot more than just lithographic printing of IC's! It is ultimately the GPU that makes the difference for gaming.
You can build an awesome gaming PC with a low end CPU as long as you go big on the GPU and you will still get amazing eye candy performance. The best computational bang for your buck is always going to be in a console, purpose built custom design mass manufacturing gaming computers that are far more energy efficient and less costly than something you can hobble together with parts from New Egg.
To get console level performance on a PC your going to need to drop $800 or more and it will draw hundreds of watts. The cool thing abut the PC is that you can go to the moon with $6000 of PC hardware. Every year you can put a new $700 graphics card in that machine and stay on the cutting edge of what is possible to accelerate, namely UHD VR experiences in the next gen 2017 VR headsets and beyond! It costs a lot to futureproof your PC gaming platform, but the interchangeable parts in a PC box offer a flexible future solution! A $250 Xbox One S will mop the floor with your $600+ budget desktop build Steam on Windows 10 action.
Step back for a moment and consider the gaming platform (PC, Phone, Console, Tablet, TV) the front end of a system where your eyes and brain are the backend. The magic happening inside your cortex is what drives people to play games in the first place. Everyone is seeking stimulation, be that from watchin the NFL to the latest IOS game on iPhones, driving motorsports racing of all kinds, spanning the gamut of human experiences from hiking to book reading, everyone on a search to stimulate their cortex.
Our desire for stimulation perhaps most evident when a toddler gains access to a tablet computer, experts now warn that the impact on their cognition of having instant access to information without a filter is too dangerous for their young fragile minds. This should give everyone pause to stop and consider what we are doing with internet access as adults! What you put into your eyes and ears has a dramatic effect on your thinking and therefor your future. What you think about affects who you are becoming.
On a lighter note, lets remember that gaming on a computers was nothing more than a way to use machines originally designed for boring adult tasks (trade your time for money) so that the whole family could have fun playing games on a computer. I remember playing Oregon Trail via a 5 inch floppy drive on an IBM Intel 386 as a child! These Wintel "Windows Intel" machines dominated my personal computer history until 2008 when I got my first MacBook. It was the iPod Nano a few years earlier that spiked my interest in Apple hardware.
To say that a Mac cannot play computer games is not completely accurate. I have Steam on both my 08 MacBook and 15 iMac and both are able to accelerate games, just not on the highest graphics settings, they are not gaming consoles and were never designed to be used like that. For a light bit of last gen computer game playing, even older Macs can do it! The real rub for people into cutting edge gaming is the lack of HTC Vive support and Oculus Rift support on a Mac. Rumors have been circulating that Apple will pair a 7th gen Intel CPU with a 10th gen NVidia GPU in the next iMac refresh in order to give it VR acceleration capacity, only time will tell!
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