Most of these games have reviews on Inside Mac Games dot com. Because of this, I cannot really comment on the earliest games for the 601-604 CPU’s. I didn’t really start gaming on Macs until a good year or more into the G3 era around early 98. I will list all the options I can think of but will really only comment on the ones I have direct experience with. Although these games are all harder to find these days, they are pretty much all still available if you look hard enough in the right places. It makes sense to break up games by system requirements, so people can try the ones within the ability of the hardware they have. The GPU is still important in gaming, make no mistake I'm just saying that the CPU is more of a factor in Mac gaming vs.

This was all during a debate where others had claimed that the GPU was far more important for Mac gaming, but it's actually 2D where the GPU plays more of a role on a Mac vs. Obviously the 9800 is better suited for the 1.8 GHz, which is where it lives now, but those tests were to prove a point at the time. Although the 9800 in the slower system is a far better GPU, the difference is negated by a CPU that is clocked 80% faster. The 1.8 GHz system beat the snot out of the 1.0 GHz in every single way. An example of this was some testing I did a couple years back. I say that because in my direct experiences with many games it’s the CPU that makes the most difference. In my experiences, I would say that the CPU plays a more important role in Mac gaming compared to the wintel world. These two examples cover the extreme ends of the video hardware needed for PowerPC gaming.

The games in the later part of the PowerPC era (2003-2006) are the ones that tend to benefit from the 64MB and up cards. For greats like Oni from the late 90’s you can get high frame rates on 8 MB vid controllers. A 32MB card is often fine for most of them. Another great thing about older games is that you don’t need a video card that costs several hundred dollars to play them.

Power mac g5 gaming