Steam has finally arrived for the Mac. Many think that Mac gamers have been waiting just two months for Steam’s release, but the truth is that we’ve actually been waiting years for an announcement of this magnitude. Not only do we now have a very popular (and often controversial) distribution service for the Mac, but we also have Valve’s entire catalog of titles, including the critically acclaimed Portal, Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead. And it seems we’re all agreed: Steam for Mac is a good thing. Can we finally put the whole Bungie/Halo for Mac affair behind us? Maybe next year…
Before we get carried away with inter-dimensional portals, let’s have a look at performance of Portal on this ridiculously large 27″ iMac that Apple UK loaned me. Here are settings I used for both Mac and PC benchmarks:
- Model detail: High
- Texture detail: Medium
- Shader detail: High
- Water detail: Reflect world
- Shadow detail: High
- Colour correction: Enabled
- Anti-aliasing mode: 2x MSAA
- Filtering mode: Anisotropic 2x
- Wait for vertical sync: Disabled
- Motion Blur: Enabled
- Field of view: 75
- Multicore rendering: Enabled
- HDR: Full (if availalble), bloom ticked
You can’t disable HDR on a Mac since Valve didn’t implement the non-HDR path, so HDR is enabled by default. I assume that the same goes for Multicore rendering, which also can’t be changed on a Mac.
I ran a custom timedemo of one of Portal’s chambers, with a good mix of portal use and movement, on a 27″ iMac (3.06 GHZ Intel Core2Duo with 4GB DDR3 RAM and the rather paltry ATI HD 4670 with 256MB VRAM). I tested Mac OS X 10.6.3 and also ran an up-to-date version of Windows 7 Ultimate via Boot Camp.
Ouch! Portal on Windows 7 has around twice the frame rate of Portal on Mac OS X. I’m running resolutions that are huge, but 2560×1440 is the native resolution of the iMac’s panel. 1920×1200 is a whole chunk-o-pixels less, but it still takes a beating. When I lower the resolution any further that lovely screen suddenly looks rather murky. Of course I could keep the high resolution and put most of the settings to low, but again I’ve got that murk, this time as a result of low settings.
Many blog posts and articles I’ve read compliment Portal’s performance. So I asked myself what’s more important: enjoyment or performance? Clearly, many of you run Portal at lower resolutions and settings, and you really enjoy the game, which is fantastic. Enjoyment is far more important than squeezing out a few extra frames each second. So, what’s the problem? Well, people like me require a minimum of performance to enjoy a game, and removing that wonderful lighting or clever water effect is like removing adjectives from my favourite poem or song. Playing a game as beautiful as Portal without the glitz just isn’t the same. And remember, Portal is not a particularly taxing title. Left 4 Dead 2 will hit your system hard. And, there’s that niggling problem to boot: Windows via Boot Camp gives a far superior experience. That grates.
Could my problems be solved by getting a better Mac? Well, I challenge you to find me one that’s affordable and justified. My loaned iMac costs £1378. I asked Apple for this model because it’s probably the most popular Mac desktop considering Mac Pros start at £1940, which is a huge sum of money. This iMac has nearly everything you could want: a delicious screen, fast processor, fast RAM, lots of storage - but it has a pretty pathetic GPU, especially for a native resolution of 2560×1440. It’s great for photos, video and web browsing, but poor for high-end games. I considered taking a Dremel to the back of the iMac in search of a PCIe port, but I don’t think Apple UK would appreciate me disemboweling their property.
So why does Mac OS X lag behind Windows in games? Developers, engineers and gamers I’ve spoken to have said that its lack of GPU optimisation, the inherent difficulties in porting a PC/Console title from DirectX to OpenGL, and platform differences may all be factors. Maybe our Macs are just made for different things? Edwin at Feral Interactive told me that he can compress two 720p videos, transfer 10GB of HD, and play BioShock simultaneously on his Mac Pro - without a performance hit. Impressive certainly, showing the strengths of Mac OS X, but how often do I need this? And, it doesn’t change the fact that our Macs lag behind Windows when enjoying games.
[I had a section testing mat_viewportscale, but it appears that my testing went awry and vertical sync was enabled on the Mac, causing FPS to be limited. Odd, I double and triple check settings and results, so I'm not sure what went wrong, but it's better to have accurate information. Apologies for any confusion.]
Is it too much to ask that the world’s most advanced operating system can play games as well as Windows?
It would be interesting to see performance stats of Portal running under CrossOver.
I tried Portal on CrossOver, same settings as above apart from Shadow detail set to Medium and Antialiasing switched off (CrossOver doesn’t seem to support them):
Native 28.0 FPS
CrossOver 21.36 FPS
CrossOver was pretty jittery though, Native wins.
Well, if your fans turn on, you’ve blown it.
Better to have portal run at 6 fps than to have your computer get hot or jeopardize battery life! If portal is going to cause my computer’s fans to turn on or get hot, I’ll go back to playing doodle jump on my iphone.
