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Steam for Mac - thoughts?
- Thread starter cbags101
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AthlonXP
Fully [H]
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Me too, I am waiting for CS to come on so I can play that, also any of the left for dead games.
i wish there were more valve games too, but it says there will be new games each wednesday for the next couple weeks, so there's still hope.
Free portal and $10 torchlight is a nice treat though. I'm in love with the idea of purchasing a game once and having it for both my macbook and windows desktop.
Free portal and $10 torchlight is a nice treat though. I'm in love with the idea of purchasing a game once and having it for both my macbook and windows desktop.
blitzkommando
Gawd
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Hopefully the SteamPlay issues are corrected shortly. I purchased the Civilization IV complete pack, which is available on Mac via SteamPlay, but I can't install it. Oddly enough it is available for purchase. Still, I figured they would be bugs on release day and I figure that will get corrected soon enough. Until then I at least have Portal and Torchlight to test.
GnomeCop
[H]ard|Gawd
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strange, TF2 was available for download in my games library list this morning on steam for mac, but now it's not there. I've experienced a few crashes here and there, but nothing too crazy. Probably some bugs they'll squash soon enough.
yeah, it doesn't even show up in my list of 'all games' for whatever reason.
Same here.
The more the merrier. I for one look forward to pwning mac n00bs online and @ lans.
I imagine that it'll take a while to get source ported to the Mac but then when new games come out it will be that much faster for the Mac version to be released.
gg Valve.
I imagine that it'll take a while to get source ported to the Mac but then when new games come out it will be that much faster for the Mac version to be released.
gg Valve.
Source porting is more or less done, its just a matter of getting games other than TF2 and Portal up on the service. They say that they'll be releasing new Mac games every Wednesday, so I expect that we'll be seeing the rest of the Source library pretty soon. They also said that they are releasing future games on the same day for both OS X and Windows. Blizzard and id manage the same so I don't see why Valve won't be able to do the same.
Keep in mind that a lot of the Mac noobs are either long time PC gamers that switched (I can say this about quite a few people from my old QuakeWorld clan, and yes I'm old) or PC folk that own Windows desktops and Mac notebooks. There isn't as much separation in the real world as some tech sites would like you to believe.
gg Valve indeed
GnomeCop
[H]ard|Gawd
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This morning the steam client, while open and just sitting on the desktop was triggering the Geforce 330m GPU in my i7 macbook pro, but I guess they did a small update during the day? Because now the client sticks with integrated intel graphics, until you launch a game. Not complaining, this is a good thing, just wondering if anyone else noticed this?
I didn't notice any extra updates to the client today...
I didn't notice any extra updates to the client today...
In between restarting my system, it's updated at least twice today.
Looks like they're pretty busy fixing it up.
Mistrblank
Limp Gawd
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I'll say I'm impressed they're only requiring you to buy the game once. It's all too common for companies to want you to buy their stuff over and over.
Valve is a privately held company, so they can do things like this.
Wish we had more of them in the world.
mrgstiffler
[H]F Junkie
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I posted this in the other thread:
Portal actually runs extremely well on my system. But I am running with a quad-core 3GHz, 8GB and a GTX260, so it's not too surprising. Played a few levels at 1920x1200 and every setting set to max. Was totally smooth. I'll have to take some screenshots and compare to Portal running under Windows to see if there are many differences.
I bought the Steam Play bundle, Torchlight and QuantZ
Portal actually runs extremely well on my system. But I am running with a quad-core 3GHz, 8GB and a GTX260, so it's not too surprising. Played a few levels at 1920x1200 and every setting set to max. Was totally smooth. I'll have to take some screenshots and compare to Portal running under Windows to see if there are many differences.
I bought the Steam Play bundle, Torchlight and QuantZ
well color you impressed because everything you already bought for windows is free on mac if it has been released for mac.
Apparently the Mac vs. PC performance (and IQ) isn't too hot, although at 2560x1600 the FPS didn't drop below 60. The tests were performed with a Hackintosh, but a very beefy one at that. AT described the IQ as being on par with a "magazine scan."
p) not up to par for me.
I can live with the FPS never dropping below 60, but that IQ is clearly
p) not up to par for me.
