Steam for Mac, Portal Performance

Steam for Mac went live today, so I thought I'd run it on an iMac from 2008 and a MacBook Pro from 2009 together with a friend of mine. We were actually surprised on how well it ran on some of the hardware we are running. See more details on the systems and performance after the jump.

Both systems were run in sidescreen resolutions, the iMac at 1280 x 800, and the Macbook Pro at 1152 x 720. Most settings were at about medium or enabled, with Model detail and shader detail set to high and blur effect disabled. Check out resolution and Advanced Settings screenshots for exactly what we ran on the iMac.

The iMac ran the game very well. I was impressed at how well it handled lighting effects, how good the shaders looked, and how little stuttering there was. The iMac stuttered a little bit, especially when jumping, but the game was otherwise solid.

The one thing that bothered me in both cases was, despite Vertical Sync being enabled, the game still seemed to jump a bit. It almost felt like tearing, but not quite. Turning off vertical sync, though, showed a major increase in graphics tearing.

Running a framerate counter on the iMac showed the game to run at around 25 - 40 fps, and even an occasional 50 - 60 fps. This was nice, as it showed the Source engine for Mac seems to be taking advantage of the graphics processing available. As more updates are released for titles that are Mac ready, we may see an improvement in graphics performance, but considering that this is a very fresh release, the performance is very satisfactory. Disabling V-Sync left the game running pretty solidly above 50 fps, which is fantastic. Gone is the era of game ports for Mac that rely heavily upon software graphics processing. Awesome.

Maxing the settings on the iMac dropped the framerates to about an averages of 4 fps, and maxing out at 14 fps, though this was likely just a fluke. The screen even started to glitch out quite a bit, but never crashed, which I eventually expected it to. I love OpenGL stability.

When you think about it, Apple really does have an ideal situation going for its gamers, a situation that still needs to be taken advantage of. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Source Engine for Mac looks at the system it is being ran on and easily scales the graphics to what that system is capable of, all due to Apple's relatively closed hardware set. Everything is easily categorized and tested, as you only have to deal with the Mac Pro, the Macbook Pro, Macbook, iMac, and the mini. This makes the hardware configurations much more predictable and allows for better long-term optimization. This means less fuss and better performance for the end user, and less issues in testing for the developer. So, yeah, creating a larger gamer base on Macs is a great thing.

Final impressions, I still think there is room for Valve to improve their engine's performance, but it's a lot closer to being simply awesome than most things right at initial release. I'm excited to see the other source games coming out, and easily can see success in Valve's move to get things rolling on the Mac.

MacBook Pro Specs:
2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
Geforce 9400 M 256 MB

iMac Specs:
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 256 MB