Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Disappointed with Steam for Mac?

From Gizmodo...




For the longest time (and admittedly, even today), gaming was the Achilles's heel for anyone considering a Mac. Most games simply never made it to the Mac platform. Steam promises to change all this, and we're already beginning to see the first examples of Valve's effort. Once you hit the Steam store, you're able to see that Valve has already marked games that are available to both Mac and PC users. To celebrate Steam for Mac's release, Valve even announced that its popular title Portal would be freely available until May 24th.

The Implications of Steam for Mac

There are several hurdles that Valve must overcome in making Steam for Mac successful. First of all, a majority of titles on Steam are Windows-only titles. That means that these games are developed to run through Microsoft's DirectX API. In Mac OS X, graphics are handled by OpenGL. While Valve's own Source engine is available for both DirectX (Windows and Xbox 360) and OpenGL (Mac OS X and PlayStation 3), there are major differences.


The second major hurdle is development. It's unclear whether Valve has ported Portal from Windows to OS X or recoded and optimized. However, during testing, we discovered several bugs that lead us to believe that, at least at the moment, titles are being ported in order to meet time-to-market.

Portal and Portaling

As of this writing, Steam is being continually updated by Valve. There have already been two big updates for Steam for Mac today, and Portal itself received an update as well. Unfortunately, the game still seems buggy. Sometimes it crashes, sometimes there are missing textures, and sometimes the colors are off. The last major update actually causes the portals to appear black. You're unable to see through them, as you should.


Obviously, this is a major bug that needs to be addressed. It demonstrates that games enabled via Steam for Mac require more than just simple port. Getting a DX title running in OpenGL is no small feat.

Benchmarks

Portal isn't exactly the most graphically-intensive game on the market. However, we wanted to find the delta in performance betweem Portal for Windows and Portal for OS X. We came up with two platforms, one of which is a late-2009 MacBook Pro and the other a custom-built hackintosh.

Mid 2009 Apple MacBook Pro:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.53 GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR3 @ 1067 MT/s
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 9400M 256MB, 197.16 WHQL
HDD: Intel X25-G2 SSD 80GB
Screen: 1440x900
Sound: Built-in sound
OS X: Version 10.6.3 with latest updates
Windows: Version 7 64-bit with latest updates
Hackintosh:

CPU: Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition @ 3.33 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD7
RAM: 18GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1079 MT/s
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB, Catalyst 10.4
HDD: Intel X25-G1 SSD 80GB
Screen: 2560x1600
Sound: Built-in sound
OS X: Version 10.6.3 with latest updates
Windows: Version 7 64-bit with latest updates



We can see immediately that Portal for Mac is nowhere near as capable as its Windows counterpart. However, there are several interesting points to take away from this. Portal for Mac, in its current form, is at least able to deliver playable frame rates, even on a lower-end Mac like last year's MacBook Pro. Admittedly, the biggest bottleneck here is the GPU.

On the hackintosh side, we get a different and more interesting picture. It appears as though a combination of factors could be holding Portal for Mac back from achieving Windows-like 3D performance. First, we're fairly certain that the Mac drivers play a significant role. Currently, the driver for the hackintosh platform is a combination of Apple's default driver with some level of community engineering. This isn't the ideal approach to optimization. Until Apple comes out with higher-performance drivers, we'll continue to see a significant delta between the two platforms.

Second, the OpenGL versus Direct3D debate is ongoing. Some industry experts, like John Carmack, swear by OpenGL. However, it's clear that Microsoft has put a tremendous effort into pulling the software development community onboard with DirectX, and an increasing number of titles are employing the API. OpenGL on the Mac, on the other hand, is better-suited to productivity than gaming performance. On a related note, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which is available natively for both OS X and Windows, runs far better in Windows than it does in OS X. At 2560x1600 with max settings, WoW can reach upwards of 150 to 200 FPS on the above hackintosh configuration, while it maxes out at 35% to 50% below the Windows scores, suggesting the aforementioned factors are taking a toll.