It’s the video card drivers. They’re unfortunately fairly second rate on the Mac, especially when compared to Windows, where video card companies slave away to get an edge on each other with an extra frame per second or two.
@The Blur: Wow, are you for real? That’s like saying if the engine’s cooling system is running while you’re driving a car, you’re going too fast.
It’s funny, though, on my 4890, Portal runs about half speed on OS X, but Episode 2 runs roughly the same.
I think he was being sarcastic!
I’ve been asking this question several times: If the bad performance of Portal on Mac OS X compared to Windows is just a cause of bad drivers on the Mac side, then why do Call of Duty 4 run (what I know) about just as well in Mac OS X? This game should be far more heavy on the hardware than Portal, right?
While I’m sure Apple could do a better job on the drivers there must be something missing on Valve’s side of things, no?
I tried BioShock on Mac and PC, same ratio of performance.
I’ll certainly try and get ahold of a PC copy of CoD4 so we can quantify this.
“It’s the video card drivers.”
While this is a component of it, Valve has stated that the Mac port has a Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation package built-in, which is where the performance drag is occurring. Basically, the Source engine is calling this library with a DX call, which then calls OpenGL.
It’s doing twice the work as the Windows version, thus half the performance.
I don’t think that’s correct.
From Netkas:
On Mac Source, all of the source code has been compiled native. Specific modules have been replaced with ones that can drive OS X API’s, like graphics and sound. All the OpenGL code lives in a little lib called “shaderapidx9? which is shorthand for “the shading subsystem that can run on dx9-class hardware”. That’s sort of the grand central station for graphics API traffic coming out of the engine and down into the OS&driver.
And from Jason Mitchell at Valve:
We accidentally shipped some Windows dlls. Feel free to delete them and see what happens. We are a native app by any definition I can think of.
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Hey – any chance you could run these tests after the multiple Portal updates Valve has released? Many gamers (myself included) have noticed a significant improvement in the framerate and performance compared to when it was first released.
Peace!
I tried Portal at 2560×1440 with same settings as used in the article and got about 11FPS. (FPS usually varies by a little bit) No performance increase.
OS X 10.6.2 vs 10.6.0 vs 10.5.8: How Fast Do 3D Apps Run on Each?
http://www.barefeats.com/nehal16.html
Something to consider- although the performance difference isn’t huge for the apps/games they tested, I’d be interested to see if Valve’s games run better on 10.5 vs. 10.6
mfw
world’s most advanced operating system
this has nothing to do with your poorly made operating systems, it’s a battle of hardware, which mac is definitely behind in. best solution is to find a site that will help you, custom build a computer with high-end gaming components (not GTX460-480, which generate a heat level comparable to that of a nuclear reactor) and install a Linux that you find to be good. If you’re really into Mac’s install hackintosh.
Did you not read the article? It is running on the SAME SYSTEM with windows in bootcamp… This is most definitely a battle of OS
maybe a little late to the party here but…
My one experience with gaming on a Mac pretty much turned me right back to Windows. last year I was trying to play EVE online on a Mac pro with a Xeon hyperthreaded quad-core, 8 gb of ram and a high end 2 b video card of some sort- basically a machine made specifically for heavy HD video editing.
EVE is a pretty light as far as games go, I might add. But the graphics were atrocious. I had it as maxxed out as it could go in every conceivable area, and the performance was fine, but it was like playing an N64 again. Everything was just blocky as hell and missing all of the cool lighting effects. I ended up closing it down and going back to my little Dell laptop with a Centrino duo, integrated graphics and 1 gb or ram because the graphics were, ironically, far superior.
Yeah, it’s Transgaming’s Cider technology.
It was pretty iffy when it came out, but I’ve heard that things have improved since then. I haven’t forgiven them for the horrible, horrible BF2142 port back when EA announced their games were coming to the Mac.
Is Source games playable on an iMac? I mean, can you have decent graphics and get 60 FPS?
Backstory:
My Windows Audio driver just died, and after spending 3 hours to no avail trying to fix it.. I’m fed up with Windows. I had a MacBook two years ago and it was the best piece of hardware ever.
Right now I’m trying out Virtual Box on my parent iMac, making sure my vital Win7 apps work as planned… then.. perhaps it’s time to switch.
Decent graphics and 60 fps is a pretty high standard for just “playable”. Most people wouldn’t be too bothered if it was half of that.
Have games been tested on the same specs of Windows 7 and Windows 7 on Bootcamp?
I’m thinking about buying a Macbook Pro 17″, but would bootcamp running Windows 7 be better than in a Mac environment?
Haha, these people are stupid. It’s not the mac, it’s the game. Erm..I’m pretty sure of that. My iMac ran Portal super smoothly, and I haven’t had any performance issues since switching to the Mac side of things…just saying.