First look: Valve's Steam, Team Fortress 2 and Portal for Mac - Page 2

Originally Posted by JeffDM

You can't easily overclock or update game consoles with better hardware either, and those platforms seem to be doing pretty well overall.

The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the median hardware is not today's high end but technology that's a few years old now.

The most popular screen resolution is 1280x1024.

As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Originally Posted by ghostface147

there isn't a common API like Direct X that can hook into the deeper layers of OS X.

Originally Posted by ShaolinDave

Public beta this month?
Wasn't the official word from Valve that the official release was this Wednesday? Now all we're getting is two games?
First they delay the official release from April to mid-May, now the official release is just a public beta and who know when we'll get the full thing. I wish Valve would stop jerking us around like this.

Originally Posted by JeffDM

As an aside, for all the complaining we've heard in these forums about OS X lacking SLI/Crossfire support, it turns out that only about 2% of Steam users are using it.

Originally Posted by Superbass


.. Really these companies are just trying to make a quick and easy buck. They know that gaming sucks so bad on Apple computers that they can throw a 3 year-old bone to us and lots of Mac users will jump all over it...

Anyways, with the 2 generation old, rebranded graphics in the new Macbook Pros, and no DirectX support in OSX, I don't think this will change too much about the mac as a gaming platform, except for people who don't mind playing with all graphics set to "low".

Originally Posted by Buffer


Ehrm - Telltale Games has done exactly this several months ago, when they released their Monkey Island episodes for Mac - also for free for customers owning the Windows-versions? :

Originally Posted by MacHarborGuy

Why would you "bet" that? People thought the same thing when Steam was first released in 2003, and look at what happened since then.

This will be the start of the return of gaming on the Mac in a huge way. Great for developers and consumers alike.

The ONLY reason I used BootCamp was to be able to use Steam and play TF2 (why would I need to buy a gaming PC is I already had an iMac that had good enough specs?). Now I won't need to use Bootcamp anymore, NOR will I need to rebuy all of the Source Engines games (Portal, HL, HL2, HL Episodes, TF2, etc), because I get the Mac versions automatically.

Win Win in all regards.

Originally Posted by Noliving

Disagree, besides maybe the Operating system and the amount of ram, it is pretty much high end, most people are either using a 4800 or 5800 series of ATi card, for Nvidia it is either a 8800/9800 and also a 260x video card, they are using decent processors as well.

For the primary display resolution, ah ya 1280x1024 is only around 18.8% and your forgetting the fact that over 18% have it at 1680x1050, over 10% have it at 1920x1080 and additional 5% have it at 1920x1200, I would say nearly as many people are running it at 1920x1080, if you include the 1920x1200, as they are running at 1280x1024

Originally Posted by StLBluesFan

I can't let this slide...

You're misrepresenting the Steam survey. While "the most popular" screen resolution is 1280x1024 (18.8%) more than 56% run at a resolution greater than that (including over 10% with dual monitors).

Originally Posted by WilliamG

The other thing to consider is that as video cards are updated, often a single card will perform as well as two of last year's cards.

SLI is only for people who upgrade constantly and need the very fastest and best. Those folks are PC folks. They wouldn't really consider a Mac even if it had SLI.

Originally Posted by Haggar

But if 1 of the newest cards would run so well, then wouldn't 2 of those cards perform even better? SLI and Crossfire are not just for games. For all the talk about Macs being the ultimate professional graphics workstations, Apple should have the hardware support to back it up.

Originally Posted by MacHarborGuy

Apple DOES have the hardware, but that is usually in the higher end systems. Its the difference between the $1200 iMac (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB shared memory ) and the $2000 iMac (ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics with 512MB).

Originally Posted by djames42

I ran the Half-Life series just fine on my 1st-gen MBP with its (relatively) ancient X1600. Granted HL-2 isn't modern itself, but my point is that this should run fine with the current generation of (discrete) video cards.

Originally Posted by djames42

Can't believe nobody's brought up the most important question... When is Episode 3 coming??? Kinda ended on a bit of a cliffhanger with Episode 2!

Originally Posted by Marvin

That won't be until at least 2011. Valve said no new games this year but they brought forward Portal 2 in time for Christmas.