The Graphics Issue with Apple

Graphics driver and application availability will improve over time, and when the Steam for Mac is mainstream enough, developers are not only more likely to port their titles, but unveil games for both platforms at closer to the same time. Things are getting more exciting for an install base of Mac users who've largely been shut out of the gaming world altogether. Unfortunately, GPU selection is a big issue for Apple right now, as the company barely offers anything competitive to what's available on the PC (one of the most advanced graphics option for the expensive Mac Pro tower, for instance, is last-generation's AMD Radeon HD 4870).
 
Does anyone else have this issue... How do I fix it? It has been like this since I downloaded steam..
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2010-05-18 at 12.58.44 PM.png
    Screen shot 2010-05-18 at 12.58.44 PM.png
    577.3 KB · Views: 194
wsippel said:
Hey! Wine does an amazing job considering the difficulties and the scope of the project. It even knows a few tricks Valve still has got to learn - like making Source games work on Geforce 7xxx cards or not crapping out on particles for ATI users. Sure, I'm biased as one of many contributors, long time user and advocate, but I still believe they (we) did great, and I'm somewhat sad Valve didn't work with Codeweavers. No reason to belittle the effort and achievements, especially considering a cooperation would probably benefit all Mac gamers.
Click to expand...

Sorry I didn't mean to come across as belittling the great work of the WINE community. I'm no coder so I can't speak to the hours of work that folks like you put in. WINE was manna in the desert for a long time but unfortunately it never had (or most likely never will) have the muscle and prestige that Valve (duly) has to take gaming on the Mac to a normal level.

WINE was great but it still had its problems. You could tell it was non-native. I know Steam on OS X is having issues but the gripes of 75% of the people here are just ridiculous. I can't tell if people are trolling or are serious. The legitimate gripes (like Geforce 7 cards not working or even my 8600 being slow on Portal) could just as easily be directed at Lord Job's lack of concern for gpu drivers or the OGL consortium inability to modernize on par with D3D.

Give it time, Valve will get the hang of OS X. I'm confident with people like rbarris working on it :D

Once again, sorry... wasn't trying to belittle the mammoth achievements of WINE.
 
palebluedot said:
Sorry I didn't mean to come across as belittling the great work of the WINE community. I'm no coder so I can't speak to the hours of work that folks like you put in. WINE was manna in the desert for a long time but unfortunately it never had (or most likely never will) have the muscle and prestige that Valve (duly) has to take gaming on the Mac to a normal level.

WINE was great but it still had its problems. You could tell it was non-native. I know Steam on OS X is having issues but the gripes of 75% of the people here are just ridiculous. I can't tell if people are trolling or are serious. The legitimate gripes (like Geforce 7 cards not working or even my 8600 being slow on Portal) could just as easily be directed at Lord Job's lack of concern for gpu drivers or the OGL consortium inability to modernize on par with D3D.

Give it time, Valve will get the hang of OS X. I'm confident with people like rbarris working on it :D

Once again, sorry... wasn't trying to belittle the mammoth achievements of WINE.
Click to expand...
You didn't offend me or anything, so there's no need for excuses. I really understand your point. Users don't really appreciate the effort it took to get what they experience up and running, they just care about stuff working according to their expectations - expectations Wine (and, on a much higher level, Steam) doesn't necessarily live up to.

What most people don't seem to understand is what Wine actually is and why it even works as well (or badly) as it does. Wine is a project that started almost two decades(!) ago, in 1993 to be exact, and since then, more than 1100 developers contributed to the project. It's a mostly complete reimplementation of most Windows programming interfaces on top of Unix, many of which are poorly or not at all documented, and some of which are actually buggy. It can't and won't feel native for that very reason - the applications running on top of Wine think they're running on top of Windows, so they expect a certain behavior. That also means Wine has to be compatible with Windows' bugs without introducing new bugs Windows doesn't have, which doesn't make things any simpler.

