Mac 1.1, Very slow performance, doesnt use all my CPU

[Herolordguy]

I have a beefed up Mac Pro 1,1 with an 8-core (dual xeon x5355 quads), 24 GBs of Ram, SSD drives, and a 280x GPU. I saw that Steam, all of a sudden, offered severeal of my PC games as Mac games, so i installed GRID 2 to test it. it was very poor. The only way to get 60fps was to play on "super low" graphics. I launched Activity Monitor, adn saw that my CPU is only at like half of its usage while playing (ie, it shows all 8 cores with activity, but they are all at 50 or lower percentage). I have an 8-core PC (amd 8350) which runs the game perfectly, so I know that the game can utilize 8 cores. So, is this a Mac Steam issue? (ie, if i ran bootcamp on this mac, would i get better performance?) are the Mac version of steam games supposed to be slower?

[Kargor]

Originally posted by HeroLordMan:

So, is this a Mac Steam issue?

Steam has no influence on the performance of games.

(ie, if i ran bootcamp on this mac, would i get better performance?) are the Mac version of steam games supposed to be slower?

That's a rather difficult question. First of all, chances are they are not "supposed" to be slower.

However, MacOS has what? 5% share of the PC market, and 1% share of the gaming PC market? At least those are some numbers I remember. Compare that with Windows having a 95% share of the PC market and 99% of the gaming market -- as a game company, where would YOU spend your resources?

Thus, while MacOS games are not "supposed" to be slower, there's a good chance that they receive considerably less "love" from their makers.

[videogames]

Odds are it would run better on WIndows, especially if you're using hardware that was never intended to be used on Macs, like that 280X. Driver support isn't exactly fantastic in OS X. I have a Hackintosh with a GTX 980 (have to run the NVIDIA Mac Pro Quadro drivers) and get considerably worse performance on OS X than I do on Windows, while my old iMac runs about the same on both.
Another issue is just how old these Xeons are. The FX8350 while weaker than a modern i7 is still considerably newer than the X5355. If a game doesn't utilize your dual CPU setup properly it'll definitely be slower.

But try it out for yourself, make a Windows partition and run some benchmarks and games on both OS to see how it does.

Shoddy ports do play a part in it as well, some lazy developers just cbf to put in effort in a platform they don't think is going to sell well.

[Herolordguy]

Ok, I installed windows 7 on my mac and will download games to test the performance deference. When I had a quad core, k used to get 45-50 on battlefield 4 so I expect at least 60 with an 8 core.