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blitzkommando
Gawd
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Well, good news today is that those of us with Civilization IV got it on the Mac platform now. Strangely, now I have two copies of each Civilization IV title divided by platform. Other news came in the form of a Portal update which claims to have fixed the 'blurring' and another fixed the portals showing up as only black with no image. So far I'm quite impressed with it being as stable as it is. Hopefully in coming months we'll see performance improvements in the way of drivers though that is completely dependent on Apple.
mrgstiffler
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Nice. Hopefully they keep it up...
Yeah, it really is. Bigger than the QuickTime icon even!
http://ibelieveinron.com/lol/steamicon.jpg[/IM G][/QUOTE]
[IMG]http://i40.tinypic.com/ou5baw.png
it really isn't that much bigger at all, i think that if it wasn't a big square it's size wouldn't be as noticeable
tnt3k
2[H]4U
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it really isn't that much bigger at all, i think that if it wasn't a big square it's size wouldn't be as noticeable
its just not transparent is all
QwertyJuan
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untrueparadox
n00b
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did you guys get tons of updates for the steam client so far? everyday i logged on since the release, i had to download a 30mb patch, and every patch has a different size. thats a lot of progress for steam in a short few days.
King Icewind
Supreme [H]ardness
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How is it supposed to work? Hardware spec wise, it doesn't make sense to me. The best iMac only has a 4850. All the other ones have crap video card wise. I don't see how you would even be able to play games at higher settings, or in the future.
Works fine. I used to dual boot with the early 2008 MBP and it ran Source games great. I recently tried Starcraft 2 on my 27" iMac and its also doing fine. Someone I know on Shacknews posted benchmarks of games like Batman:AA, Left 4 Dead 2, TF2, Dragon Age, etc etc, on the 27" iMac and he got good framerates both at native 2560x1440 and dropped down to 1920x1080. I already have a desktop PC for gaming that I'll use over my iMac for Steam, so for me the real value of Steam on OS X comes down to using it on my Macbook Pro. Not needing to dual boot Windows, eat up all that hard drive space, and waste time waiting to reboot is nice.
Given that most new Macs can run all of the OS X games currently available on Steam great, I don't think performance is such a big concern.
On a 27" screen at the resolution it's running it can really stress the 4850. It may work fine for source games but not much more. Will it run crysis maxed? I very much doubt it. Or Age of Conan which i'm playing now. Granted you'll have to use bootcamp for both.
On the plus side apple has better mobile GPU's to choose from for the next imac refresh.
I had some issues installing Portal. The download would get stuck and cause Steam to lock up. I'm chalking that up to the amount of people downloading Portal.
Once I got the game running, it was great. Native rez with all settings on high, plus 2x AA and 2x AF, ran great.
Once I got the game running, it was great. Native rez with all settings on high, plus 2x AA and 2x AF, ran great.
And if you're lucky, they'll use some lube when they bend you over with regards to the price of these new machines. *snicker*
Price of a 512 MB 4870 video card: $150ish (brand new)
Price on Apple.com? $350.
No Apple tax my ass...
Daggah - Who the hell buys a Mac Pro system with i7 Xeons? Not gamers, that's for sure. Between the very limited Mac Pro target market and the fact that cards made for EFI still don't exist in any real quantities (I really wish PCs would finally switch over so you could use cards for both platforms with no price gouging) means that companies like ATI and EVGA can and will charge crazy amounts for their EFI Mac cards.
Either way it doesn't make sense to bring Xeon workstations into this, not when the mainstream machines are iMacs (most of the cost being the displays that cost a minimum $1100 by themselves) or Macbook Pros. iMacs are priced better than AIOs from most companies out there, and MBPs absolutely carry a premium but its not insane compared to premium or business machines from companies like HP, Dell, Lenovo, or Sony.
Either way it doesn't make sense to bring Xeon workstations into this, not when the mainstream machines are iMacs (most of the cost being the displays that cost a minimum $1100 by themselves) or Macbook Pros. iMacs are priced better than AIOs from most companies out there, and MBPs absolutely carry a premium but its not insane compared to premium or business machines from companies like HP, Dell, Lenovo, or Sony.
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