Mac OS X Portal Performace | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS X Portal Performace

anandtech.com

21 pointsmanvsmachine25 comments

Their screenshot comparison is inaccurate. It didn't look right to me, so I duplicated their screenshot on my own Mac at 2560x1600. My Mac Portal screenshot matches their PC screenshot in sharpness. For some reason it looks like the Mac version was not running at 2560x1600 (or even close) in their screenshot.

Here is the Mac screenshot I made: http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg

Their Mac one: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png

Edit: thought_alarm noted that there was just an update that fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation". That's probably what was going on.

The difference that stuck out to me the most was the lighting. Look at the transparent pipe at the top of the room or the shadows and specular highlights coming from the office on the left. At least for now, it seems that the graphics engine may not quite have feature parity with the Direct3D version.

I don't find this surprising. Windows gaming software (which includes games, drivers, libraries and OS) has been tweaked and optimized over the course of the last 15 years or so. Each new graphics driver release brings improvements.

The Mac world is at the beginning of this path. While it might take shorter (because people know what they're doing), it won't be instantaneous.

Tried it on my Core 2 Duo mini today. It sucked. It complains that it doesn't recognize the Windows version of my graphic chipset, and then when I continue it goes full screen with a pixelated image of something and starts flashing. I had to command-Q it to get out.

And as far as the article goes, I don't consider it a valid test when you are running on non-Apple hardware.

The test results may not be completely definitive, but I think they they bring up an interesting point: now that Apple is getting what it wants (large-scale adoption), how is it going to handle relations with third-parties in a rapidly moving industry such as gaming? As the article points out, the fastest Apple-sanctioned GPU you can buy is a GTX 285. At nearly a year and a half old, that card is ancient from that industry's perspective. OpenGL 3.0? NVIDIA released their 4.0 drivers for Windows / Linux a month ago. As much as we all may recognize that Microsoft has issues, their third party device / driver support is something that Apple could learn from.

As far as I can tell, Apple still doesn't care much about gaming on the Mac. I'm sure they could offer better graphics cards if they wanted to, it's just low on their list of priorities.

Hopefully Steam will get enough people to start using Macs for gaming that Apple feels pressure to start offering decent video card choices.

The poor performance verses Windows doesn't surprise me. Consider, my Mac is about a year old; while it's a Pro model, it was the entry level model. Despite this, the game plays well (no human perceptable stutter) at full resolution and settings. Valve isn't really motivated to optimize this game due to its age and how the current Mac hardware pool surpasses what PCs were (even accounting for the Mac platform's GPU lag) when Portal was originally released.

The real proof in the pudding is when Valve starts to release Mac/PC dual releases like they've been hinting at. If they have the same problems Blizzard has getting decent performance for their hybrid releases, Apple might finally notice that their lagging on GPU support is a problem and not something they can continue to dismiss/hand off as the developer's responsibility. (I know... dream on.)

I heard somebody say something to the effect that the iPhone was the phone Steve Jobs wanted (thus explaining how the company executed so perfectly on it).

Sadly, they went on to say it was obvious Jobs isn't a gamer.

I love my Macbook. I'm thrilled with Valve for their decision to make OS X a first-tier platform. I wish to no end Apple would take gaming more seriously.

They released an update today that, among other things, fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation".

It's an interesting comparison, but considering that Steam/OS X is barely 2 days old it's a little early to start drawing conclusions.

I just played my second game of Mac portal today, and before the game started, Steam downloaded an update.

It didn't fix any visible bugs for me, but it looks like it introduced a new one. Now when I look into the portals, all I see is black instead of the room on the other side. Yesterday when I played, I could see through portals fine.

It is just a glitch on my specific hardware, or did any other Portal Mac player get this too? I figure that if all of us are getting this bug, it'll probably be fixed soon. But if it's just me, I might be outta luck.

This isn't a bug, it's a graphics setting. You can control how many iterations go into drawing the contents of each portal. The lowest setting is 0, which doesn't draw any. I don't have it installed so I can't tell you exactly how to change it, but the option's in there somewhere.

I found the setting you're talking about, and if doesn't fix this bug. The portals still render as big black holes no matter the setting (well, if you set it to 0, the portals are obscured by blue/orange flame energy)

I played last night on iterations=2 (default) and I got black portals as well.

I'm seeing the same bug here on a pretty recent (November '09) Mac Pro.

add '-windowed' to the launch options.

How do I do that? I'm not very familiar with Steam.

Right-click on Portal in the Library, then select Properties. Should be obvious from there.

I'll just confirm that I had the same problem and doing the -windowed trick worked for me. Once you do it, you can switch back to full screen in the settings.

Just took a look and: Yup, same here.

Yep, me too.

The only bug I have is that I don't get any sound. I haven't really tried anything yet to fix it, but played for about 3 minutes. Anyone have any thoughts on what may be the issue though?

I had that too the first time I started the game. I quit and restarted it and the sound worked fine.

Has anyone else had a problem where the menus have no text. As in, I can't see the menus at all. I figured it might be a font problem but couldn't work out what it could be.

I have same issue. Latest patched Steam, 10.6.3. on 1,1 Mac Pro. Tried -autoconfig on launch in case of video issues. Runs fine on same system under BC, Win7. Menus are there and can find them after clicking around, dialog boxes also text-less.

How do we know that there aren't optimizations left to be done on the engine? This is two days after launch on a new backend. Surely there is room left to grow.

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