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Portal: Mac OS X vs Windows Performance Test

@ 2010/05/14

It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announced that they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.

We went ahead and ran a timedemo from test chamber 18 and beyond on both the Mac OS X and Windows versions of Portal. We kept the settings cranked up at all times, but varied the resolution between 1280x800 and 2560x1600 to look at different GPU loads. At the worst-case of 2560, the Mac version of Portal runs at only 54% of the speed of the Windows version. That moves to 63% at 1920x1200, and 66% at 1280x800.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/05/14

awesome

Comment from wutske @ 2010/05/14

Just saw this on soup

Comment from blackened @ 2010/05/14

Well, at least it works.. I still cant think about gaming on a Mac without thinking about this classic.. The first line always makes me laugh.

Comment from Kougar @ 2010/05/14

A mac user said it was because Valve uses a DX9 -> OpenGL abstraction layer for the OpenGL calls.

Either way the performance doesn't matter as much as the loss of image quality... if I wanted to play a game that was that fuzzy, I'd take off my glasses.

Comment from thorgal @ 2010/05/14

Not surprising these results. OSX relies on Open GL, and no current graphics card is optimized for open GL gaming. I don't really see this taking off : the Mac (OSX) is no gaming platform.

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