This Steam launch will most likely consist of only games we already know about:

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1
Bioshock 1
NFS: Carbon
The Sims 3
Half-Life 1
HL:2 + ep1 + ep2
Portal 1
TF2
True Crime: Streets of LA
Star Wars the Force Unleashed
Jedi Knight 2 Outcast and Academy
Tiger Woods PGA
Prey
UT3
Colin McRae Rally
Battlefield 2142
Harry Potter
World of Warcraft
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Tomb Raider Anniversary
Neverwinter Nights 2
Command & Conquer
The Chronicles of Riddick (upcoming)
Quake 4
Doom 3
Lego Star Wars/Indiana Jones
Star Wars Battlefront
Star Wars KOTOR
James Bond 007: Nightfire
Splinter Cell 1 (thanks a lot Ubisoft)
XIII
Halo 1
Star Trek Elite Force 1 & 2
Tony Hawk 4
BloodRayne
Soldier of Fortune II
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Spider Man 1
Sacrifice
Red Faction 1
American McGee's Alice
Escape from Monkey Island
The Tales of Monkey Island
Myst series (1-5)
Spore
Prince of Persia
Rayman Raving Rabbids
Still Life 2
Guitar Hero
Disney games: Cars, Up, The Incredibles
Black & White 1 and 2
X-Plane 9
StarCraft II
Brothers in Arms

That wouldn't be a bad list of games to start out with even if most of them are old games. I'd probably get Quake 4 as I only ever played the demo. I would like to play Half-Life using a controller so will get those again and try out the 360 controller on the Mac using the 3rd party driver. Maybe the Force Unleashed but it's a big download and they will charge full price for it. I would possibly get Still Life 2 as well, it's nowhere near as good as the first one but I'd see if it plays better performance-wise on the Mac side.

Modern Warfare 2 would be good - it requires Steam so it can be ported over now. I think that if publishers don't keep adding games to the distribution platform, it will run out of steam (pun intended) quite quickly. At least it'll be a place you can get downloads legitimately.

Originally Posted by ghostface147

While I am thankful Valve has done this, I don't think the Mac is still a viable platform. As fat as I know, there isn't a common API like Direct X that can hook into the deeper layers of OS X. There isn't a huge Mac market if you break down the numbers. Apple doesn't allow overclocking, frequent video driver updates nor do they allow graphic cards to be swapped in and out.

Originally Posted by funkyp56

its up for me!!!

Originally Posted by zorinlynx

It's called OpenGL. And the nice thing about OpenGL is that it is multiplatform; you can use nearly the same graphics code on any operating system supporting OpenGL, including Linux and Windows as well.

Apple is actually improving their OpenGL code as we speak, and it's primarily due to Steam coming!

Originally Posted by BenRoethig

Portal runs really well, even on my less than steller REV.A aluminum iMac.

Originally Posted by debusoh

I just installed Steam and I am downloading Portal now (free, at least for a while...).

I will let you know how it does on an Macbook Pro 15", i7.

I think it is GREAT that valve brought this platform to the mac.

Originally Posted by jfanning

And so it should, Portal is a three year old game. The funny thing is it won't run on my iMac due to the 7600GT, where the Windows version runs fine on it.

Originally Posted by JeffDM

On the single graphics, that's true (but the fact that 25% still use DX9 should say something), but the processors represented could be as old as 2006 or 2H2005 and still be in the middle of that pack. Going by the chart, it's only in the past few months that the quad core users finally exceeded the single core users. The fact that a negligible portion of users are running dual GPU or higher still remains as well, lack of SLI is one of the things that Mac detractors really screamed about on this forum, they had the fervent feeling that it's a very common thing to do when they couldn't prove that it was in widespread use, and it turns out it really isn't.

Originally Posted by JeffDM

But there's the flip side, 44% of steam users are using 1280x1024 or lower as their primary display resolution. It's also comical that a 5:4 screen is still so commonly used.

Originally Posted by Noliving

Yes it does, it tells me that the majority have decent graphic cards. dual core Processors as old as 2006, that are most likely core 2 duo processors, are still decent when you look at the system requirements of the games on Steam. Very few games want a processor under the recommended settings to be either a core 2 duo 2.4 or a quad core. Dual graphics cards were always a niche market, the argument was that it was another hardware feature that the mac computers lack.

Ya so what? Professional gamers at CAL run at 1024x768 with the latest sponsored hardware from Intel, ATi, and Nvidia for the sole reason to absolutely guarantee a playable experience no matter what.

Originally Posted by zorinlynx

It's called OpenGL. And the nice thing about OpenGL is that it is multiplatform; you can use nearly the same graphics code on any operating system supporting OpenGL, including Linux and Windows as well.

Apple is actually improving their OpenGL code as we speak, and it's primarily due to Steam coming!

Originally Posted by SharpDefine

civ4 apparently needs to be installed on a non case-sensitive partition...
I have to reinstall my system according to valve. nice.

Originally Posted by djames42

It is also virtually unplayable because of the inability to view through portals to see what's on the other side (I couldn't find a setting that enabled this necessary graphics option which was enabled by default when I played it on the PC).