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From Penny Arcade, a comparison of World of Warcraft (WoW) performance on OS X vs Windows via a Macbook running Boot Camp:

So I installed Boot Camp on my MacBook yesterday.
... for reference here are the stats on my MacBook:

MacBook Pro
2 GHZ Intel Core Duo
2 GB Memory
Radeon X1600

I'm running WOW at 1440 x 900 with all my graphic settings jacked all the way up. I've got spell effects and textures and all that good stuff up as high as it can go. With these settings under OS X I hovered between 15 and 20 FPS. It was just barley playable but for raids and stuff I'd drop down to a lower resolution and take off a few of the fancy effects. Now on the same laptop, but running under Windows with the same crazy settings I averaged between 35 and 40 FPS.
...
I honestly prefer using OS X at this point and it was sort of nice to have a game I could play that didn't require me to go upstairs and start up my Windows box. But it runs twice as fast under Windows for ***** sake. I can't ignore that. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/04/19

I've been wondering when someone would run an OS X native application vs a Windows native application on a MacBook (or other Intel hardware) and compare them...

Could be that the vid card is under clocked

>Could be that the vid card is under clocked

Unlikely, as it is the same hardware, just being driven by XP,,
more likely the universal binary is simply not as efficent as the XP native,

Which when you think about it is logical to be slower,
The game was originally built for XP/Direct X, then ported to OSX/PPC, and then finally recompiled for OSX/Intel, unless you have some *very* clever compilers you are going to introduce some inefficencies,

Could be that the vid card is under clocked
I'm inclined to agree with this.

It's not necessarily a driver issue more a firmware issue. Apple has been known to block features of their grahpics cards for ages. My iBook has been patched so that it can run dual monitors with different screen displays, normally only a feature of the PowerBooks. It was merely a matter of downloading a firmware patch.

But the thing to note with running the cards in the MacBook Pros is that patching it would inccur a serious fan noise.

Regarding the graphics card being underclocked:

Now on the same laptop, but running under Windows

It's differing versions (OS X vs Windows) on the same hardware - so if the graphics card is underclocked, it's impacting both the OS X WoW and the Windows XP Wow.

The difference in performance has to be due to Windows XP/WoW being a better application (more optimised etc) than OS X/WoW.

The critical nail-biting question - is that because Blizzard had more staff on the Windows XP application development side (which is highly likely) or because Windows XP is better for highly graphical games than OS X?

I say its probably a bit of both.

Wow was written for windows and optimised to use directx etc - as far as i am concerned getting a version for osx was a major achievement in itself - but yeah my old xp box that cost me a few hundred bucks and has a built in video card and takes an age to run photoshop handles Wow like a champion and i get 40-60fps, on my G5 imac which handles everything else beautifully and loads photoshop and dreamweaver etc in a tenth the time of the pc - gets about 20 fps.

I would assume its because directx and the rendering engines for windows have been refined and improved over the years and are totally optimized yet the mac was not traditionally a gaming machine so they probably are a bit behind in the programming dept at blizzard getting it up to the same level of optimization. Surely its only a matter of time though.

Also bear in mind all the best games developers still work on windows platform and theres a lot more tools available so until the trickle down effect occurs and more come out of the woodwork - i guess we just wait it out for the next generation of uber mac programmers to make fantastic games... keep the faith!