Barefeats has posted a new comparison shootout to determine whether the Xbox 360 Elite or Playstation 3 reigns supreme as platform of choice for electronic racing enthusiasts. In addition to the review of what the latest consoles have to offer the article also examines racing titles on the Mac.

You might be surprised to know that there are at least 12 car racing games that run under Mac OS X. Most date back to 2004 or earlier and are far from being state-of-the-art in their use of the full CPU and GPU processing power of the Mac, making it a very weak alternative to the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

That may seem odd since the Mac has state-of-the-art Shooter games like Quake 4 that are every bit the equal of the Xbox 360 version of Quake 4. But there are at least two reasons why racing games languish on the Mac. First, Microsoft's policy of "Xbox 360 only" for titles like PGR 3 and Forza 2 will prevent the porting of those titles to Macs (or PCs). And one game developer told us that it's hard to build a business case when resellers have a tendency NOT to stock Mac racing games in their inventory.

Yet, there are still occasions where we will want to get a "racing fix" from our Mac -- like when we are traveling with our MacBook Pros to a MacWorld Expo. And thankfully there are game developers working to provide better car racing for Mac owners. The soon-to-be-released Colin McRae Rally Mac is a good example.

Barefeats: Racing Shootout

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