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How well does Portal run on your system?

When I ran the game under Windows it was okay, but now it won't render the insides of Portals. They're just black.

I tried tweaking the graphics, but nothing seems to change...
 
27' i7 iMac 4GB ram, everything maxed out with 0xAA is 45+FPS at all times with render depth at 9. I'll update later when my 8GB kit comes later today :D

Overall, I'm very impressed
 
With AA off and AF set to 16x I was getting a constant 60 FPS(the refresh rate of my monitor) on my 4850 24" iMac with everything else maxed out.
 
To the OP:

Weird, I have almost exactly the same specs as you (2.66 Ghz proc tho) and it's been great. Try these settings.

Everything on high except:

Color correction off
blur off
medium shadows
AA off
trilinear filtering

Played a bit of the last level at 1600x1050. It never dropped below the high forties/low fifties except for the fire part. Make sure you increase your mouse sensitivity.
 
Specs in sig, it ran fine on the normal settings, but for some reason I couldn't get any sound?:confused:
 
Macbook, 2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM. I did get a warning that my Intel GMA 950 was not supported, but I could play the game anyway.

I downloaded Portal. When I started the game, first a picture came up of the a man with a valve in his head (obviously the company logo) followed by an image of what looking like a glass box. It said "loading" at the bottom of the page and the image started flashing rapidly. After a minute or so, I got tired of that and turned the game off. Is it supposed to flash like that, and if so, for how long?
 
Axemantitan said:
Macbook, 2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM. I did get a warning that my Intel GMA 950 was not supported, but I could play the game anyway.

I downloaded Portal. When I started the game, first a picture came up of the a man with a valve in his head (obviously the company logo) followed by an image of what looking like a glass box. It said "loading" at the bottom of the page and the image started flashing rapidly. After a minute or so, I got tired of that and turned the game off. Is it supposed to flash like that, and if so, for how long?
Click to expand...

It will likely continue until you have a GPU supported by Source.
 
awesome and helpful thread

i will post my results with a 9600m and a 9400m with my MBP 15"...will have to do it tomorrow though....on my 4th beer tonight :p
 
Late 2008 Macbook.
2.13GHz Core 2 Duo.
2GB RAM.
GeForce 9400M.

Runs grand at 1152x720 which was the default for me.
 
Specs in Sig

I have not changed any settings and it runs just fine except for the occasional lag when looking at/near Portals. This sounds like a very common bug hopefully its something todo with the software and will be fixed?
 
Latest MBP 13" 2.4 4GB GeForce 320

Runs nice and smoothly throughout, little bits of lag here and there, but nothing significant, although I haven't finished all the levels yet.
 
The Mac Pro in my sig:
50-70 fps at 1920x1200 fullscreen with all settings maxed except 4xAA and 4x anisotropic. Drops to the 40s when looking at a portal.

MacBook Pro in my sig:
30-40 fps at 1680x1050 fullscreen, all settings maxed except 4xAA and 4x anisotropic. Drops to 20s when looking at a portal.
 
You may want to update the first post with this:

In Options, go to Keyboard and then Advanced. Check 'Enable Developer Console" Accept, etc, now in the game or anywhere press tilde (~) below escape to bring down the dev console. Type in this command:

cl_showfps 2

The 2 is the last mode out of three, 0 being off, 1 is a live counter updated every frame, and 2 is the (much preferred) average counter that updates every frame, but as an average of the past second so it's actually intelligible.

(I'll be back to give you guys a nice list of source engine developer commands)

With that said (on the system in my sig) I have a Radeon 4870 HD with 512 MB of VRAM, 1920x1200 display and I have everything maxed except textures—I have at high instead of very high. I get an average of 40-50fps. No change of settings I do offers a substantial boost in performance. I can go from 8x, to 4x, to 2x AA, at I remain at the 20fps average. When I turn AA off though, I get 150-180fps… Seems AA is the lynchpin in the Steam Engine running properly on OS X or not. On this same system running windows, I can EASILY break 180fps running completely maxed settings, 1920x1200, etc.
 
e8200 at 3.0ghz hack
gtx 260 896 216 core

1920 x 1200 everything max, runs ok but no where near as good as windows.
 
base 17" i5 MBP, runs awful. Steam is a joke on mac right now. I can't fathom why they would realese portal when high end macs are getting 15 fps on mediocre settings (lol 4 x aa max). This is a source based game! Windows Laptops from 5 years ago can run this much better. Have a feeling they realesed thier client to sell mini games and capitalize on casual gamers.
 
