Steam For Mac

zurielzuriel
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Just want to hear some User Experiences with it so far....



Kinda more interested in the new graphics card performance...like what around what year of games can it play on the highest settings with great framerate? (speaking about the 13inch specifically)

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,171moderator
    It's hard to say, not many intensive games have been ported over yet. The 63 or so games on Mac Steam are mainly obscure puzzle games that don't really tax the computer much at all.



    Portal is probably the best benchmark so far and reviews haven't been too good. It doesn't work nicely with color correction and vsync as they cause huge framerate drops.



    Nonetheless, the 13" Macbook Pro with the 320M is very good for games and will play pretty much any Windows game that's out right now. It handles Crysis on medium quality. If you are interested in a particular game, search for 9600M GT benchmarks as the 320M is about the same speed, just slightly slower.



    Here are some gameplay vids on the 13":



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pkmIopKnig

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9-ooo2ZmA

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKg3fm30gpc

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkDq8ffs6mU

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MMohbjWADo



    portal for Mac is here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VhbYz8-Ek



    Sometime screen capture apps slow down the games.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    djrumpydjrumpy Posts: 1,116member
    I've played both Portal and Torchlight on a 27" iMac with all settings maxed and resolution on both games set to 2560 x 1440 (native) and noticed no slowdowns whatsoever. No tearing, or anything of that sort. I can't speak to the lower end, but for the new iMac's, there don't seem to be any performance issues.



    I also played torchlight in a window @ 1920 x 1080 and noticed no slowdowns at all.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    clausbellyclausbelly Posts: 4member
    Mac is there pointed at in my opinion Steam on the Mac only works with Intel based Macs; something that isn't listed anywhere including the Steam knowledge base until after you try to run the client.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    hirohiro Posts: 2,663member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    It's hard to say, not many intensive games have been ported over yet. The 63 or so games on Mac Steam are mainly obscure puzzle games that don't really tax the computer much at all.



    Portal is probably the best benchmark so far and reviews haven't been too good. It doesn't work nicely with color correction and vsync as they cause huge framerate drops.



    Nonetheless, the 13" Macbook Pro with the 320M is very good for games and will play pretty much any Windows game that's out right now. It handles Crysis on medium quality. If you are interested in a particular game, search for 9600M GT benchmarks as the 320M is about the same speed, just slightly slower.



    Here are some gameplay vids on the 13":



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pkmIopKnig

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9-ooo2ZmA

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKg3fm30gpc

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkDq8ffs6mU

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MMohbjWADo



    portal for Mac is here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VhbYz8-Ek



    Sometime screen capture apps slow down the games.



    It's also hard to say because the ports of older games are done through Wine-like compatibility mapping. That will always be slower, and not a fair comparison for actual system capability. You can only really say whether a games performance is acceptable or not, not how good is the Apple box compared to a non-Apple box.



    At some point the Source engine is supposed to have a native OS X version. Then real performance comparisons can begin. I don't remember what that timeline was supposed to be or if I even read one yet.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,171moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hiro View Post


    At some point the Source engine is supposed to have a native OS X version. Then real performance comparisons can begin. I don't remember what that timeline was supposed to be or if I even read one yet.



    It's already native, one of the developers on the Steam forum wrote the following:



    "I wrote the native OpenGL module for Source Mac. It presents a DX9 compatible interface to the engine, engine calls me, I call GL, dots appear.



    The performance issues being investigated are generally driver level things - below this layering. The layering doesn't exhibit any noticeable overhead in our profiling.



    The whole app is compiled with gcc as a native Mach-O binary using the OS X toolchain."



    They seem to have developed a custom translator to go from DX calls to OGL calls. The difference with WINE is that WINE works with binaries, the Source engine translates function calls in code so there should be no overhead.



    We'll see what improvement the 10.6.4 drivers make.
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