Valve: Apple, ATI, Nvidia to Improve Mac Gaming
Valve recently introduced Mac owners to Steam and the company is confident the Apple-made computers will make more than adequate gaming machines, especially now that Apple, ATI and Nvidia are working hard to improve things.
On the Steam forums, one user complaining of 'abysmal performance' was told Apple, Nvidia and ATI were all working with Valve to improve performance and things should improve as drivers are updated.
Lobsters:
Anyone else getting about 1/3 of the performance that they normally would under Windows?
I'm running a Mac Pro 2.93ghz 8-core machine with 16GB RAM. I have both the GeForce GTX 285 and a Radeon 4780 and neither of them get anywhere close to where I'm at under windows. Either card under OS X gets around 45 fps average under mild settings whereas under windows will net me ~150fps with completely maxed settings.
I know there are some performance tuning options that guys use under windows to squeeze more performance out of the game. Does anyone have any tips for running under OS X?
Rbarris (VALVE):
Performance is going to improve as drivers are updated. I would expect modest improvements in short term and larger ones in longer term. No, I can't put dates on them.
We are making a lot of progress is identifying specific issues that need work inside the game and inside OpenGL and drivers. Apple, ATI and NVIDIA are all involved.
Check out the full thread here (via Engadget).
- Valve,
- Steam-for-Mac ,
- Macbook ,
- iMac
- Corsair Nova 32GB SSD On Sale for $69.99
- Deals for June 18: Big HDTVs for Under $1,000
- OCZ Offers 1.8'' Versions of Vertex, Onyx SSDs
- Acer Injects Aspire One with AMD Athlon II Neo
- AT&T Ditches Metered Billing Trials Without Telling
- Civilization V is a Return to Form for PC Gaming
- Toshiba Creates 128GB (64Gb NAND) Flash Chips
- VIDEO: IBM's Supercomputer to go on Jeopardy!
- Deals for June 17: 68% off Logitech Ultimate Ears
- The Fable 3 Trailer From E3 (Xbox 360, Windows)
- See New Rage Screenshots, E3 Demonstration
- Another Look at Battlestar Galactica Online...CGI
- Dell Confirms Switch to Google's Chrome OS
- Toshiba Launches Dual-Screen Concept PC
- New Backdoor Trojan Nukes Windows Boot Process
- Deals for June 21: Dell 20'' LCD for $90.98
- Dell Inspiron R Line Gets Core i3/i5 and Intel WiDi
- Acer: We'll Overtake HP in Laptops By End of Year
"I'm running a Mac Pro..."
STOP! Well there's your problem right there, fella.
Perhaps gaming performance will improve but unless prices improve as well... I'll pass.
I was looking at a 4870 for a MAC. A used one on eBay still goes for $220. While a used 4890 for PC I have seen as low as $100.
It won't be easy and will probably take a while to reach an adequate level.
"I'm running a Mac Pro 2.93ghz 8-core machine with 16GB RAM. I have both the GeForce GTX 285"
So let me get this straight, my quad core with 4gb ram and a 4890 which could be built for <900$ now, blows your $3300 Mac out of the water by a FPS factor of 3x? Silly Mac bois...gaming is for Windows
I'm sure alot of it has to do with moving a primarily D3D game, under DirectX, to OpenGL. Driver optimizations will indeed help, but the source engine is going to need alot of work. Of course, it seems Mac users are deliriously happy to pay more for their hardware, so they probably won't spend too much time improving it
Even if they make improvements, the performance will never be the same. DX has had the gaming spotlight for nearly 20 years while OpenGL has not. That means game devs had the time to leaqrn the tricks, tweaks and optimizations on DX while not the same in GL.
Mac is getting its start, but I doubt it will be on par with or better than WIndows in gaming anytime soon.
I would never own a Mac, but I'm happy that OpenGL drivers will finally get some love. This will benefit Apple, Windows, and Linux. The reason is that there are a bunch of cross-platform applications that use OpenGL and could use a performance boost.
Mac Pro. 'Nuff said.
A lot of Macs have underpowered graphics cards as they were not designed with gaming in mind. It's just as well that valve started with the mature source engine games as many of them wouldn't handle any more than that.
The drivers are a good start, but some of those machines need more that drivers!
More like mac-unpro.
His multi thousand dollar machine would get kicked in the pants, even if he used windows, by my machine wich costs 1/4 as much for me to build.
"I'm running a Mac Pro 2.93ghz 8-core machine with 16GB RAM. I have both the GeForce GTX 285"So let me get this straight, my quad core with 4gb ram and a 4890 which could be built for <900$ now, blows your $3300 Mac out of the water by a FPS factor of 3x? Silly Mac bois...gaming is for Windows
And try to play something only optimized for a mac, and you'll likely see the same thing, but reversed. Don't blame the rig. Blame the programmers.
i'm sure in a couple years they'll have games running fast on macs, but unless apple lowers their prices (which is part of the allure so that's not going to happen), macs still won't be viable gaming rigs.
That's actually good news for the linux version of steam when it comes out.
