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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Hxx - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
The whole idea is that MACs are not for gaming... they never were and they will never be...gaming = windows and thats a factmichael2k - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
That would be true if Anand hadn't actually run Steam on Windows on the same HW...So it's not "Mac = Crap", it's "Valve ports = Crap".
foolsgambit11 - Saturday, June 5, 2010 - link
You assume it's Valve's port. It's not 100% clear from the review where the fault lies. For instance, perhaps OS X doesn't allow the same level of access to the hardware, or their graphics subsystems aren't optimized as well as Windows. That wouldn't be too surprising since this kind of usage isn't that common on a Mac. Or it could be a fundamental issue with the API. It would take more digging to find out.One thing is for certain: if Macs keep growing in market share, eventually game developers will be developing for OS X side by side with Windows. I hope OS X doesn't prove to be the problem here, because the last thing we need is another thing holding back game improvements (along with consoles and integrated graphics, for instance).
wolrah - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
If the OpenGL version of the Source engine was an option on Windows this could be a more interesting test. I'd like to see what parts of the performance and graphical differences are caused by the OS and drivers versus the different graphics APIs.Exodite - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
The comparison on actual Apple hardware was really the most interesting, thanks for noting that.The hackintosh experiment is fun I suppose but I feel it's rather irrelevant as far as a performance comparison goes.
JarredWalton - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
Or at least, it left some areas open for question. Judging by the results here, Ryan's Hackintosh Portal comparison did not generate different results than using real Apple hardware.Exodite - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
Ah no, I simply meant that it's not a scenario that's likely to come up a lot in the real world.That said it does lend credence to the idea that there's no special sauce gluing MacOSX and Apple hardware together.
Brian Klug - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
I actually thought that Ryan's choice to use a Hackintosh was brilliant - you can virtually guarantee the exact same hardware platform that way. Without having a Mac Pro or another piece of Apple hardware at the ready, it really does make sense.I agree though it's useful to see some numbers on current generation Apple hardware. I know I tried running our timedemo on a mid 2008 MBP and encountered some... issues... It'd be interesting to see if HL2/Portal runs at all passably on a MacBook with integrated intel graphics.
-Brian
morphologia - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
No, but seriously...cherry-picking the hardware components is one thing, but their operational parameters are very locked into place on a Mac. For the sake of higher stability and guaranteed hardware intercompatibility, you sacrifice some of the built-in component flexibility present in a PC. Certain software (modern games) shows this more than others.Sahrin - Friday, June 4, 2010 - link
Your post assumes that you can't have stability and excellent performance. This is patently false, Windows users have been getting this for 7+ years.