Advertisement Learn Your Graphics Settings Inside and Out Advertisement You may not think about it because OS X assumes most of the duties when it comes to managing your systems graphics, drivers, and other settings, but there are some things you can do to get familiar with how your Mac handles video and how you can improve it.Lets take a look at a few ways to make those games run as smoothly as possible.
Good Games Laptop Mac Handles VideoAdvertisement Thanks to Steam, Humble Bundles, and developers who are just more open to releasing their games on multiple platforms, owning a Mac doesnt mean youre resigned to watching your Windows friends get their game on. Plus, if youre like me and use a Windows PC as your primary gaming machine but travel with a Macbook Pro, you dont necessarily want to leave your video games at home just because youre headed out of town. Good Games Laptop Free Up SomeFree Up some Disk Space and Clean Up System Clutter Advertisement One of the best ways to keep your Mac in speedy shape is to clean up your app clutter, disable resource-hogging startup apps, and uninstall unwanted apps (especially menubar utilities that run in the background all the time). We covered some of these tricks in our guide to speeding up and reviving your Mac, but its even more important when it comes to games. Some of those games may grab some disk space for scratch while youre playing, and if youre short on it, youll feel it. As a byproduct, the last thing you want, especially if youre playing Steam games, is to cut Steam off from valuable disk space while youre playing. How to Speed Up, Clean Up, and Revive Your Mac The weathers turning warmer in our neck of the woods, which means its time to start thinking Read more GO Media may get a commission Bioderma Sensibio H2O Buy for 15 from Dermstore Beyond that, you can always use some of our favorite tools to clean up and spruce up your Mac, like Onyx, our favorite system tweaker for the Mac, or iBoostUp, another fast and free Mac tweaking tool. Windows users will be familiar with CCleaner, which also works a treat on OS X. The Best System Tweaker for Mac If you want to tweak settings and run maintenance scripts in Mac OS X, you can always take it to Read more Advertisement Disable OS X Features You Never Use Advertisement Additionally, you can kill off some of OS Xs features that you know you never use, like Dashboard or Notification Center, if you never use them. Theyre generally always running in the background, and when it comes to gaming, every bit of added horsepower you can get it useful. Good Games Laptop How To Turn OffThis tutorial from MacTuts is a great how-to for both if youd like to turn them off entirely, but heres how to turn off Dashboard: Open a Terminal Window (Applications Utilities Terminal). Enter this command to disable Dashboard: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES Enter this command to restart the Finder: killall Dock The Finder will automatically restart, with Dashboard disabled. To disable Notification Center, follow these steps: Open a Terminal Window (Applications Utilities Terminal). Enter this command to stop Notification Center from re-launching: launchctl unload -w SystemLibraryLaunchAgentscom.apple.notificationcenterui.plist Enter this command to stop Notification Center: killall NotificationCenter Notification Center should immediately go away. If you get a process not found error while running one of the above commands, thats okayit should work regardless. If you ever need Notification Center back again, open a terminal window and enter this command: launchctl load -w SystemLibraryLaunchAgentscom.apple.notificationcenterui.plist Then press CommandShiftG in Finder (Go To Folder) and type in SystemLibraryCoreServices. Advertisement Since both processes run all the time in the background, you may be able to free up some system resources for your games to run a bit more smoothly, especially if you have integrated graphics. Let Steam Finish Its Work Before You Play Advertisement If the bulk of the games you play on the Mac are Steam games, your best bet before you fire up your favorite gamesor before you hit the road with your Macis to let Steam do everything it needs to do long before you feel like playing anything. Patches, updates, new game installs, do it all before you play, and dont trust Steam or your Mac to manage that stuff in the background while youre trying to game. In Windows, if you have a powerful enough gaming PC, you can freely let Steam work while you do other things. In OS X, it just doesnt seem to work quite as well. Edit: Someone pointed out to me that Steam suspends downloads and patches while youre playing - thats true, and thats a good point. ![]() ![]()
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