Wine wasn't developed with games in mind, either. Many, probably most of the developers don't even care about games. The fact that it works better with games than with many other applications is mostly that games usually use just a rather tiny subset of Windows (like DirectX). There was a time when the installers were more problematic than the actual games - games would run on Wine, but you simply couldn't install them on Wine because the installers use other programming interfaces that were either incomplete or broken in Wine. Then new versions of DirectX were released while the installer relevant APIs were fixed, and the tides turned. You could install games, but you couldn't run them. Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Windows or a new version of DirectX, some Wine developers have to analyze them and figure out how to reimplement them, without using illegal reverse engineering techniques like disassembling. It can be quite hard and very time consuming, and there are still issues with older stuff that require attention, so it'll never completely catch up. But the advancements made in recent years were really impressive in my opinion.

But I guess all that isn't really all that interesting... :)
 
I quote like Steam on the PC, but for some reason its been a nightmare on my MBP.

Downloaded, and during the first launch where it updates, it got to 28mb out of 33mb and restarted. Now it got to 12mb out of 16mb and crashed. Was doing this for 5 days no matter what I did (not good on capped broadband) but eventually got in on the 6th day. Portal downloaded at 4.5mbps which was good and has since then worked great. Beat it in 81 mins though (played before) but still good to have.

Once Valve work all the bugs out it'll be much nicer!
 
ErikGrim said:
Yes, non-native is inherently bad. Unless you do something BETTER and different ENOUGH to make it worthwhile. There is nothing about the Steam app that doesn't scream "lazy port".

http://designdare.com/-steam-is-a-port
Click to expand...
Steam isn't just about the Mac users. I've already said why *I* prefer it to have a unified interface across different OS.. Skin support and usability being the main ones. You will be able to skin it to behave/look like an osX app shortly.

One person's blog/opinion doesn't override anothers. ;) There are legitimate, totally sound reasons for wanting GUI parity across platforms, and Steam works fine - a lot of people love the GUI. People should just hide it if they hate it so much. :confused: - Or wait for skins.
 
ErikGrim said:
Yes, non-native is inherently bad. Unless you do something BETTER and different ENOUGH to make it worthwhile. There is nothing about the Steam app that doesn't scream "lazy port".

http://designdare.com/-steam-is-a-port
Click to expand...

Wow, that's pretty unappreciative. Do you have any idea how much development works goes into what they did?

It's not a "lazy port" It's an EARLY RELEASE.

The focus was obviously on getting the GAMES running on Macs. They coverted the Source Engine from running on DirectX to running on OpenGL.

They even managed to get it running fairly well considering Apple rarely even pushes out Graphics card drivers. A lot of Macs have cheap GPUs running OLD drivers. I'd say they're off to a great start. Things will be looking better once Apple decides there's enough demand to roll out new drivers for their systems.

As for the actual Steam.app... So what? It's a means to an end. It always looked like that. This has been said a lot before... Steam is looking for a UNIFIED PLATFORM. They want the user experience one one platform to be as close as possible to that of the other. That's why they look almost the same on Windows and Mac.

As for UI not being OSX enough. BFD! iTunes doesn't look like the rest of Aqua. How about Quicktime X? It's not a big deal. The OS itself is just a means to the end. If you want to play the game you run the OS to run Steam to run the game. Who cares what they look like?

If you just wanted to "play" your OS and "play" Steam by moving around windows and making them look pretty then you're SOL.

PC gaming has never been about things looking clean and classy and I see no reason for them to change their UI to match what Apple does. If you don't like it make yourself a skin. Steam does have a Skinnable UI.
 
ViViDboarder said:
Wow, that's pretty unappreciative. Do you have any idea how much development works goes into what they did?

It's not a "lazy port" It's an EARLY RELEASE.

The focus was obviously on getting the GAMES running on Macs. They coverted the Source Engine from running on DirectX to running on OpenGL.

They even managed to get it running fairly well considering Apple rarely even pushes out Graphics card drivers. A lot of Macs have cheap GPUs running OLD drivers. I'd say they're off to a great start. Things will be looking better once Apple decides there's enough demand to roll out new drivers for their systems.

