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Steam Prompts OS X Graphics Update

Posted by Soulskill on from the like-opening-a-valve dept.

Stoobalou writes "Mac gamers got a massive boost when online gaming hub Steam started supporting the platform a few months ago. The arrival of the online service, which allowed Mac-toting gamers to play some of the same games as their PC brethren, in some cases cross-platform, created a great deal of debate between the two camps, with the PC crowd pillorying Mac fans for the relatively poor performance of their expensive hardware. Now it seems that Apple has gotten the message, as they have provided a graphics update for OS X Snow Leopard which will make progress toward closing the gap between the two platforms."

8 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Call me crazy. by Spazntwich · · Score: 5, Funny

    But I think this is clearly AT&T's fault.

  2. Valve... by epiphani · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Valve, if you're listening...

    Please, please, please do steam and your games on linux. You've already made them POSIX and OpenGL, you're 85% of the way there.

    I will buy every damn game you release on linux. I never want to run windows again, and if I can get portal and TF2 on linux, I won't.

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    1. Re:Valve... by not+already+in+use · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You've already made them POSIX and OpenGL, you're 85% of the way there.

      More like 10%.

      This is the problem with Linux: What company in their right mind would port to the platform that is both hardest to develop for and has the smallest user base? xorg, driver issues, distro inconsistencies all make porting games to linux an absolute nightmare. A lot of fundamental changes need to be made to desktop linux before it will really be taken seriously by anyone but Id. John Carmack even came out and said that Rage wouldn't be commercially supported on Linux, and that they'd provide an executable and let people fend for themselves as far as actually getting it to run.

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      Similes are like metaphors
    2. Re:Valve... by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, adding another distro is a great idea ... if you want to run games from Value you have to use their distro. If you want to run EA games you have to use their distro.

      Contrary to the common but ignorant belief that more Linux distro's is a good thing, they aren't. Linux's main problem to commercial adaptation is the number of distros and the problems dealing with inconsistancies between them (did you even read the post you're responding too?) ... adding more distros doesn't help the problem when the problem is already 'too many distros'.

      And for what? A few thousand sales at the very most? When instead they can dedicate that same person to Windows and get 100,000 sales from their work?

      Don't expect Value to start asking for your resume, you've already show you have absolutely no idea why they haven't done it already.

      DLL Hell on Linux is actually far worse than DLL hell on Windows, package management tools or not, its not a problem they can solve, again, contrary to popular belief. If you think package management tools can solve the problem then you clearly don't understand the problem.

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      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Re:Vendors by Thinine · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nope, nVidia and AMD both write their own drivers. Apple supplies the OpenGL implementation. This fix was a combination of updated drivers and refinements to Apple's OpenGL to increase performance.

  4. Re:Mobile chips by Dog-Cow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm guessing you're a complete and utter moron. And my guess is correct.

    Those complaining are complaining about the games performing better ON THE SAME Mac running Windows.

  5. Re:Vendors by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Informative

    Windows 7 runs it all in user mode (you don't have to reboot when you install a driver) so a crash isn't a big deal.

    Uhm, live kernel driver updates is something windows has done since Windows 2000. 99.9% of the time in Windows XP can have its graphics drivers update on the fly and work fine if you just ignore the 'you must reboot' button.

    The drivers are kernel mode, they always have been, they always will be, unless you want them to be slow as molasses due to the userland/kerneland context switching thats required.

    Rebooting is not required to modify kernel drivers. Its as simple as issuing 'net stop' and 'net start' commands (or using the API for the same purpose) with the NT kernel. I know, I do it, I've written Windows kernel drivers.

    2) nVidia in particular but ATi as well are real good at writing drivers. They don't crash much, if ever. They are not going to be our source of instability.

    What world do you live on?

    ATI has some of the shittiest most unreliable drivers on the freaking planet.

    nVidia gives you a 50/50 chance of getting a good version that works reliably without a bunch of bugs. Half the time you score, the other half the time you're falling back to an older version of some sort so your games don't crash or your machine bluescreen anymore.

    I'm not really sure where you get your information from, but you probably should not use that source anymore.

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    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  6. Re:Slow graphics on Macs? by bonch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wake me up when Crysis is worth playing. Crysis is the game every single PC gamer cites when mocking the Mac, but it's not even a good game. The days of graphics demos disguised as games died in the late 90s. Visuals are a solved problem. More people play 2D FarmVille than all the copies of Crysis ever sold because most people don't care anymore about high-end graphics. Gamers like you are now a smaller niche than the Mac userbase itself.