The Final Cut said:
base 17" i5 MBP, runs awful. Steam is a joke on mac right now. I can't fathom why they would realese portal when high end macs are getting 15 fps on mediocre settings (lol 4 x aa max). This is a source based game! Windows Laptops from 5 years ago can run this much better. Have a feeling they realesed thier client to sell mini games and capitalize on casual gamers.
Click to expand...

I've got 8xAA max. And you can't really blame Valve for the performance difference. First off, it's their first attempt at making gaming in OS X a big deal, and I think they've done a good job to start with. They know there are some performance issues and they're working on it, and so is Apple with better GPU drivers. My i7 iMac can run the game at fully maxed setting with no AA @ native res without a single flaw. And I dare you to play these games on a 5yr old Windows powered laptop, it'll be a painful thing to watch.

Some people complain wayyyyyy too much. Give it time, they always fix what's broken. Always.
 
VALVe is an amazing company, Gabe Newell is a true entrepreneur who despite amazing growth still makes the customer #1. They just released fixes for Portal on the Mac today and will continue to do so until it's up to par. Steam isn't just a digital distribution marketplace; long after a game's release they continually refine and update their products through Steam. Team Fortress 2 recently experienced its 119th update after 2.5 years, do the math: that's almost an update every week, with only a single purchase of the game, no subscriptions+expansion packs like World of Warcrack or anything. (TF2 is also also on the verge of receiving a major update, the Engineer Update)

If there's anyone to point fingers at in this, it's Apple and the graphics card manufacturers, but mainly Apple for not providing such a comprehensive API framework for graphics like M$ has done with DirectX. (Core animation definitely doesn't count! lol). This failure on Apple's part has put all the load on game developers to push themselves to the Mac platform, rather than Apple helping out by pulling a little. Historically VALVe has gone to Apple many times to try and help make the Mac a viable gaming platform, but 'never got the return phone call'. It seems it took a giant pile of money falling in Apple's lap from the unprecedented success of games on the iPhone OS to finally convince Apple that Mac gaming is a good idea, worthy of some investment. Up until a microsecond ago Apple was still touting Halo: Combat Evolved and Call of Duty 4 as its biggest gaming titles... and they both run like CRAP on my $3,300 Mac Pro rig that can eat the same games for breakfast on Windows.

End of it, VALVe was working hard for Mac gamers before Apple was. We owe them a big group hug for bringing us these games, and even for free if we'd already purchased them on PC through the new SteamPlay initiative. Trust me, Gabe will clean some house at Valve if Portal 2 comes out and it's little brother Portal 1 (and all the other current-gen Source games) still runs worse. It's to their benefit as well, as fixing up their current games up to par will help them with their simultaneous development of the Windows and OS X versions of Portal 2.

/history lesson
 
All of the people with i5's complaining about how their games run just prove how big of a difference the i7 and 512mb gpu make.

Playing games on a 256mb gpu just dosent cut it anymore : /
 
ozreth said:
All of the people with i5's complaining about how their games run just prove how big of a difference the i7 and 512mb gpu make.

Playing games on a 256mb gpu just dosent cut it anymore : /
Click to expand...
Not so much in Windows really.. This stuff, even L4D2 runs great on the old unibody 9600MBPs with 256MB VRAM - On the windows side..

i7 with 512MB would obviously be nicer though haha. I'm sure once Apple and Valve have optimised a lot of people will be very happy with the performance.
 
Playing on my 2.4ghz macbook pro with the 256mb 8600m gt with 4gb of ram and it runs fine. Some frame rate issues but nothing major that hinders my gameplay. I'm not too picky about the performance since its just great that steam has come to the mac. Plus I would give Steam and Valve time to work out bugs that are being reported right now. I'm just waiting for TF2 and I'll be happy.
 
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