I think it takes a particularly narrow view to see Boot Camp as anything but good news for Mac users in general, gamers included.

For one thing, based on the conversations I've had with actual game publishers -- as opposed to things I could infer from the statements of gamers or just off-hand observations on the market -- it doesn' look like Boot Camp has had a majorly negative effect on their porting or publishing efforts. So at the very least the status quo has been maintained, and that's important to keep in mind.

Secondly, Boot Camp lowers the barrier to entry for new Mac users who also like to game, because it enables them to continue to play the games they want to without having to worry about a Macintosh conversion. Don't feel like waiting until January when Aspyr is done with Prey? Buy it now and play it today on a MacBook Pro running Boot Camp and Windows XP. Want to play a game that doesn't stand a very good chance of ever seeing a Mac conversion, like Half-Life 2? I play it regularly on my Intel iMac.

Third, it gives Mac users and Mac developers a pretty powerful place to leverage a criticism at Apple from, which is that OpenGL on OS X underperforms compared to DirectX on Windows. Up until now it's been very easy for Apple's defenders, including those within Apple, to say "Well, you're comparing apples to oranges" when we point out the comparative performance deficiencies of similarly configured Mac and Wintel hardware when playing games. That's out the window, so to speak, when you can take a Mac, install Windows XP on it, and see a distinct performance delta between the same game running on OS X and Windows.

Tho in all fairness, Mac OS X OpenGL does perform very comparably to Windows OpenGL on the same hardware. Still, it gives Apple's OpenGL team, as well as ATI and Nvidia's Mac engineers, something to shoot for, and hopefully surpass.

So yeah, Boot Camp is a good thing for Mac gamers.

Cinebench is a highly optimized test -- and yes, it performs the same on both. But there's a big difference between an OpenGL benchmark and OpenGL use in game play. In the benchmark, the CPU doesn't have to multiprocess: there's no audio, there's no network, there aren't any other players or robots to worry about, etc.

In game play, every game I've tested so far (I gave but one example) has scored lower on OS X OpenGL than it has on WinXP OpenGL. Whether we wish to blame that on porting, drivers, or OS X, I don't know -- but it's a very easily observed behavior.

As for the quality of the ports ... don't you think Aspyr would do everything in their power to insure that the port is running as quickly as possible on the Mac? The better the game performs, the more units they'll sell. So I tend to blame OS X and/or the video drivers more than I blame the company doing the port.

The fact that Apple has taken proactive steps to increase OpenGL's speed on certain Macs (with multi-threaded OpenGL) also implies to me that they're aware they have a performance issue to address. Don't get me wrong -- OpenGL on OS X clearly doesn't suck. I saw over 70fps in Quake4 with fairly high detail levels and a high resolution. That's amazing. But the fact that the same machine will do over 90fps in Windows implies that we have room for improvement.

-rob.