Mac OS X Portal Performace

Their screenshot comparison is inaccurate. It didn't look right to me, so I duplicated their screenshot on my own Mac at 2560x1600. My Mac Portal screenshot matches their PC screenshot in sharpness. For some reason it looks like the Mac version was not running at 2560x1600 (or even close) in their screenshot.<p>Here is the Mac screenshot I made: <a href="http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg</a><p>Their Mac one: <a href="http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png" rel="nofollow">http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png</a><p>Edit: thought_alarm noted that there was just an update that fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation". That's probably what was going on.

I don't find this surprising. Windows gaming software (which includes games, drivers, libraries and OS) has been tweaked and optimized over the course of the last 15 years or so. Each new graphics driver release brings improvements.<p>The Mac world is at the beginning of this path. While it might take shorter (because people know what they're doing), it won't be instantaneous.

Tried it on my Core 2 Duo mini today. It sucked. It complains that it doesn't recognize the Windows version of my graphic chipset, and then when I continue it goes full screen with a pixelated image of something and starts flashing. I had to command-Q it to get out.<p>And as far as the article goes, I don't consider it a valid test when you are running on non-Apple hardware.

The poor performance verses Windows doesn't surprise me. Consider, my Mac is about a year old; while it's a Pro model, it was the entry level model. Despite this, the game plays well (no human perceptable stutter) at full resolution and settings. Valve isn't really motivated to optimize this game due to its age and how the current Mac hardware pool surpasses what PCs were (even accounting for the Mac platform's GPU lag) when Portal was originally released.<p>The real proof in the pudding is when Valve starts to release Mac/PC dual releases like they've been hinting at. If they have the same problems Blizzard has getting decent performance for their hybrid releases, Apple <i>might</i> finally notice that their lagging on GPU support is a problem and not something they can continue to dismiss/hand off as the developer's responsibility. (I know... dream on.)

They released an update today that, among other things, fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation".<p>It's an interesting comparison, but considering that Steam/OS X is barely 2 days old it's a little early to start drawing conclusions.

I just played my second game of Mac portal today, and before the game started, Steam downloaded an update.<p>It didn't fix any visible bugs for me, but it looks like it introduced a new one. Now when I look into the portals, all I see is black instead of the room on the other side. Yesterday when I played, I could see through portals fine.<p>It is just a glitch on my specific hardware, or did any other Portal Mac player get this too? I figure that if all of us are getting this bug, it'll probably be fixed soon. But if it's just me, I might be outta luck.

The only bug I have is that I don't get any sound. I haven't really tried anything yet to fix it, but played for about 3 minutes. Anyone have any thoughts on what may be the issue though?

Has anyone else had a problem where the menus have no text. As in, I can't see the menus at all. I figured it might be a font problem but couldn't work out what it could be.

How do we know that there aren't optimizations left to be done on the engine? This is two days after launch on a new backend. Surely there is room left to grow.