Does Starcraft 2 run better on Windows or Mac?

I have Starcraft 2 installed on my Macbook Pro in OS X. I have Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, nVidea Geforce FT 330M, and a SATA hard drive. In Energy settings I've set it to Higher Performance over battery life. I notice that running it on the recommended High settings, it doesn't run very smoothly when there are many units on the screen.

I have Windows 7 Ultimate also installed via Bootcamp. I'm considering installing Starcraft 2 on that now.

My question is: Does Starcraft run better on Windows 7 than OS X?

Things to consider in comparison:

  • Mac OS X default to 32-bit mode, while on Windows can start in 64-bit
  • Does nVidia graphics card better support on Windows?

Typically, I find cross platform games have better performance on the Windows version as opposed to the Mac versions. If you look at what Blizzard's recommended specifications are:

PC Recommended Specifications:

  • Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better

Mac Recommended Specifications:

  • Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
  • 4 GB system RAM
  • NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better

PCs require less powerful components than Macs do. From this, I would assume Starcraft 2 runs better on Windows than on Mac.


It runs much better on a Windows 7 boot. People are reporting that on the same Mac, they're getting low framerates at low/medium settings under OS X, and very good framerates at high/ultra settings under Windows 7.