Valve: Apple, ATI, Nvidia to Improve Mac Gaming

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Whether prices fall or drivers are improved, Macs are still not gaming rigs if Apple continues to fool people by offering the 'latest' hardware for their products, which PC enthusiasts have access to years before.
 
Apple finally started to use Intel processors in their machines, years ago they claimed to have the fastest machines on the market with their old processors. They finally learned that Intel processors are faster. Apple wants more market share and gaming is the way to go for that, but they need to come off of their high horses and get serious about gaming gaming, that means letting programmers do their jobs to make games work for MACs and not use their heavy closed handed techniques. Apple wants more market share, this comes with more risks as far as security goes, Apple needs to get serious about security and let their loyal customers know when theres a risk instead of holding back and then release patches years down the road. If Apple wants to be a major gaming platform they need to come down a notch and let programmers do their jobs and get serious and honest with their customers and not be so cocky.
 
Like someone said already, this should benefit LInux platform at least indirectly. Steam is the is the only reason I haven't made a full switch to linux
 
I can understand the reasoning as a game developer not to support Macs and Linux. If the choice between OpenGL and DirectX was a tougher choice, I can see developing a game with OpenGL. However, the gap is huge between the features of DirectX and DirectX's speed. The API has just had so many millions thrown at it, its light years ahead of OpenGL at this moment.
The real choice for the developer is do they want to gimp the capabilities of their game for at most a 10% bump in users? You also have to consider most Macs are not game capable with discrete graphics cards making the potential boost under 5%. I think most developers will come to the same conclusion that developing for Mac or Linux just is not worth it unless there is serious investment put into OpenGL.
 
[citation][nom]ordcestus[/nom]Me too thats the only reason i'm cheering this on. i'd rather apple start being reasonable on prices then i'll cheer them on for thier products[/citation]

Once Steam comes to Linux, Windows is doomed.
 
this is why Apple users hate flash. because it requires the dev-tools, Apis, OS architecture, and hardware to at least be somewhat designed for performance.

the cold hard fact of the matter is, that all of these things on Apple products are crap. now they have been given the true acid test, it has all come out.

I personally hope this means that Apple will get their shit together and may even one day release a gaming PC. that would give me one less reason to hate them. I don't enjoy hating Apple, but at the moment they leave me no choice.
 
[citation][nom]lauxenburg[/nom]Once Steam comes to Linux, Windows is doomed.[/citation]
Is this yet another Windows' death prediction I see? LOL. Good luck this time.
 
@lauxenburg, that won't happen since valve only has control of porting their games over and that is about what you get (some small indie companies as well). Don't expect it take over very quick due to the low market share, though i would enjoy having linux installed native (virtual machine is fine)

again the good thing i see out of better OpenGL support in OSX is better support in linux (since i don't use a mac, not worth the premium)
 
[citation][nom]raised_fist[/nom]@TEAMSWITCHER. please for the same price as the cheapest mac laptop you don't have pentium, you even have i5. i5 come in mac pro around 1800$. At that price you have i7 and real pro video card or better gaming card (nvidia 330 while not that bad, is ooold tech only with a new name).But sure it's not aluminum but plastic and you don't have a glass screen so who let you see what's going on behind you while working. Better performance or better look, it's a matter of choice.[/citation]

I'm sticking by my earlier comments. You can thumb me down all day long, but it wont change the fact that PC laptops SUCK! You pay half the price for a MacBook Pro and get half the computer. The MacBook Pro is years ahead in design and quality. I can think of no greater crime than taking a great Intel mobile chip and wrapping it a plastic butt-ugly case, with a crappy keyboard, and worthless trackpad. Why, oh God why, can't any PC manufacturer create anything that is remotely good as the MacBook Pro?

I'm not the only person who thinks so. I keep seeing more and more MacBook Pro's at my local Panera Bread, Starbucks, and on our college campus. It's the only truly great laptop on the market today - price be damned. It's not just looks, if you think that your're lying to yourself. It's a damn fine machine.
 
[citation][nom]mrfish[/nom]loldid you guys read the article totally false comparison " mild" settings on the mac "maxed " on windows no wonder the guy got different frame rates[/citation]

If anything the Mac version should have been quicker then, seeing as there was less graphics processing to be done. Perhaps you need to re-read the article...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

If one were inclined to do so, one could say that the performance difference between the Mac and PC is actually greater than 300% due to the different settings. I would like to see what framerates are being obtained under max settings on the Mac Pro.

