A new era of gaming on the Mac may be at hand and I don’t mean just the older titles or titles no one wants (exceptions are the few first person shooters on the Mac) unless you are really into RPGs. Star Wars: Empire at War is now available as a free demo to owners of Intel Macs (PowerPC users need not apply).

The full retail version of the game will be available in stores next week for a price of $50 (technically $49.95).

Hardware wise the game will require an Intel Mac with either a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.83GHz (or higher), 512MB of memory (1GB or more preferred) and a Radeon X1600, Geforce 7300 or Intel GMA 950 graphics with at least 64MB of video memory. On the operating system side you must have OSX 10.4.8 or later.

Note there is an error in the original article, as they say “an Intel GMA 7300 graphics card”. There is no Intel GMA 7300, current generations stand at the GMA950 and GMA X3000. I very much doubt the GMA950 is up to running Empires at War and as far as I know, the GMA X3000 is not available on the Mac (for now).

Taking into consideration the fact that integrated graphics can’t really play games at all; best to just stick with Macs that have a dedicated graphics card.