First, they're working on the source engine for openGL and that's instantly applicable to linux.
Then there's the fact that they have the graphics people onboard for this on macs, so some of that should also spill over to linux.
im confused are there no native openGL games? i would think that with decent drivers they should run on part on osx and linux but im sure windows would still be on top... maybe its just a problem with the games
but I agree at the end this will help linux probably more then apple 
cause those who wish to run linux will get the best of both worlds one day... well we can dream right?
I saw the words Mac and Gaming together and lol'd.
Mac folks will never admit the Wintel boxes beat them in anything (for 1/2 the price)...
I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.
Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching
I welcome the improvements gladly, this could only eventually mean the uprising of OpenGL once again!?! Still waiting on that Linux Steam client now.....
Mac Users are surprised that their computers can't really do anything... But, I too welcome the Improvements for the sake of PC/Mac gaming as a whole.
This is also why people who do heavy CAD work as well 3DS Max use windows.
mac was never intended for gaming until now, It will take some time to get Windows gaming peformance, but it isn't just job for Apple to get this it's for the game developers too , to learn more about Mac OS X
I welcome the improvements gladly, this could only eventually mean the uprising of OpenGL once again!?! Still waiting on that Linux Steam client now.....
Me too thats the only reason i'm cheering this on. i'd rather apple start being reasonable on prices then i'll cheer them on for thier products
I'm getting down votes cuz I said my Mac Pro with dual i7's rapes my single i7 in my PC.
Are the PC haters so biased as to not admit the 2 i7's in a Mac Pro will beat a single i7 in a PC in video rendered
PS: I'm expecting the hate in this one, it's quite typical
More like mac-unpro. His multi thousand dollar machine would get kicked in the pants, even if he used windows, by my machine wich costs 1/4 as much for me to build.
If he used Windows on 'Mac' hardware it's not different than using Windows on that same hardware in a different case. The only problem is the coding under Mac for the drivers and processes that run the game, get your facts straight. A 3000$ Apple computer running Windows 7 WILL beat your ~750$ computer at just about anything. That's indisputable even though most Apple computers are overpriced.
The problem here isn't the hardware or the price of it, it's the drivers that have mostly been geared at video and photo editing are suddenly being used for gaming, it's going to take time for them to get tuned. These are some of the first nVidia and ATI drivers that are used heavily (if at all) for gaming. Go back 20 or so GeForce driver releases and tell me that doesn't suck to play with.
DirectX was introduced in 1995, so it's more like close to 15 years. Good luck finding a 3D consumer card in 1990...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directx
By contrast, OpenGL has been with us since 1992 - more than 3 1/2 years earlier than DirectX. Read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL
You are correct though, that OpenGL hasn't been designed for games.
i'm sure in a couple years they'll have games running fast on macs, but unless apple lowers their prices (which is part of the allure so that's not going to happen), macs still won't be viable gaming rigs.
Amen while a select few gamers wil brag about their awsome 4000+ dolar PC with quad vid card a but laod of ram and a intel uber cpu , most pc gmaers live on a budget much closer to 800-1200 dolars max on thier pc cost , macs just don't offer gaming at this price range.
Hes running a Mac Pro lol. $2499 with 3GB OF RAM STANDARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gee! i can get those fps with my Athlon 4850e with a radeon 5k card and that was a budget build i did for less then 300 bux?? Course my puter doesn't have that pretty fruity icon on it......but for 10 times less and same frame rate? Think I prefer no pretty fruit icons lol!
Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching
That's strange, because PCs can crunch numbers too. Who woulda thunkit?
Ok time to put a stop to this nonsense right now.
Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching
There is absolutely ~nothing~ special about the Mac "case" for video rendering. The case is about the only thing unique on a Mac, the drivers are just ports from the Linux world that Apple spent some extra time on. There is no super secret "Mac optimization code" that makes Video rendering run any faster on a Mac. Its just 1's and 0's being processed by a program. If anything "video rendering" would work significantly faster on a Windows box with a render that is using CUDA or OpenCL to process it through the GFX card. The games are getting poor performance because their DX titles and Steam is having to either use a wrapper (cheap development but significant performance hit) or transcode (significant development costs) the engines. The body responsible for OpenGL has screwed the pooch so badly that its been discarded / ignored for anything game or performance related. CAD / CAM and industrial manufactures still use it because they have millions and sometimes billions of dollars invested into software / equipment that revolves around OpenGL and some variant of Unix.
Case in point, at my house I have a fully loaded SunBlade 2000 with 8gb of memory, 2x UltraSparc III- 1.15ghz CPU's two 73GB 10K FC-AL drives and a XVR-1200 GFX card. The GFX card alone was originally the cost of an entire PC. Its old by today's standards (and I got it for super cheap used) but awhile back it was a beast of a CAD / CAM / design workstation. The software that's supposed to run on it is insanely expensive. The software license's alone dwarf the entire cost of the above noted MacPro.
Maybe Apple Owners' will realize how much they are getting ripped off when they try and game. I really hope something good comes out for Linux from this; cross-platform gaming would be tight.
Should've built a Hackintosh PC