As for the actual Steam.app... So what? It's a means to an end. It always looked like that. This has been said a lot before... Steam is looking for a UNIFIED PLATFORM. They want the user experience one one platform to be as close as possible to that of the other. That's why they look almost the same on Windows and Mac.

As for UI not being OSX enough. BFD! iTunes doesn't look like the rest of Aqua. How about Quicktime X? It's not a big deal. The OS itself is just a means to the end. If you want to play the game you run the OS to run Steam to run the game. Who cares what they look like?

If you just wanted to "play" your OS and "play" Steam by moving around windows and making them look pretty then you're SOL.

PC gaming has never been about things looking clean and classy and I see no reason for them to change their UI to match what Apple does. If you don't like it make yourself a skin. Steam does have a Skinnable UI.
Click to expand...

I agree with everything said. It's amazing at how ungrateful people are being.
 
aiqw9182 said:
I agree with everything said. It's amazing at how ungrateful people are being.
Click to expand...

It's just frustrating. I mean, people don't have to be greatful and bowing down to Valve for doing this, but calling it a "lazy port"?

Ugh. There was a lot of development!

Also, UI-Guidelines are... wait for it... GUIDELINES! Not following the native LOOK doesn't mean the code isn't natively running.
 
fixing rooted steam progs!

hey there people!
i had the same issues where my games would not load thru the steam app, and after much google search had found nothing really....
but i had a stab at it !
i had 2 games that worked and suddenly didn't....
what i tried was to right click on the game title (i am a mac fan but please buy a proper mouse) and select the properties of the game....
then i chose to deselect it from the steam community and then selected the "local files" section and did a defrag and a verify, after that the game worked!
only bummer is that it kinda took like 10 mins per game...
(just to be sure - im on a mac! 2.4GHz 4GB V10.6.3)
it worked perfectly for me!

hope it works for everyone else!
and to everyone please don't diss mac or steam or pc - we are all binary (for the moment anyway!)
good luck!
 
prices are great, but the games are not. I expected a bit more of a selection, yet the only thing I can get on steam is several old Valve games and games I can buy as apps for my phone (card games, mini flash games, etc).

The biggest selling point is my only complaint.
 
Old Way vs. Steam

Old Way: buy game, install it, run it.

Steam Way: download Steam (one time only). Figure out Steam's interface, which is different from every other Macintosh application. Click on Steam links at random until it gives you the game you want. Start the game. Play the game. Enjoy the game. Stop the game. Steam is still running. Restart your computer. Steam is still running. Dig around in Settings > Accounts until you find the Steam autostartup thingy. Disable it. Try to log on to Steam. Your password doesn't work. Hey, I have a list of 200 internet accounts and passwords I've accumulated over the years, they all work but Steam doesn't? Click through the Steam "I'm stupid and my password doesn't work" links. Try to submit a report. Hey, you need a different logon to complain about Steam than to play Steam. Get your complain about Steam logon. Wait for the e-mail that validates your complain about Steam logon. Logon and complain about Steam. Receive elegantly written reply from Steam that does not solve the issue. Repeat the process for a day or two until Steam unlocks their "wow you really are an idiot but we'll let you back on Steam" reply. Log back on Steam. Start the game. Play the game. Steam crashes when you stop the game, but who cares. Buy an expansion pack. Start Steam, start the game. The expansion pack isn't there. Logon to Steam with the complain about Steam logon, complain about Steam. Play a different game in the meantime. Have fun. Stop the game. Log back in to check on the status of the complaints about the expansion pack or to see if the expansion pack is there. Realize that your password doesn't work. This is the exact same situation from two weeks ago. Start the complain about Steam process to get your password reset. Feel bad about all of sudden becoming so dumb that you can't remember your password for Steam but for some reason can still function as a productive member of society in other venues. Come to the realization that you're not a smart as the Steam people who like its cross-platformness. Swell with pride at realizing you don't want to learn a third OS (1. Windows 2. Mac 3. Steam-so-I-can-play-games). Take a deep breath and realize that maybe, just maybe, you're not good enough for Steam and don't want to become a Steamer. Sigh briefly at the missed gaming opportunities. Look into the concept of a paragraph, whatever that is. Go on with life.
 
