Welcome to MacMonday, a weekly column where we'll talk about issues related to gaming on Apple's platform beyond "Why isn't PC Game X coming out on the Mac?" In this inaugural edition, let's discuss Spore, Will Wright's latest masterpiece.At this point in time, the closest we can get to playing Spore properly (until its release in September) is to download the Creature Creator demo. Like any downloadable, the first thing you'll want to do is check the required specs to make sure your box can run the game properly. When you come to that, however, you'll see that the specs make two requirements upfront: an Intel Core Duo Processor, leaving PowerPC Macs out of the loop, and OS X 10.5.3 Leopard. Let's take a look at what this means for Mac gamers....

In the wake of this week's big hardware news -- nVidia's launch of the 200 series of graphics cards -- we, the hardware enthusiast community, are pushed one step closer to an approaching and annoying precipice. There is, unfortunately for those who want the best of both worlds, an impending schism between Intel and nVidia, which is liable to leave users in the unenviable position of having to make a fairly large choice or compromise.Do you want to use the most powerful CPU soon to be available (Intel's upcoming Nehalem) or the most powerful video card implementations (nVidia's SLI)? However, if the current corporate stalemate doesn't resolve, you can have one or the other, but not both.Let's all take a few minutes to say a few things that shouldn't be heard by polite company. I'll wait. Hell, I'll offer suggestions....

Is the PC gaming industry dying? According to a recently revealed new non-profit organization, the answer is a resounding "No!". The PC Gaming Alliance was first announced last February at a press conference at GDC with companies that normally compete with each other. Hardware companies like Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Acer, Dell and Antec are full members and game software developer/publishers like Microsoft, Epic Games and Activision are also members of the group (contributors include Capcom, Razer, Logitech, the Guildhall at SMU, Wildtangent, and the Entertainment Merchants Association).So what is this diverse group doing to promote PC gaming? The organization is aiming to come up with ways to improve marketing for PC gaming, trying to fight new ways to combat PC game piracy and looking to do research into PC game revenues beyond the normal retail sales. Perhaps their most important mission is to establish a minimal hardware requirement for a PC to run most games and to create guidelines for game developers to have their games run well on that minimal platform.While the PC Gaming Alliance is still working on these matters (they are planning to announced their first study results in August), Big Download wanted to get an update on the organization and its progress. We sent some questions to the group's president Randy Stude (who in his day job is the director of the Gaming Program Office for Intel) to see if we can get a sense of what the organization is doing and how they feel about recent criticism from game developer Valve Software. ...

Back in February at GDC the PC Gaming Alliance was first announced. The non-profit organization of game publishers like Activision, EA, Microsoft and hardware companies like Intel, Nvidia, AMD and others was charged to defend the PC as a gaming platform via efforts to create a hardware standard for developers to use and to find out how big the market actually is. Little info on the PC Gaming Alliance has been revealed since the February launch. Today News.com chatted with the organization's president Randy Stute who revealed that they plan to announce their first results for their inital look in the industry in August.Those results will include a more comphehensive look at global PC gaming hardware and software sales as well as a timeline to reveal when the organization will announced the mimimal PC gaming hardware specs. In the interview Stute pretty much slams the reporting of the NPD Group for until recently underreporting the extent of PC game revenues. Recently the NPD Group revealed that there was $1 billion generated for online revenues in gaming and Stute stated, "So if you add the billion dollars they claim to have found in annual subscription revenues on top of the $920 million that they were previously reporting in retail, suddenly the PC game piece of the pie is closer to a quarter of all software revenues generated in North America. That's one platform out of eight that's generating a quarter of all the revenues."...

Even as HP's Voodoo brand is seemingly going up in smoke, the first collaboration between the huge PC maker and the small gaming PC company is about to get some more exposure. The critically acclaimed (and expensive) HP Blackbird 002 PC had previously been sold only on the web but now they will start appearing soon in retail stores.While HP won't reveal what retail locations will sell the Blackbird 002 until June 29, they have released the hardware specs for the retail versions. For $3,299 you can get the PC with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor with liquid cooling, a Windows Vista 64-bit OS, dual Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT graphics cards, a 500 GB hard drive and more. HP and Voodoo are planning a big event tomorrow, June 10, to reveal some more new products....

