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

How well does Portal run on your system?

palmerc2

palmerc2

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 29, 2008
1,625
687
Los Angeles
list your specs

I'm on a 24" Alu iMac "iMac7,1" with snow leopard

2.8GHz C2D
4GB ram
ATI radeon HD2600 256MB

It is amazingly choppy, and messed up. I don't know what my average FPS was, but it wasn't that high...it got real choppy when things were going on such as the moving metal cylinders, fire, the final scene, or whatever. All that on the lowest settings even

I used to have bootcamp, which I have counterstrike source, team fortress 2, half life 2, etc etc etc....counterstrike and the like ran perfectly. I hope it runs the same on the mac side.
 
Unibody MacBook 2.0GHz, 4GB, 9400M

Same thing. Runs decent to great in some places but sometimes all of the sudden I'll get this huge lag and low FPS (like in the last test around the cylinders) and then out of nowhere it'll get better.
 
hhmmm

Menge said:
Unibody MacBook 2.0GHz, 4GB, 9400M

Same thing. Runs decent to great in some places but sometimes all of the sudden I'll get this huge lag and low FPS (like in the last test around the cylinders) and then out of nowhere it'll get better.
Click to expand...

Now that is interesting, I played it on my Rev C MBA (HDD version) and I thought it played very nicely (default settings) indeed - this was on the battery!

Have yet to try it out on my 2006 Mac Pro with flashed 512MB 4870.

F
 
Early 2009 24" iMac
3.06 Core 2 Duo
4 GB of RAM
ATI Radeon 4850

Ran pretty well. Nowhere near as well as it does in Windows though.

In Windows I am able to max everything out including AA and AF and with no hiccups in framerate at all(easily capping the refresh rate of the monitor which is 60Hz). On Mac OS X, I have everything maxed out with the exception of AA which I have to put at 2x with AF at 16x. Any combination at 4x AA is locked at 20 FPS and dips down to 10 when you are looking through two portals. With 2x and 16x, I get 30 FPS and it dips to 20 FPS when I'm looking through two portals. With 2x and 16x without vertical sync, I get 45 FPS and it dips to around 35 when looking through two portals.

From what I've been reading on Valve's forums, Portal is using double buffered vertical sync, which locks it down to 30 when you could be getting something like 55. That's the only performance enhancement Valve needs to work on. The rest is all on Apple's outdated video drivers and incomplete OpenGL support. 10.6.4 is supposed to be bringing some big improvements so I have my fingers crossed.
 
On my hackintosh:
Q6600 2.4ghz
4gb memory
8800GTS OC 640mb video card

All settings on high, 1920x1080 resolution, 2aa, 2af.

I get 60 FPS. Then when I look at a portal I get 30 FPS.
 
MBP 2.66 with NVidia 9400M + 9600M GT

Only tried it with the slow 9400M switched on so far, and it's been running flawlessly. No slowdowns at all.
 
iMac 27" i7, in native resolution it's a little bit lagging, I can't really play. Also laggy on HD res, 1920*1080.
Below, works perfectly.
 
works great on default settings... haven't had a chance to run on max... but you don't really need to have amazing graphics for this game...


uMBP(late 09) 2.53ghz 4Gram Nvidia 9400M

Portal is a good game... but I'm patiently waiting for some CS... 1.6 preferably
 
Mine ran it okay at all high + native res but I dropped some to medium due lowish FPS. IMO there ain't big difference between high and medium
 
MBP 2.8 dual core, 9600gt and Portal runs perfect at it's default settings. Though don't know how many fps, but no frame drops or anything.
 
MacPro 2.8 Octo
12Gb Ram
1GB 4870


1600x1200
Everything High
AA x 4
Antistropic x 8
Motion Blur ON


Smooth as butters ;):):):):)
 
It works very very nicely on my 9600M MBP and my 8800GS iMac.. I'll take fps over resolution though and tend to run games with nice AA at around 720p.. Not totally sure why, I usually just like the look and extra smoothness over extra pixels. :)
 
27'' i7 iMac, 4 GB ram.
Works ok in full resolution and mostly full settings, but the occasional drop below 30 fps when looking into portals bugged me so I took the resolution and the shadows down a peg or two, now it's fine.
Sure does get the GPU diode cooking though....

-Nick
 
2008 imac
3.06ghz dual core 2
4GB RAM
8800 GS

On max resolution, with high settings its ok, but the GPU is getting toasted. Will probably not play it again until Valve and apple optimise their stuff.
 
Had to cut some things down (No world reflections, no AA, Trilinear filtering) but I didn't really notice a decrease in visuals. It looks good and it runs pretty smooth too. I do think they can do more optimization for OpenGL, though. It could run smoother on my hardware. My GPU is more than capable for Source games.
 
My runs butter smooth using the macbook in my sig, just turn of vsync and all of your problems will go away
 
My new MBP 15" 2.66 ghz i7 only runs like 15-30 fps with portal and for css on the windows side it runs over 100 fps. So steam a lot of work to do with the beta. Definitely worth having on my mac side more though.
 
2007 Macbook

Running 1GB Ram, 2.0GHz, GMA950.
I obviously can't play it in OSX, but windows 7 bootcamp, I can play just fine until I get to very large rooms, then FPS goes out the windows and becomes laggy. I'm wondering if it's Apple's drivers for the gpu. But what I don't get is why I can play in windows but not osx. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Apple supply the driver for the gpu for the windows bootcamp? Or is this possibly on Valves side of things?

Edit: This is for Portal
 
i'm playing it off my parent's mac mini that i bought them.

once cs:s comes to mac, i'm going to sell my macbook and get a macbook pro to play it.
 
It runs surprisingly well on my 2.4 Ghz X3100 MacBook in a window with all settings to low except models and textures at high. It's a little choppy here and there, but plays better than expected considering the warning that popped up when I first tried to run it.
 
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