PatrickCocoa said:
Old Way: buy game, install it, run it.

Steam Way: download Steam (one time only). Figure out Steam's interface, which is different from every other Macintosh application. Click on Steam links at random until it gives you the game you want. Start the game. Play the game. Enjoy the game. Stop the game. Steam is still running. Restart your computer. Steam is still running. Dig around in Settings > Accounts until you find the Steam autostartup thingy. Disable it. Try to log on to Steam. Your password doesn't work. Hey, I have a list of 200 internet accounts and passwords I've accumulated over the years, they all work but Steam doesn't? Click through the Steam "I'm stupid and my password doesn't work" links. Try to submit a report. Hey, you need a different logon to complain about Steam than to play Steam. Get your complain about Steam logon. Wait for the e-mail that validates your complain about Steam logon. Logon and complain about Steam. Receive elegantly written reply from Steam that does not solve the issue. Repeat the process for a day or two until Steam unlocks their "wow you really are an idiot but we'll let you back on Steam" reply. Log back on Steam. Start the game. Play the game. Steam crashes when you stop the game, but who cares. Buy an expansion pack. Start Steam, start the game. The expansion pack isn't there. Logon to Steam with the complain about Steam logon, complain about Steam. Play a different game in the meantime. Have fun. Stop the game. Log back in to check on the status of the complaints about the expansion pack or to see if the expansion pack is there. Realize that your password doesn't work. This is the exact same situation from two weeks ago. Start the complain about Steam process to get your password reset. Feel bad about all of sudden becoming so dumb that you can't remember your password for Steam but for some reason can still function as a productive member of society in other venues. Come to the realization that you're not a smart as the Steam people who like its cross-platformness. Swell with pride at realizing you don't want to learn a third OS (1. Windows 2. Mac 3. Steam-so-I-can-play-games). Take a deep breath and realize that maybe, just maybe, you're not good enough for Steam and don't want to become a Steamer. Sigh briefly at the missed gaming opportunities. Look into the concept of a paragraph, whatever that is. Go on with life.
Click to expand...

Still can't understand what is wrong with steam's interface... sorry but a person has to be a lot of dumb to not understand how to use steam's interface.

Oh and by the way, old way doesn't really exists in Mac world.
 
Freakdahouse said:
Still can't understand what is wrong with steam's interface... sorry but a person has to be a lot of dumb to not understand how to use steam's interface.

Oh and by the way, old way doesn't really exists in Mac world.
Click to expand...

Exactly, it's quite simple.
 
it's better than nothing. if steam wouldn't be interested in making mac version of game, how do you want to play with it? you would still continue to play windows version by bootcamp. actually, pure mac version game should be making before implementing into Steam or other online store. or they should make separated mac version like bioshock, COD 4. I don't really expect a mac version of game. anyway, you should be appreciated for doing by Steam. otherwise you can't expect this is coming at all.
 
Steam performance on a 2008 3.0 Harpertown compared to 2009 2.66 Quad-core single.

Hello,

I have my current Mac Pro which is a Harpertown 3.0(3.2) 8-core with the radeon 4870 hd + 8GB of memory DDR2 800. I also sold my machine yesterday for 2000.00 and put it towards the purchase of the 2.66 Quad-core 2009 Mac Pro which has the single processor in it.

Question: Will performance on the 2009 be much better than on the 2008 Harpertown 3.00 I once had? I did move all my 4 1TB drives over to the new system + I moved my radeon 4870HD over - I ditched the GT120. I also installed 8GB of memory in my new system.

I don't use pro-apps and money is tight as to why I couldn't afford even a refurb 2.26 8-core. But I assume that the refurb 2.66 I bought with its hyperthreading under Snow leopard can make a difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back