Nark:
Computer applications in general perform differently because no two applications are performing exactly the same instructions and/or operating on exactly the same data. Games, in particular, can have a huge range in the
size of the data set it needs to keep track of (think TicTacToe vs. Doom3),
what it needs to do with the data (update all geometry, test for and handle collisions, render visible geometry, apply post-rendering effects, etc...), and
how it's going to work on chunks of data (organize the game world into quad-trees? cache static objects in VRAM?). In addition to this, game performance is dependent on the hardware that is running it.
I guess the only answer is that no two games perform the same
because they are not the same. Why don't car engines perform the same?
and why can't developers make games to manage all the data better
They can, and good developers care very much about maximizing the performance of their game on their target hardware. This requires smart decision-making about how to organize game data and how to make efficient use of the hardware they are targeting. Sloppy developers (and developers who have run out of development time) might stop working on the program after they see that it can run on the hardware.
Especially considering with 256 RAM you hardly have enough to keep the system and 1 more application running.
Yeah. Nark, I really wouldn't suggest running games on OS X with anything less than 512MB of RAM. With 256MB, a lot of games are going to push you over the limit of your RAM, and OS X will resort to paging data to/from the hard disk, which will likely make your game completely unplayable.
The fact on macs is we have a bad version of Open GL.
What? Microsoft officially dropped native OpenGL support for Windows years ago (in a push to make DirectX the standard in graphics rendering on that platform), I think at version 1.1. OS X natively supports the most up-to-date version of OpenGL (1.5), since the OS is
built on top of it and relies on it for many OS-related drawing tasks. What do you mean by "we have a bad version of OpenGL?"
Until we fix that the system requirements will be retardedly growing.
Are the system requirements for current Mac games unacceptable? Doom 3 requirements are virtually identical on OS X and Windows...