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

Portal on a MacBook?

GFLPraxis

GFLPraxis

macrumors 604
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
7,152
460
Obviously, since there's no Mac version of Portal, I'd be running it under Boot Camp. I've been considering purchasing Portal via Steam (no need to buy the whole Orange Box, I just want Portal), but I have no idea if my system can run it well.

I don't care about maxing out settings, but will the game look fine with a good framerate on my Core Duo MacBook w/2 GB of RAM? Can the GMA950 cut it?
 
GFLPraxis said:
Obviously, since there's no Mac version of Portal, I'd be running it under Boot Camp. I've been considering purchasing Portal via Steam (no need to buy the whole Orange Box, I just want Portal), but I have no idea if my system can run it well.

I don't care about maxing out settings, but will the game look fine with a good framerate on my Core Duo MacBook w/2 GB of RAM? Can the GMA950 cut it?
Click to expand...

Judging by this thread I would say not, but who knows, perhaps someone can get it working. Good luck! :)
 
I can only assume that it would run it decently. portal and TF2 are not high graphic intense games. But don't quote me on that, because I don't have a macBook.:apple:
 
Valves games seem to have good backwards compatibility (HL2 runs sweet on my old Dell laptop). So I would think that it would run but the graphics options would have to be set low & you'll probably only get 25fps (if that!).

I think the GMA950 is a Dx8 card so Portal will run in Dx8 mode.
 
mateus said:
Valves games seem to have good backwards compatibility (HL2 runs sweet on my old Dell laptop). So I would think that it would run but the graphics options would have to be set low & you'll probably only get 25fps (if that!).

I think the GMA950 is a Dx8 card so Portal will run in Dx8 mode.
Click to expand...

No the gma 950 is Dx7 graphics chip.
 
hankolerd said:
I can only assume that it would run it decently. portal and TF2 are not high graphic intense games. But don't quote me on that, because I don't have a macBook.:apple:
Click to expand...

Actually, I would say TF2 is pretty much on par with Episode 2 in terms of graphics. Cel-Shaded graphics don't necessarily mean the game is graphically simple, TF2 is not. It's a beautiful game, beautifully developed. Episode 2 looks amazingly good, and Valve has done a great job at faking stuff (like trees, which look amazing from afar, and when you use the car [that thing is fast but upon close inspection, the geometry is quite simple).

To the OP: I don't think the integrated graphics on the MacBook could be able to handle a game like Portal; yet, i've seen some amazing stuff come up later on on a game's life-cycle (such as the Ugly Mod for Oblivion [which I can't recall the name of], which made possible running Oblivion on old computers; true, it looked like crap...)
 
GFLPraxis said:
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/index.htm

Intel's web site disagrees with you. It advertises DirectX 9 functionality.
Click to expand...
Well the wikipedia it says dx7 also whenever a play a source game or any game for that. matter
dx7rj1.png
 
triddent222 said:
Actually, I would say TF2 is pretty much on par with Episode 2 in terms of graphics. Cel-Shaded graphics don't necessarily mean the game is graphically simple, TF2 is not. It's a beautiful game, beautifully developed. Episode 2 looks amazingly good, and Valve has done a great job at faking stuff (like trees, which look amazing from afar, and when you use the car [that thing is fast but upon close inspection, the geometry is quite simple).
Click to expand...

No, they're not. Episode 2 uses projected shadows and higher resolution textures, bump mapping is a lot more prominent in Ep 2 also.
Plus Ep2 is also running AI and uses more physic objects which, whilst not affecting the graphics card will be a strain on the CPU.

I recommend downloading the HL2 demo and see how well that runs with settings on high (but not AA or AF). I'd estimate that to be like Portal with low quality graphics.
 
raggedjimmi said:
No, they're not. Episode 2 uses projected shadows and higher resolution textures, bump mapping is a lot more prominent in Ep 2 also.
Plus Ep2 is also running AI and uses more physic objects which, whilst not affecting the graphics card will be a strain on the CPU.

I recommend downloading the HL2 demo and see how well that runs with settings on high (but not AA or AF). I'd estimate that to be like Portal with low quality graphics.
Click to expand...

TF2 Uses Soft-shadows, Normal maps, HDR+Bloom, Physics, AI, etc. True, the Physics and AI on Episode 2 are way more complex, but TF2 still requires quite a bit of processing power. I didn't say it was "better" or equal I said "pretty much" which means, "almost", to what degree, we could argue that for a couple more hours.
 
I only listed what Ep2 has over TF2.

Case in point, I can run TF2 with everything on max (with AAx2 and AFx8 though) in 1440*900 and get a nice 30fps.
Episode 2 I need to turn shadows to low, HDR and motion blur off, texture quality to medium and water to reflect world only with AA off to get it at 30fps.
Portal is like TF2, only for some reason the water effect has to be put to simple reflection to keep it at 30fps.

