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Steam for Mac Details: Native Performance, Chipset Limitations, Closed Beta Underway

Yixian said:
Um... ever heard of DirectX?

Piss poor GPUs for your buck, no attempt to actively coax game engines to the Mac (Havoc could have been bought, Apple didn't bother, responsible over the last 5 years for a large number of AAAs never coming to the Mac) etc - Apple have done almost nothing with OS X besides the Intel transition to encourage gaming on the Mac at all. Steve has long considered gaming a waste of time, until he realised on the App Store that give people the option and they will game in vast numbers on Apple products.
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Hmm, hadn't look at it that way. Your post makes sense and is quite correct on this respect. Sorry, I thought your earlier post was just a jab at Apple for no reason. Gotcha and I agree. :) Maybe we will see a lot more coming to the Mac from Apple, I have a feeling Apple had a lot to do with Valve going full force with the Mac crowd.
 
gregnv said:
Gaming is the last thing the PC does better than a Mac. Getting Steam and the core Steam games is HUGE and should make the Mac more attractive.

Now for a desktop system that is more powerful than the iMac but not a server/workstation class Mac like the MacPro.
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G4 Cube?
 
Looking forward to this. Already have a few Steam purchases, might have to play through Half-Life 2 again on this 27-inch beast :eek:
 
Nermal said:
But you don't even need to; if you've bought the Windows version then you get the Mac version for free :D
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Nice....!!
Does that also count for "physically" bought DVD's..?

Here's my copy.... so excited!
 

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MacsRgr8 said:
Nice....!!
Does that also count for "physically" bought DVD's..?

Here's my copy.... so excited!
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it should work fine, as long as you have registered the game to a steam account, and presumably you have done this, because HL2 doesn't work with out steam.
 
I hope other game manufacturers that are using the steam platform come out with mac versions of their games as well.

I'm really hoping to see Modern Warfare 2 on the Mac. I really want to play this game. But don't want to bootcamp it.
 
As a proud owner of the latest base iMac, I'm looking forward to see how TF2 will run. I can get Borderlands to play under Windows 7 in Bootcamp at around 28fps. Hopefully, under OSX TF2 will be better.
 
Wonder how beta testers were selected?

I signed up to be a beta tester as soon as Valve announced the program. I have a MacPro, and a Macbook Pro as well as an active Steam account. By active, I mean 124 hours of MW2 and "too numerous to mention" TF2 multiplayer action! I was apparently not selected to participate even though I would seem to fit the profile perfectly. Bummer! I was hoping to ditch dual booting sooner rather than later.
 
This is very cool, and I will follow closely. Open GL vs. directX and the much superior hardware offered by the PC side will make this an interesting "battle" if it even gets there. I'd really like to see decent Mac gaming take off. Then again I'd like to see decent Macs appear as well ;-P
 
mike.coulter said:
As a proud owner of the latest base iMac, I'm looking forward to see how TF2 will run. I can get Borderlands to play under Windows 7 in Bootcamp at around 28fps. Hopefully, under OSX TF2 will be better.
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One can almost guarantee that TF2 will run infinitely better. First Borderlands is very well know for having framerate problems on all three platforms it release on, Second Borderlands is using the Unreal 3 Engine from Epic which debuted around 2006, while TF2 is running on VALVe's Source engine which was first used in 2004 with Half Life 2. My people agree that the Source engine is starting to look a little shabby. And Lastly the mac book in my signature with the trusty 9400 can crank out 40fps in TF2 on medium so you should be good on an iMac.
 
TennisandMusic said:
This is very cool, and I will follow closely. Open GL vs. directX and the much superior hardware offered by the PC side will make this an interesting "battle" if it even gets there. I'd really like to see decent Mac gaming take off. Then again I'd like to see decent Macs appear as well ;-P
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if mac gaming ever does take off, it will begin to show the cracks in the graphics layer that has so long plagued the gaming world, namely DirectX. DirectX was designed to be the easy way out, unlike OpenGL, which though harder, produces better results in the end. Microsoft first took over the PC gaming market with it and then moved on to the console market. There's a reason the XBox has and X in the Name(DirectXbox).
 