Several months ago, PC processor maker Intel purchased the game physics development software company Havok, which is used in a ton of PC and console games. In February the company announced that it would release the PC version of the Havok tool set for free for anyone to use for non-commercial uses. Well, today is the day to download those files.The files contain both the Havok Physics and Havok Animation tools and can only be used for independent game developers along with academic uses and "enthusiasts". The files do not include Havok's other products such as Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction. The company feels this new release "will boost creative game development throughout the industry."...

PC processor maker Intel and graphics chip company Nvidia may be rivals in some respects but in other cases they have to work together to get their products out. Now News.com is reporting rumors that the two companies may be heading for a showdown over licensing issues which could affect desktop PCs, particularly on the high-end gaming PC market..According to the story (which cites a number of unnamed sources) Intel wants to license Nvidia's SLI technology for its chipsets that support their upcoming high-end processor currently code named Nehalem. If Nvidia and Intel can't come up with an agreement, the story claims that Intel will go ahead and keep their Nehalem license from Nvidia which won't allow Nvidia to make their own motherboards that support Nehalem. Worst case? High end gaming PCs will be separated into two groups: one with Intel Nehalem processors and AMD-created Crossfire chipsets and the other with AMD processors and Nvidia SLI chipsets. Nvidia has yet to comment on these reports while an Intel spokesperson stated that there is a "disagreement between Intel and Nvidia as to the scope of Nvidia's license from Intel to make chipsets compatible with Intel microprocessors." Intel, however, has added that they are " . . . not seeking any SLI concession from Nvidia in exchange for granting any Nehalem license rights to Nvidia."...

A few months ago, a number of PC gaming hardware and game publishers launched the non-profit PC Gaming Alliance, designed to both help promote PC gaming as well as solve some of the issues that are currently plaguing the industry (hardware compatibility and piracy being the top two concerns). One of the members of the Alliance is AMD and this morning the PC graphics chip and processor company announced a program called simply AMD Game that is being designed to help consumers purchase PCs for gaming purposes.The press release states that a study by Jon Peddie Research indicated that two-thirds of all PCs sold in 2007 has just the basics in terms of hardware and were not able to really give a solid gaming PC experience. The AMD Game logo will be put on hardware and components that the company feels will give consumers a clue that these products will be suited for gaming. Hardware retailers like Newegg and TigerDirect and gaming PC makers like Alienware, Velocity Micro and others will sell PCs with the AMD Game logo. The company has even posted up info on several hardware configurations for PCs that could be used to make high-powered gaming PCsOf course, all of these is designed to also help AMD sell more hardware to consumers; they make both processors under the AMD name and graphics chips under the ATI brand. Having a gaming PC with an AMD made motherboard, processor and graphics chip makes things simple for buyers and gets AMD more money. They need it to to compete with Intel on the processor side and NVIDIA on the graphics side. Will Intel and NVIDIA also launch their own similar program? That's a good question......

One of Valve's biggest benefits it gets from its Steam download service is finding out exactly what people have in their PC rigs via a voluntary survey. Today Valve released the latest results of their hardware survey (covering the period between Nov. 15, 2008 and May 15, 2008).The results make for some fascinating reading and speculation. Among the highlights: Intel accounts for 58.48 percent of PC processors in the survey compared to AMD's 41.51 percent Video cards based on NVIDIA Geforce chips took up the top eight places on the survey list; the highest ATI based card was the Radeon 9600. Gamers still apparently have small monitors for the most part; the highest percentage is for 16 inch monitors with 25.8 percent. Only 6 71 percent of survey owners have monitors that are larger that 21 inches. 64.49 percent of PC owners in the Steam survey have microphones Windows XP still is installed in a whopping 80.92 percent of PCs in the survey; over a year after its launch Windows Vista is installed in only 17.61 percent of PCs (that includes the 64-bit version) 32.59 percent of PC owners in the Valve survey have hard drives that are higher than 250 GB. ...

