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Steam for Mac Now Live, Portal is Free Until May 24th

Hurda said:
Oh, WinXP. Why not WinME? Or Win98? Sheesh.
If you bash something, make sure you bash equal opponents. Otherwise it's just desperate trolling. :rolleyes:
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I'm not bashing anyone, I was just positively surprised compared to my Windows experience :rolleyes: . XP is a great gaming system since it doesn't waste as much of the system's recourses as Vista or Win7. The last time I played full screen games was on XP, and on XP everyone knows that once you're in a full screen game, you're at its mercy. An enormous amount of PC users still use XP. I mean I would not have expected a full screen game to animate so nicely with Exposé, it acts like any other window, which is very nice. It didn't do that under Crossover Games either. I didn't know it does it on more recent versions of Windows, but as you probably know, no one uses WinME or Win98. Many people use XP though. Win7 just came out and most hardware isn't compatible with that or even Vista. They're still selling PCs with XP on it.
 
Currently on the last level of Portal. Played through the entire game on max settings and max res on my early 2009 24" iMac with a 4850. Runs and looks great. Now I just need Counter Strike Source and Team Fortress 2 and I'm set.:D
 
kingtj said:
I find that 99% of the people bellyaching about the Mac having "too poor of video and too few options" to be usable as a gaming machine are just hung up on chasing the best performance, regardless of practicality. (EG. What good is being able to render a game at 240fps when the human eye can't even tell the difference between that and HALF as many frames or less? And what good is running a huge LCD at a really high resolution when it's been proven that for gaming, a 22" or smaller LCD is optimal anyway? Your eyes can't take in the whole scene at once, at a normal viewing distance from a monitor when the screen is larger than that.)
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I'm thoroughly enjoying Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1680 x 1050 on my 22" display with Medium/High settings and x2 AA/AF. I plan on getting a larger 24" one at 1920 x 1200 within the next few months.
 
It's been said before, I repeat it with as much frustration and malice towards Steam as I can.

It doesn't work on my Mac Pro?! The damn thing meets the minimum requirements of the game in Windows mode, but a 7700GT can't meet Steam's standards? 256MB NVidia is still plenty of power these days! And you tell me that 1: The games I do have for steam isn't supported like Empire Total War, and 2: The one game I can have for steam, a 3 year old game can't run AT ALL on a 4 year old computer?

Ya know, Steam, about a good 70% of Mac users still use Computers 3 years old or older! Ya can't just cater your service to the folks who run the latest and greatest stuff.

Pathetic, Steam. Pa-the-tic.
 
Steam crashed twice on me during the downloading and I'm not quite sure yet, but I have it back running now and it appears to be downloading fine. I'll post the report it gives on why it crashed here if it does it again, but I'm so glad Steam has finally came over to the mac :)
 
STEVE-O- said:
Nah, yours is FAST, i have 20mb broadband (thats fast in the UK lol) :p and mines only going at 600kb/s
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That still could be your distance from the exchange on an ADSL2+ product.

I'm getting 20KB/s using BT's FTTC. :mad:

And quite happy we get to keep Portal!
 
Man i tried Portal and used the same settings (or as close to) I use on XP. I got some bad frame rates, choppy as hell especially if i am in front of another portal, LOL. I'll stick to boot camp. I easily stay in the 90's according to fraps .It's very smooth. IDK though maybe its just me cuz i figure OSX will use all 4 gigs of my ram while XP only can see or use 2.5 or 3gigs (i don't remember the cap) but it works well. I remember I tried Call of Duty 4 for mac and just like this one used the same settings I used in windows and it was a slideshow. I mean totally unplayable. Now dont get me wrong on XP I was averaging only 26 fps which is a little choppy but it was still playable. Who knows:(....

BTW My card is a NVidia 8600GT (<-- lol, yes already replaced once) 256MB with 250GB 7200 RPM HD
 
Hoping Half Life 2 is live soon, It was one of my fav games and i only managed to play though once before switching to Mac.
 
The servers seem ok to me. Im downloading average 4900-5200 kb/second, with peaks around 7200 kb/second.
93% in less than 20min
 
I gave this one a BIG FAT NEGATIVE. Why? It's quite simple: PERFORMANCE SUCKS!

As I've said before, it's just the freaking Windows version of Steam running natively in Mac OS X. That's why it asks for a .EXE file when changing the icon of a gaming. You can also notice it when you're changing the key combination to bring up the in-game overlay (It'll say Winkey when you press Command).

Mac OS X has very crappy GPU drivers. Portal doesn't play NEARLY as well as the Windows version does AT THE SAME EXACT SETTINGS. I get nearly 90FPS with everything as high as possible (no motion blur, no AA, 16xAF, vertical sync off). Setting Portal to the same exact settings for the Mac version gives me LESS THAN 25FPS!

Very crappy performance.