No doubt Ram will have a big part to play too, since EP2 maps take up much more memory than TF2. Phong Shading takes up a chunk of resources too, but theres no way to turn that off :eek:
 
I think it would work

My netbook works with steam so a macbook should do fine, although the mac version doesn't support intel graphics cards.
 
It might be 3 years old, but Portal on OSX came out a few months ago, and I just bought it a few days ago as an Xmas treat, and I still can't get it to work :(

My Macbook: 4GB, X3100 graphics, 2.2GHZ

I've tried all the launch options given in another thread:
Code: 
-mat_dxlevel 70
-mat_dxlevel 90
-dxlevel 80
+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1
+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1 -console -heapsize 256000 -dxlevel 80 -width 1280 -height 800 -novid +cl_drawmonitors 0 +r_shadowrendertotexture 0
+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1 -console -heapsize 256000 -dxlevel 80 -width 800 -height 600 -novid +cl_drawmonitors 0 +r_shadowrendertotexture 0 -window -dxlevel 80

but had no luck :( People have said they run Portal fine on X3100 graphics in BootCamp / XP so it should be workable in OSX right ?
 
You might have a bad install of Portal. Try deleting the local content (right click on it in Steam) and download it again. I have the (mostly) same computer and Portal works fine, if slow.
 
Last edited:
RedTomato said:
but had no luck :( People have said they run Portal fine on X3100 graphics in BootCamp / XP so it should be workable in OSX right ?
Click to expand...

nope... very different. X3100 has better DirectX support, which is being used in Windows, than OpenGL support, which has to be used in OSX.
 
Deleted all local content for Portal, redownloaded (took a couple of hours), rebooted my macbook just to clear the decks, and tried Portal again.

No dice. Same error as always : "This game does not support this type of graphics processor"

Grr. Currently have options set at:
-mat_dxlevel 80 -width 640 -height 480

Any ideas? This guy on YouTube with same computer as me has Steam Portal running on OSX :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0v6YIFH7_8
 
I forgot the obvious: are you running Snow Leopard? Snow Leopard has optimized a lot of things for Source (Valve) games and if you are running Leopard or Tiger it might not cut it. If you are running the latest version of Snow Leopard, then I'm out of ideas.
 
Yes, latest Snow Leopard, fully updated. Hmm. Scratches head.

Perhaps it's because I only have the most recent Portal files? Maybe earlier versions were more compatible? But Portal on OSX only came out a few months ago.

I don't have many fancy OSX add-ons or mods - I try to keep this macbook relatively vanilla. Xcode, Growl, Perian, MacFUSE (for NTFS access) and Dropbox are installed, and that's about it. I don't have Bootcamp - I run Windows in VMWare so that I can store snapshots.

Can I ask - when changing launch options for Portal (or other Steam games), do you need to restart Steam? All I do is change the option, then close the game prefs window and retry the game. I haven't bothered to close Steam or reboot each time. (I did try rebooting once but it made no difference)
 
Steam does not support the GMA 950 or X3100 anymore. You're out of luck. If you don't believe me, ask rbarris. :) He works for Valve IIRC.
 
Last edited:
Mackilroy said:
Steam does not support the GMA 950 or X3100 anymore. You're out of luck. If you don't believe me, ask rbarris. :) He works for Valve IIRC.
Click to expand...

Ah that's interesting. He just told me yesterday in another thread:
rbarris said:
Intel graphics chipsets such as the GMA950 and X3100 are not supported by Source engine games running in OS X.
Click to expand...
I didn't know he works for Valve. I was rather taken aback by his statement as there are many reports and YouTube videos of Portal etc working on OSX & X3100. Thanks for clearing all that up.

So you mean Steam / Valve / Source etc USED to work on OSX X3100 / GMA 950 and no longer does so? That's a bummer. Guess I've thrown £30 down the drain then even though I checked that the games I wanted (Portal, HL and a few others) worked on OSX & X3100, and they've only been out on Steam a few months :(
 
Oops, bad word choice. I should have said Source, not Steam in general. My mistake. :)
 
Update:

I looked elsewhere and found that the fact that the game ran on the GMA950/X3100 initially was an oversight.

It was an unsupported configuration which ran at one time, but caused so many support calls that Valve understandably put in a hardware check to stop it from running.

Devs have stated that they were never intended to be supported, and there were multiple posts on the forums promising that a future update would break compatibility altogether by implementing a hardware check.
Click to expand...
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1561707

I work in IT support myself and I fully understand the need to restrict operations to known good hardware configurations. It's just that this issue wasn't clear to me before.

I'm posting in this thread as it might help others to understand why there are so many videos out there showing Valve games running on Macbooks etc when now they currently don't.

rharris said:
I helped write the original requirements and as I recall they said "ATI X1600 or higher, or NVIDIA 8600M or higher". Intel chips were omitted from the support list for performance, correctness and stability reasons on OS X.
Click to expand...
 
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