
- Games for mac 10.6.3 mac os x#
- Games for mac 10.6.3 drivers#
- Games for mac 10.6.3 update#
- Games for mac 10.6.3 Patch#
Portal is going to be slower, the question is by how much.
Games for mac 10.6.3 drivers#
For gaming, Apple has been slow to include support for new hardware and new driver features (they are just now OpenGL 3.0 compliant) and overall their drivers are more conservative when it comes to performance. The Macintosh platform is renowned for being a graphical powerhouse, but this refers to professional/prosumer photography and the like. The other half of our quick look is at performance. It’s by no means bad, but as one person put this when being shown these screenshots “It’s like looking at a magazine scan” when looking at the Mac.
Games for mac 10.6.3 mac os x#
There’s clearly a difference in IQ between the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Portal, and it’s not in the Mac’s favor. Now some of this can be explained away due to gamma, since Mac OS X and Windows have different default gamma levels, but gamma could never explain the entire difference. Without a Windows reference image it would be harder to tell that the Mac screenshot differs this much, but we believe that the difference is great enough that anyone with an eye for details that has ever played Portal on Windows would notice the foggier/blurrier IQ on the Mac. It’s not a night & day difference, but the Windows screenshot is distinctly clearer than the Mac screenshot. The Mac screenshot is noticeably foggier than the Windows image, and textures appear to be less sharp. Going with 2560x1600 with the game at its highest settings and 4xAA/16xAF, to our surprise the images are distinctly different when directly compared. We have a gallery of screenshots, but for our analysis we’ll stick with comparing in a single set. Such a change can impact image quality depending on how it’s done. For the Mac OS X port of Source, Valve had to replace the DirectX backend of Source with Mac-appropriate components, the key of which is OpenGL. Valve is traditionally a staunch Microsoft ally, having built up their services and engines around Windows and DirectX. We’ll start quickly with a look at image quality. And while the use of a Hackintosh does technically invalidate our results since it’s not a real Macintosh, based on our experiments we believe that our results don’t suffer in any way for using a Hackintosh, and as such we believe the results to be experimentally valid. As Mac OS X does not currently support either the GeForce GTX 400 series or the Radeon HD 5000 series, we had to step back a bit with our video card choice, settling for a GeForce GTX 285. So Portal performance is somewhat arbitrary – most Macs with a discrete GPU should be able to handle it to an acceptable degree.įor our test we loaded up our GPU test rig with Mac OS X 10.6.3 in a Hackintosh configuration. With modern hardware though, we’re hard-pressed to keep older Source games from achieving runaway frame rates.

So with that in mind, we went ahead and took a quick look at Portal’s performance under Mac OS X.Īs is the case with all of the games on the Source engine, they’re designed to scale up and down fairly well. While it’s not the most graphically intensive Source game these days (that title belonging to Left 4 Dead), at this point it’s as good as anything else for looking at the performance of the Source engine under Mac OS X, particularly considering how long it’s been since a game’s original developer did the Mac port.

Even though Steam is out and the Source engine has been ported, this week has seen the release of only 1 Source game for the Mac: 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.Īs it stands Valve is taking a gradual approach to rolling out their back catalog to the platform.

It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announced that they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news.
Games for mac 10.6.3 update#
Please see our update below for for the full details.
Games for mac 10.6.3 Patch#
Update : Valve released a new patch for Portal on the 13th which resolved the blurriness issue.
