Mac OS X Steam Performance: Half Life 2 Episode 2, Still Slower than Windows
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 4, 2010 2:04 PM ESTImage Quality: Still Foggy
As Ryan pointed out in his more timely piece, image quality under OS X is noticeably worse than under Windows.
The Mac screen shots are foggier for some reason and despite the fix that was applied to Portal, Half Life 2 Episode 2 appears to have worse texture filtering quality under OS X than Windows. This is more pronounced of a difference than what we saw under Portal.
Half Life 2 Episode 2 - Windows 7 - Click to Enlarge
Half Life 2 Episode 2 - OS X - Click to Enlarge
It looks like something is wrong with the AF setting, reverting to Trilinear filtering confirms my suspicion:
Half Life 2 Episode 2 - OS X - Trilinear Filtering - Click to Enlarge
But AF isn’t completely disabled. Using the Windows version for comparison it looks like Half Life 2 Episode 2 just forces 4X AF regardless of what you set the texture filtering option to:
Windows 7 4X AF
OS X 16X AF
The sky and muted colors are still a problem and I can’t seem to find out the cause of that one. There’s some texture banding off in the distance in the sky that’s only visible in the OS X version.
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MonkeyPaw - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
Totally agree. Not to mention that the last Mac I owned was a DP Powermac that crashed on me all the time, for no reason. The system would not even be under load and I'd get the black screen kernel panic. Maybe things are better now, but the closed hardware concept didn't do it for me back then.I don't mind Macs at all. I might own one again, if it weren't for Apples advertising smugness and lies. The products they make are usually quite good, and could probably stand on their own without the terrible exaggerations.
Alexvrb - Monday, June 7, 2010 - link
Their products are no better quality than anyone else, and they're considerably more expensive to boot. Without their marketing/brainwashing department, they'd be dead by now.adonn78 - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
The drivers really are not there for the Mac platform. In addition the games have to be converted from directX to openGL. I format that has been seldomly used in the past few years for games. not to mention The video cards on apple are at least a generation behind. The newer cards and drivers are not available. And not optimized for the mac platform. Teh mere fact that the games are even playable ont he mac is a promising start. We may see regular driver updates and major performance increases is Steve jobs takes gaming seriously. But its unlikely.heffeque - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
Who knows... maybe with 10.7 things will start changing in that direction.softdrinkviking - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
i think that it's been said before, but people who are looking for the best performance possible are not going to go out and buy a mac for that purpose.if my hunch is correct, then steam on OSX is just a value add for people who are already stuck in the mac ecosystem (willingly or not.)
if you look at it from that point of view, it's unlikely that playing your games at a lower resolution with a little bit of fuzziness is going to be a deal killer for most folks.
while i have no doubt that the opengl ports will improve over time, there is very little incentive to make it perfect.
people who must have "perfect" while they game buy windows machines.
so i don't think that anyone can look forward to any serious improvement in the mac -steam situation.
simply because not enough people care.
heffeque - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
Well... actually you pay for one game and you get it in both platforms. I only payed for HL2 once several years ago and I was able to download it "for free" for Mac. It's just a matter of commodity not to have to reboot in Windows to have to play for a while, though I have to admit that, although I do play Portal on Mac, I still play HL2 on Windows because of the better graphics and better frame rate.Lonyo - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
It's nice that you tested some more configurations, but the testing is still really lacking.3 different systems. Still no ATI cards.
Yes, ATI might not be the automatic option, but it's more useful than testing a gazillion NV cards because it might allow some identification of the issues, like is performance driver related or game related. Is image quality driver related or game related.
Please try and sort out testing something using ATI graphics.
heffeque - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
It probably has more to do with the DirectX vs OpenGL issue than nVidia vs ATi.Penti - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
Driver developers or rather hardware graphics vendors do their own OGL implementation. They are different.Lonyo - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
The OpenGL for which NV Windows XP drivers result in worse performance on a GTX470 than a GTX285?http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=17550&page=7
While in Windows 7 the same card can be up to 50% faster
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=18180&page=5
NV OpenGL drivers can suck a lot, therefore using only NV cards on a non-gaming OS which NV may not have made decent drivers for (like they haven't made decent WinXP drivers for theGTX470) seems unfair on Valve (as much as I do not in fact like them).
It would also indicate more whether the problem lies in the drivers being crap, or the OpenGL port being sub-par.