Yes! It’s possible. There .. that should answer the question of ‘Can I run Counterstrike: Source and Half Life 2, etc on my Mac?’ Now let me explain how I’ve experienced it.
My Mac Pro has 2 xeon cpu’s and 6gb ram and sata2 hard drives and a nvidia 7300 256mb gpu, so fast enough to play cool games like cs:s and hl2, etc. But .. can I?
Yes, I can .. I can bootcamp into XP or Vista and enjoy native gaming, but this requires a reboot. And mac users surely understand that rebooting is a rediculous concept called into life for those Windows users.
Or, I can run it in OSX directly. And this hasn’t been possible for a while using VMWare and Parallels, etc. But now Crossover Games supports these awesome games, including Team Fortress 2, and other games. YES!
Go to http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/ and download a copy, it’s a 7 day trial and easy to install. Then I went to the program and told it to install Steam via download. Which it did. Then I told Steam to download Counterstrike: Source and install it. Which it did. Ok, all these virtualization and emulation softwares have done this .. but does it run the actual game? Yep.. in 1680×1050 full screen with everything working and in high resolution. No compromise besides no bloom effect. So far so good.
Yes, compared to the native running it’s a bit less snappy in responding to commands, but I have to say I only noticed this because I paid attention. During actual gameplay where my mind is focussing on the headshot I 100% forget about that and just game. I get enough fps, and it’s really smooth. It crashed once on me but it didn’t have any effect on my OS at all. I’ve been playing for hooours again and really enjoyed it. And the best thing is, is that I do not have to reboot every time I want to play for 45 minutes.
If you got any steam games and a Intel Mac, I strongly recommend giving this a try.
Here’s a video of my experience: http://www.gamevee.com/viewVideo/CounterStrike_Source/Other/CounterStrikeSource_on_MacPro_with_CrossoverGames/543996