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Valve Officially Announces Steam and Game Library Coming to Mac in April

Adding on to the previous posts, this is potentially indicative of a huge shift at Apple. Before the iPod Touch they didn't give games the light of day. They didn't care. Within the last year they're suddenly show casing games in their ads. (Yes, they did show of Halo back in the day but look what happened there...not that it was directly related to Apple being less than helpful with game companies.) If Valve suddenly changed their mind with respect to mac games because of support from Apple it could have farther reaching implications than just Steam.
 
Steven Jackson said:
It's only a few days old: 27" i5 iMac 4GB ATI Radeon HD 4850 (512MB). What sort of performance might I be able to get from this? Could I rival Xbox 360/PS3? Original Xbox? PS2?
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Original Xbox and PS2 can be creamed by a 5 year old low-tech mac mini... I am certain that your computer could beat those.

As for Xbox 360 and PS3? Well I am guessing you will get about 50% better performance games on it... I could be exaggerating a little, but it sounds just about right.
 
Nifty feature

Also included in the announcement is the addition of a new "Steam Play" feature for Steam, allowing purchasers of either the Mac or PC versions of Valve's games to play on the other system free of charge. Third-party game developers distributing through Steam are also widely expected to take advantage of the feature.

If I don't like the way the game plays in OSX I can play in XP (or vice versa) without having to pay for a second game. Very good move, Valve.
 
rmbrown09 said:
Yea I just thought of something, DX is definitely a huge part of these games, I use launch options like dxlevel-95 etc.
Are they actually going to change up the game for openGL... something or just interpret dxlevel commands into openGL equivalents.

hmmm
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It will most likely have run options, but I don't suggest you try using DirectX on Mac! The results would be... Horrifying...

You should be able to use server commands though.
 
macintologist said:
Does anyone NOT like this announcement??

BTW, does this mean we will finally play Half Life 1 on the Mac after it was cancelled?
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Half Life: Source should work - it uses the same engine as Half Life 2 and they released it as a bonus with the Half Life 2 Gold edition.

But I doubt that they will port Blue Shift, Opposing Force or any of the bazillion mods that exist for the original Half Life.

Anyway. This. Truly. Is. Awesome!
 
I hate to p**s on peoples chips. But those thinking that the Mac native versions will give the Windows one a run for its money are in for a shock.

http://www.barefeats.com/nehal14.html

Mac OGL performance noticeably trails that of even the dreaded Vista (even at ultra high resolutions, where raw power usually over comes software optimisation), and with ATI and Nvidia locked in a knife fight to the death I doubt serious optimisation for the platform will be along any time soon.

All that aside, this is a great day for Mac gaming fans.
 
layte said:
I hate to p**s on peoples chips. But those thinking that the Mac native versions will give the Windows one a run for its money are in for a shock.

http://www.barefeats.com/nehal14.html

Mac OGL performance noticeably trails that of even the dreaded Vista (even at ultra high resolutions, where raw power usually over comes software optimisation), and with ATI and Nvidia locked in a knife fight to the death I doubt serious optimisation for the platform will be along any time soon.

All that aside, this is a great day for Mac gaming fans.
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I wouldn't suggest quoting barefeat... It's not a very accurate and professional website.

OpenGL 2.x has faster draw-calls than D3D 9 and 10. Sadly it is surpassed by D3D 11. The HLSL is also poor compared to the GLSL (again, except on 11).

OpenGL 3.x is planned to surpass 11 by almost 12% efficiency! Unfortunately? Only 10.6.3 will be supported... No previous versions...
 
Yes!

Half-Life 2 was the only reason I used bootcamp. Now I can get rid of bootcamp and get some GBs back. :)
 
Neotyguy40 said:
I wouldn't suggest quoting barefeat... It's not a very accurate and professional website.

OpenGL 2.x has faster draw-calls than D3D 9 and 10. Sadly it is surpassed by D3D 11. The HLSL is also poor compared to the GLSL (again, except on 11).