Maybe it's running slow because it's got a virus 😉
 
[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]I'm sticking by my earlier comments. You can thumb me down all day long, but it wont change the fact that PC laptops SUCK! You pay half the price for a MacBook Pro and get half the computer. The MacBook Pro is years ahead in design and quality. I can think of no greater crime than taking a great Intel mobile chip and wrapping it a plastic butt-ugly case, with a crappy keyboard, and worthless trackpad. Why, oh God why, can't any PC manufacturer create anything that is remotely good as the MacBook Pro? I'm not the only person who thinks so. I keep seeing more and more MacBook Pro's at my local Panera Bread, Starbucks, and on our college campus. It's the only truly great laptop on the market today - price be damned. It's not just looks, if you think that your're lying to yourself. It's a damn fine machine.[/citation]

Dell XPS Adamo
ASUS U6V Bamboo (my personal favourite)
ASUS NX90
Sony Vaio (any model really)

And of course you're going to see more Macbooks at Starbucks and Uni... Go to other places in the real world (airport, conferences, etc). If you're going to go out and get information on consumer trends you're going to need a far greater sample size than uni students and starbucks customers (who are the typical Mac customer anyway).

At my uni I've yet to see an international student with a Mac, and international students are the third highest source of income for the state in which I live, so there's plenty of them. Other than that, I think I've seen about 10 students altogether (which is 0.1% of all the students enrolled there).
 
"I'm running a Mac Pro 2.93ghz 8-core machine with 16GB RAM. I have both the GeForce GTX 285 and a Radeon 4780 and neither of them get anywhere close to where I'm at under windows."

This implies the guy can and does run Windows on his Mac. After all, Windows is the MOST popular application for the Mac. That aside, I don't see the point, really. Just continue using your dual booting to run the games and get the performance you expect instead of whining about the poor performance on OSX. You KNEW it was going to run like crap on OSX to begin with, didn't you??
 
[citation][nom]TEAMSWITCHER[/nom]I keep seeing more and more MacBook Pro's at my local Panera Bread, Starbucks, and on our college campus. It's the only truly great laptop on the market today - price be damned.[/citation]
Your basis for comparison is posers at Starbucks and those on your college campus? You just lost any sort of credibility.
 
[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]I'm getting down votes cuz I said my Mac Pro with dual i7's rapes my single i7 in my PC.Are the PC haters so biased as to not admit the 2 i7's in a Mac Pro will beat a single i7 in a PC in video rendered PS: I'm expecting the hate in this one, it's quite typical[/citation]

Im expecting that my single i7 @ 4.2GHZ will rip his NOT OCed machine to pieces. Who run their computers at its stock clock these days? Mac owners!!!
 
Well I'm glad SOMEBODY is working on PC gaming, god knows MS isn't doing jack shit for it, god damn 360.

[citation][nom]SneakySnake[/nom]I'm a mac folk and i will admit to you very freely that my homebuild with 5850 rapes my Mac Pro, however my Mac Pro isn't for gaming, it's for video rendering, and it would rape my PC in that.Mac Pro's aren't meant for gaming, they're meant for number crunching[/citation]

I think he means "the software I'm comfortable using is either only available for Mac or I never bothered to try it on PC" since the guts are all the same the only possible difference would be software.
 
Overpriced hunk of crap. Pretty sad to get that level of performance from a machine that costs 10 times the cost of a PC that could double the fps easily.
 


This is what it really is.

Though its welcome to have better OGL drivers for OSX since this will impact linux based drivers in a good way (can't wait for decent ATI drivers for linux, would be nice for a change)
 
This is the first major development we've seen in OpenGL in quite a long time. It used to out perform DirectX when that platform first hit the market, but we all know where most of the development dollars have gone over the last two decades (16 years to be more precise). You are also porting games that were designed around DirectX instead of incorporating OpenGL into the original development process.
 
OpenGL hasn't been upgraded on a technology level since Direct X 9. That's why Direct X 10 was so huge for MS. Previous version of DX, used pretty much everything that OPENGL did. OpenGL (which is aproblem with any OPEN project) didn't have the manpower, time or money to update it. Don't get me wrong I love the idea of OPEN products but open GL is a CLASSIC example on the problems with it.
 
Seriously why do mac-fans think their HW is any more special because there is a big fruit logo on the case. There is absolutely ~nothing~ special about the fruit logo that makes rendering / graphics work / music work / whatever any "better". There is no special "low latency" or magic going on. Its the same commodity HW being used by everyone else. Apple is an OEM the same as Dell / HP / Gateway / IBM or Sony. They take commodity HW parts and put them in a customized case with their logo on it. The only difference is they use their own proprietary OS.

The performance of "creative" applications is based on how optimized their CODECS are for that particular CPU / GPU. Those optimizations carry over regardless of the OS being used. Last I checked Adobe built their software for Windows and MacOS. You can take a machine with the exact same HW, load Windows (or preferably Linux), load the software and *poof* you'd get the same performance if not better.

If someone particularly enjoys a Mac then that is their prerogative. Just don't walk around like your systems superior because its got a shiny fruit logo on the side.
 
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom] Its the same commodity HW being used by everyone else.[/citation]

If this were true why did I buy a MacBook Pro. I was a PC user for years and years, and I looked at many different laptop computers on the market today. The PC's were all too thick, too plastic, too sticker-ed, too ugly, too Intel graphic laden, had horrible keyboards (especially the Toshiba's), and small track pads (who want's to carry a mouse around?).

Yes the commodity hardware is the same, but the fit, finish, design, usability, and quality of the MacBook Pro cannot be overlooked.
 
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