If you want gaming on your Mac, install Windows via Bootcamp, and game on. Mac OS X is NOT (and NEVER WILL BE) made for gaming.
 
kingtj said:
Apple hardware is doing just FINE at playing games for me, as long as they don't cripple them with bad Cider ports! (Granted, I'm using a Mac Pro ... but that's what you WANT to use, if you want a really good gaming experience out of your Mac, along with everything else.)

I can either boot into Windows via Boot Camp and run them just fine, or run them quite playable as native OS X programs (Call of Duty 4, etc.).
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I think Mac Pros cost way too much for the computer user who just wants to play games. It's been a while since I've used a PC but I'm sure, with a little bit of research, a person could put together a decent gaming PC for around $1300. By decent, I mean something that'll run games better than a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini and an iMac.

kingtj said:
Steam coming to the Mac is the best thing that could happen to them, gaming-wise -- because it gives the small developers some real exposure for their work (games like Enigmo were written first for the Mac, but didn't really get too well known until they started porting it for other platforms). Plus, it makes everything more accessible. Even the "big name" titles aren't always easy to get ahold of for the Mac, because local stores don't bother to carry them on their shelves.
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Agreed! Like iTunes, Steam is an awesome way for developers and publishers to distribute their games. And with it now on the Mac, they can reach an even broader audience.

kingtj said:
I find that 99% of the people bellyaching about the Mac having "too poor of video and too few options" to be usable as a gaming machine are just hung up on chasing the best performance, regardless of practicality. (EG. What good is being able to render a game at 240fps when the human eye can't even tell the difference between that and HALF as many frames or less? And what good is running a huge LCD at a really high resolution when it's been proven that for gaming, a 22" or smaller LCD is optimal anyway? Your eyes can't take in the whole scene at once, at a normal viewing distance from a monitor when the screen is larger than that.)

The only really legitimate reason a Mac hasn't been a "good gaming machine" so far is due to lack of interest in developing software titles for it. The ONLY way to ever turn that around is to support efforts like this one!
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Useless bragging rights aside, the reason why a person would want 240fps in a game is because there are likely several points in said game that would really push the hardware, causing a dramatic dip in frames. When there are tons of things going on, that 240fps may dip down to 60fps or less. As many a gamer can attest to, that makes a difference in first person shooting games like Left 4 Dead and Modern Warfare. As for having a huge screen, that's likely user preference and bragging rights. Seeing as how Apple offers a 27" iMac, there's definitely a market for them. I'd love for Apple to release a Mac Mini with user-upgradable CPU and GPU. It'd definitely attract more gamers to the platform.
 
Nice my account from years ago when i used to play on pc is still active. Dont play games much anymore but ill give it a try...Downloading portal at 3.9MB/S right now :)
 
vhp3 said:
I am trying to download but everytime i hit the free link (within steam) i just receive a blank page? How did you get yours working?
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Me too. D/L steam, signup, passwords, blah blah.

Go to free link for Portal, errors, errors errors.

Are we part of the beta test??
 
Illusion986 said:
Nice my account from years ago when i used to play on pc is still active. Dont play games much anymore but ill give it a try...Downloading portal at 3.9MB/S right now :)
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wow, lucky you! I'm getting a measly 150 KB/s

...and on most downloads I get up to 3 MBs
 
Well I'm on a late 2009 MBP 17" with 9600M GT (256mb). Running on the recommended settings: 1344x480 fullscreen, high details, 2x MSAA, I get around 30fps (ew).
Turning of AA and lowering resolution to 1280x720, I can get around 59-60fps. Still noticeably worse than my PC, but it's bearable. Though my MBP is quite toasty now :p
 
Anybody else having problems with Steam not responding when starting it up?

I'm on an early 2006 MacBook Pro Core Duo. :(
 
SayUno82 said:
Man i tried Portal and used the same settings (or as close to) I use on XP. I got some bad frame rates, choppy as hell especially if i am in front of another portal, LOL. I'll stick to boot camp. I easily stay in the 90's according to fraps .It's very smooth. IDK though maybe its just me cuz i figure OSX will use all 4 gigs of my ram while XP only can see or use 2.5 or 3gigs (i don't remember the cap) but it works well. I remember I tried Call of Duty 4 for mac and just like this one used the same settings I used in windows and it was a slideshow. I mean totally unplayable. Now dont get me wrong on XP I was averaging only 26 fps which is a little choppy but it was still playable. Who knows:(....

BTW My card is a NVidia 8600GT (<-- lol, yes already replaced once) 256MB with 250GB 7200 RPM HD
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Disable Anti Aliasing, I have the same 8600GT as you and that fixed the framerate issues for me, I ran it in 1280x800 pretty smoothly on the default (Except for AA) settings. If you mess too much with the video settings it slows it down (Or at least it did for me) I think they have it currently optimized for certain mac setups change too much and you get stuck in bottlenecks (for now).
 
And I was able to download it at 10MB/s (for both the Mac and Windows versions).

Here, read this little blog post that I wrote:
"Why Gaming on the Mac Will Never Be (& Steam for Mac Sucks) - http://bit.ly/ajMHvk"
 
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