Games: Portal more stable on Mac than Windows
When it comes to Mac versus PC performance comparisons, past is prologue. Our Windows friends can go faster, but crash a lot more. Users of the fairer platform enjoy superior stability, but relatively potter along — same hardware, slower speed.
The success of Steam for Mac, as well as the arrival of Half-Life 2 and other long-sought game titles, have provided a big and much needed boost to gaming on the fairer platform. It’s good to game again on the Mac.
Thereupon, Valve reports that Portal on the Mac is five times more stable on the Mac than Windows. That’s the good news.
The not so good news is that, on the very same hardware (i.e. a Mac mini), Portal running on Windows 7 delivers much better performance than, well, the Mac running OS X. Of course, the reason for this is Steam and everybody else have been putting out Windows games for years, so they’ve had tons o’ time to optimize performance.
“We’ve been shipping games for years on Windows; we’ve been shipping them for a week on the Mac,” said Mitchell.
See also: Top 40 best free Mac games for 2010
“We’ll catch up,” said Valve developer Jason Mitchell on a recent episode of The Conversation (iTunes, free). “Apple is certainly motivated to work with us — we’re working with them; we’re working directly with the hardware vendors. We know it’s the same hardware, but you boot up a different OS, there’s different performance characteristics.”
And, this leaves with important issue to ponder. Apple has a rather spotty record when it comes to supporting game development on the Mac.
Is this a true renaissance or will Apple leave us flat once again? This time around, with the Mac market share up and steadily gaining, I’m a little more confident than in the past…
What’s your take?
via Ars Technica
Related Posts:
May 31st, 2010
It will be extremely interesting when Valve supports the iPhone OS – just MHO.
May 31st, 2010
Gosh, the writer of this article clearly doesn’t have any knowledge of game development. Games on Windows are mostly (if not all) coded in DirectX which is often very good in terms of performance, but sucks at being coded. Games on Macs are coded in OpenGL since Mac doesn’t support DirectX (it is made by Microsoft)…OpenGL is very often stable and easier to code but has lower performance.
That said, it is a very stupid statement to say that games on Macs are more stable…Games crash on Windows mostly because of overclocked hardware, bad hardware drivers (manufacturer’s fault and not Windows) and such. Macs, though, can’t be overclocked, have drivers all checked by Apple so basically there are no reasons for the game to fail.
Now, I do agree that there are probably tweaks to be done on Mac versions, but I highly doubt they will get the same performance as Windows, because Macs are pretty much bloated with tons of background processes that most users don’t even know about which take up system resources and letting less for the game itself.
I hope that people on this Mac section won’t be so ignorant when writing articles next time. Although, I see more and more that Mac users seem to believe whatever they are told at the first say without thinking twice or understanding anything…
All this being clarified, I still am very curious as to where gaming will get on Macs.
PS: I’m also very eager to see viruses coming to Macs since more and more people will use them…then maybe one day, virus creators will ignore Windows and Windows will finally be virus free