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).
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Great! Mac-users will now get decent drivers. If only they could get decent graphics cards as well...
The iMac has an ATI 4850 as its top end offering. This is 2010, you can't game properly on a 27" monitor with a 4850.
The MacPro? If you want a halfway decent graphics card like the 4870 or 285, selling an organ won't be enough.
Until Crapple releases a Mac with a potent graphics card and a decent price tag, the Mac will never be a gaming platform.
And to that Lobsters guy: there's this thing called bootcamp. If you want to game, it's already perfectly possible...
Face it: Macs are never going to be gaming machines. N Apple fanboys, consequently are never going to be gamers.
Is anyone going to run this story?
"Did Apple Update Mac's Malware Protection--But Not Tell Anyone?"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20 [...] 5ic3BzdG9y
It's Apple fault if they run badly not ATI and nVidia if Steve Jobs was not a control freak and did not lock downed is OSes maybe it would be easier to code the game for OSX.
So they want to improve the OpenGL performance, will that mean that there will be an improvement in the gameplay in Linux as well ? That will be brilliant, then I really wont need to use windows !
It would also be good if Mac versions of graphics cards didn't carry a price premium.
So they want to improve the OpenGL performance, will that mean that there will be an improvement in the game-play in Linux as well ? That will be brilliant, then I really wont need to use windows !
Yeh like who cares about over-priced Macs but improving performance for OpenGL must benefit GNU/Linux users - especially with a Steam client for Linux on the horizon. Valve games have generally run well under Wine - so more kudos to them for this work!