Behind every single one of the games we love, it lurks. The lucky ones never fall prey to it. Some can barely escape its grasp. And it changes and evolves with every new title that comes to market.What is this modern Grue, waiting to devour the unwary or unprepared? What rough beast, its hour come 'round at last, slouches towards NewEgg to be born?The system requirements to play your favorite title, or the hottest new game coming down the pipe.If your PC can't deliver a decent level of performance, it's all but impossible to enjoy playing a game. Fortunately, there are several factors that have come into play to allow the vast majority of us, the gaming public, to do so. At the very beginning are the minimum and recommended system requirements published by the game developers themselves. These specifications aren't drawn up out of the blue, but are laid down by the devs in order to make sure that anyone who wants to play their game can do so with the expectation of a decent level of performance....

Here in the Big Iron room, we're going to be throwing around a lot of computer acronyms and terminology. So, for those folks who may be new to the notion of taking a screwdriver in hand to see what's inside their system, or when it's time for you to upgrade for the very first time, here's a quick list of the components we'll be making reference to and what their roles are.CPU: Central Processing Unit. This is the processor itself, the expensive bit of silicon that performs a bunch of math very, very quickly. Intel's Pentiums, Celerons, and Xeons, along with AMD's Athlons, Durons, Semprons, and Opterons. Most of us are going to have some flavor of Pentium or Athlon (yes, even Mac users have Intel chips under the hood nowadays, though you PPC folks are a bunch of die-hards). When referring to processor speeds, we'll typically be speaking in terms of gigahertz (GHz), or billions of cycles per second. Both Intel and AMD have, independently and somewhat confusingly, moved away from coming right out and saying how fast their CPUs are in terms of raw clock speed. Instead, each of them has come up with an arcane and obscure "performance rating system" that sort of, kind of, using a perverse combination of marketing, advanced differential calculus and a lot of handwavium, gives you a vague idea of how your new CPU would stack up to a first-generation Pentium IV. This may not, in fact, adequately express how arbitrary and confusing this practice is, and I'm going to stay well clear of that particular morass. You'll be getting clock speeds in this space for the sake of everyone's sanity.Cores: Recently, both Intel and AMD have begun offering CPUs with more than one processor tucked into a single package. Such dual-core or quad-core (and, in some cases, triple-core) chips allow the system to do two (or three, or four) things at the same time, and more games -- and applications in general -- are beginning to take this into account with their programming -- a practice known as multi-threading or symmetric multi-processing (SMP).RAM: Random Access Memory. This is where your system stores the information its actively working with, and is typically measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB). There are two main types of RAM in most current PCs today -- DDR2 and DDR3 (DDR stands for Double Data Rate -- the practice of transferring information on both the "up" and "down" cycle of the memory clock. More detail for those who really want to investigate it is in the links).HDD: Hard Disk Drive. Main storage, measured in Gigabytes (GB), and occasionally in Terabytes (TB). This is where everything is saved - from operating system files to games to music - everything that takes up space when it's saved.Video Cards: Arguably, the single most important component when it comes to determining how well a PC will perform a video game in terms of frame rate (often called FPS -- frames per second -- not to be confused with the same acronym used to refer to first-person shooters). There are two major players in this arena - nVidia and ATI (which was recently purchased by CPU maker AMD). The players in this field have also been engaged in a bit of marketing and naming chicanery, but at least they're numbering their offerings sequentially, so you can be pretty confident that a 9-series card is faster than an 8-series card from the same manufacturer most of the time, for instance.SLI / Crossfire: The respective "multiple video cards in one PC" implementations supported by nVidia and ATI.There are a lot of variables that go into building and optimizing a gaming rig. It's our hope here at Big Iron to demystify some of what goes on under for you, and allow you to share in the hardware enthusiasm. There's a lot of pride in craftsmanship when you do build your own PC. Hop in, it's a hell of a ride.Rafe spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you have any hardware, performance, or upgrade-related questions you'd like to see in future editions of Big Iron, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com....