OpenGL 3.x is planned to surpass 11 by almost 12% efficiency! Unfortunately? Only 10.6.3 will be supported... No previous versions...
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That's nice. Care to link to some direct comparisons which back up what you are saying (real life numbers, not artificial benchmarks by somebody with an axe to grind). As that is the best benchmark I could find. I had a look for some WoW numbers, but all I could find were forum threads of people talking about how much better it ran on their Macs under Windows, and the Blizzard guys saying they were doing the best job they could.
 
Hehe, and people thought I was crazy saying they ported source over to Mac. Keeping the builds in sync is the right way to go. I wish more companies followed this.

Hint: Google do this with Chrome already!

Really looking forward to this, I can finally beat episode 2. I bought it, but got sick and tired of rebooting into Windows so never finished it. This will hold me over nicely until Starcraft 2 is released :D I love playing counter strike, been getting a little bored with Urban Terror recently.

Also looking forward to Left 4 dead. I heard a lot about this game, really wanted to check it out but not installing Windows.

Now, I hope I can just re-download all the content I purchased for the PC version ... or I will be rather *cough* steamed.

Its really looking like April is going to be an awesome month. iPad and steam!
 
BRLawyer said:
Excellent news. This ALSO means that one of the last reasons for people to keep (unwillingly) their inferior PCs is practically vaporized now.

MS IS DEAD. AND SO IS DELL.
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Now Apple just need to work on making my back catalogue of games compatible with their OS, then they'd have a sale :)
 
Eidorian said:
How so?
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I don't mean it in the "It's horrible" sort of way, but many of their articles are unaccurate. Look at the index and at some of the articles. You will see many of them have little info and are unaccurate. A few articles were corrected though.
 
WooHoo!!

This is what I call giving a great example.
Steam Play! Sounds like this is exactly the way it's meant to be :)
 
maghemi said:
Considering the increase in mac users most likely being the driver for bringing these games over to the mac platform, and that most of this increase is a fairly recent thing, such as myself. I'd say there are plenty of uses out there with decent video capabilities. Between our 5 macs we have video cards from 2600xt and 9400M all the way up to 8800gt and gtx 285. All of our macs will capable of playing at least some if not most of those steam games listed. In fact when I was last playing counter strike source on a PC it was on a 6600gt video. All of our macs are a least as capable if not more so than that.

I have a number of friends who play steam games a lot and have video no more powerful than a 7600gt card.

It's all about numbers, and these companies obviously feel there are enough numbers out there to warrant to cost to create the products.
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Anecdotal. Besides they are porting games that already have made them money, on an engine that they has paid for itself. The costs to them for porting must be small enough that they can try this. After all, if they follow the ID method of porting then most of the models, graphics, sounds, etc are platform agnostic. They already package their games in this way to make modding easy. A port will be more complicated than a mod certainly, but the workload has already been reduced because of the way they structure their games.
 
layte said:
Mac OGL performance noticeably trails that of even the dreaded Vista (even at ultra high resolutions, where raw power usually over comes software optimisation), and with ATI and Nvidia locked in a knife fight to the death I doubt serious optimisation for the platform will be along any time soon.
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The Mac drivers under 10.5 for the GTX285 were known to be deficient under some cases. This was fixed for 10.6.

(Plus COD4 was not a good port iirc. The Valve guys can probably write some good OpenGL code.)
 
/dev/toaster said:
Hehe, and people thought I was crazy saying they ported source over to Mac. Keeping the builds in sync is the right way to go. I wish more companies followed this.

Hint: Google do this with Chrome already!

Really looking forward to this, I can finally beat episode 2. I bought it, but got sick and tired of rebooting into Windows so never finished it. This will hold me over nicely until Starcraft 2 is released :D I love playing counter strike, been getting a little bored with Urban Terror recently.

Also looking forward to Left 4 dead. I heard a lot about this game, really wanted to check it out but not installing Windows.

Now, I hope I can just re-download all the content I purchased for the PC version ... or I will be rather *cough* steamed.

Its really looking like April is going to be an awesome month. iPad and steam!
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....and Urban Terror for the mac has not ben updated for ages.
 
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