redking31591 said:
if mac gaming ever does take off, it will begin to show the cracks in the graphics layer that has so long plagued the gaming world, namely DirectX. DirectX was designed to be the easy way out, unlike OpenGL, which though harder, produces better results in the end. Microsoft first took over the PC gaming market with it and then moved on to the console market. There's a reason the XBox has and X in the Name(DirectXbox).
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Yeah, I suppose. I know that can be somewhat of a religious argument (directX vs opengl) but I think directX is on it's way out soon either way. With programmable gpu's and all that...I just don't see it lasting. I would very much prefer to be working on Open GL anyway. I welcome Valve making this push for sure. I really love working on games, and I see no reason why Windows should have the lock on that sort of thing, but of course it takes cooperation from Apple to make machines that can run these games well.
 
Wow, I'm glad that we have some serious news about this just now, it looks amazing and I can't wait to play the Orange Box on my MBP :D

By the way, about Steam Play: why does this feature have a separate name and logo? Do you have to separately activate the fact that you can play your games on both Win and Mac? Can't you just sign in with your steam username and password and voila, your games are there? I mean that would seam logical to me, why does it have to have a special name? It's as if Gmail had this special name like "Gview" or something for the fact that you can view your emails on both Mac and PC, wouldn't that be strange?
 
redking31591 said:
if mac gaming ever does take off, it will begin to show the cracks in the graphics layer that has so long plagued the gaming world, namely DirectX. DirectX was designed to be the easy way out, unlike OpenGL, which though harder, produces better results in the end. Microsoft first took over the PC gaming market with it and then moved on to the console market. There's a reason the XBox has and X in the Name(DirectXbox).
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DirectX had features for games ahead of OpenGL while the people in charge of that standard dilly dallied. OpenGL I believe is playing catch up for games, but for other things, such as 3D modelling OpenGL is a better platform.
 
redking31591 said:
if mac gaming ever does take off, it will begin to show the cracks in the graphics layer that has so long plagued the gaming world, namely DirectX. DirectX was designed to be the easy way out, unlike OpenGL, which though harder, produces better results in the end. Microsoft first took over the PC gaming market with it and then moved on to the console market. There's a reason the XBox has and X in the Name(DirectXbox).
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Yeah, your logic makes sense. Developers will now choose the "hard" way instead of the easy way and stop using DirectX.... :rolleyes:

OpenGL just hasn't kept up with DirectX. There was a time when OpenGL would have been the better choice, but no longer. If Apple wanted to support gaming on the Mac, they would do well to license DirectX/3D the same way they licensed Exchange from Microsoft. It would make porting a heck of a lot simpler without having to use slow-down wrappers like Cider for that matter. Given the miserable GPUs that most Macs have, frankly they need every optimization they can get. Apple should be offering gaming level hardware (i.e. you can build a very decent gaming system for as little as $1200 on a PC. $2000 would get you a system that a $3000+ Mac Pro couldn't touch with a 100 foot pole). OSX also needs support for things like SLI if it ever wants to even REMOTELY keep up with Windows. The Mac Pro hardware could support it (under Windows it can), so once again it's the "most advanced operating system in the world" that comes up short. Given the cash reserves Apple has ($40+ Billion the last I heard), I think they could easily afford to make those improvements. But as long as Steve believes it's a waste of time or a "bag of hurt", you might as well forget about it. It's a darn shame Steve seems to be the only one that gets any say on these matters at Apple. They're a big enough company now that they could have a gaming division and I don't just mean for iPhones.
 
jimmyjoemccrow said:
DirectX had features for games ahead of OpenGL while the people in charge of that standard dilly dallied. OpenGL I believe is playing catch up for games, but for other things, such as 3D modelling OpenGL is a better platform.
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This is true. DirectX is at a far better place than OpenGL at the moment, developer wise and performance wise.
 
Sounds pretty nifty, but I'm a fail gamer as it is.

Though, given the choice, I'd probably buy Left 4 Dead 2. We tested it out on a classroom server (game server project--evillll), and it was amazingly fun.

No one would want me on their team though...unless I had the axe. I was fantastically good with the axe. :D
 
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