Multicore rendering is an option under Windows that isn’t adjustable under Steam for OS X, and despite the setting being greyed out as Enabled it doesn't appear to be enabled under OS X. Anisotropic filtering (16X) was enabled and all settings were as high as possible. Under OS X you only get 2X and 4X MSAA options compared to NVIDIA’s plethora of AA modes under Windows, so I stuck with 4X MSAA for this comparison. With the additional headroom of the CPU and GPU in the Mac Pro, I ran our benchmark at higher quality settings and at more resolutions. In other words, there’s a perceivable difference. The game goes from definitely playable to butter smooth. Gaming, albeit dated, is possible under OS X.īoot into Windows however and you get a 54% performance boost. Episode 2 runs smoothly on the portable Mac. Steam was up to date as of 12:47AM this morning.Īt the panel’s native resolution of 1280 x 800 the 13-inch MacBook Pro is playable at high quality settings with no AA/aniso. I’m using NVIDIA’s 197.45 drivers for the GTX 285 on the Mac Pro and the latest drivers under OS X. I’m running Boot Camp and a clean install of Windows 7 圆4 on both Macs for the comparison. The second is Apple’s new 2010 13-inch MacBook Pro with a GeForce 320M. The first is a Nehalem Mac Pro with an EVGA GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition.Ģ x 2.93GHz Quad-Core Nehalem Xeon ProcessorsĮVGA GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition (1GB GDDR3) Now that 1) I’m back, and 2) Half Life 2 Episode 2 is out for the Mac, I can provide an updated comparison using another reference point between Steam on both OSes.įor this comparison I’m using two systems.

Ryan’s original article used a Hackintosh to compare OS X and Windows performance. You’re just better off playing those games in Windows using Boot Camp. To Valve’s credit, games like Portal are more than playable at good looking settings on modern Macs. In the process of porting the Source engine to OS X a great deal of performance was lost. After reading Ryan’s Mac OS X Portal Performance article when I got back, I understood why. I actually contacted Valve ahead of time to see if they’d give me access to a pre-release version so I could do a performance article before I left. I did miss one rather important thing: the launch of an OS X version of Steam. Last year I threw a dart at the calendar and told myself I was taking 10 days off in May and thankfully, there wasn’t too much that was announced while I was gone. Planning around tradeshows is easy, but planning around unannounced product launches, new driver releases, bugs and unexpected discoveries is impossible.

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