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Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Cross-Platform Development => Topic started by: Echelon9 on May 21, 2010, 11:15:59 am

Title: Valve's experience developing OpenGL Steam on Mac
Post by: Echelon9 on May 21, 2010, 11:15:59 am
For the benefit of those living under a rock, Steam was released for Mac this month.

This is great video discussion (http://5by5.tv/conversation/16) with Gabe Newell (head of Valve), and Jason Mitchell (Software Engineer at Valve who focussed on the efforts to get Steam on Mac).

I think it's great to hear a major games developer discuss some hard data points to back up the long suspected Apple Mac graphics performance discount. Valve have done good work getting their code to run well on Mac, and they're pushing hard to help Apple improve the (lock stop) graphics drivers and OpenGL Frameworks that are released with each release of OS X.

I dare say the experience of more gamers using a stable, well developed code base like Steam on Apple will help expose the lingering bugs in the APIs and SDKs released for OpenGL development on Mac. As the developer tooling gets better over the next year, big improvements should be seen.

Which only bodes well for FS2_Open and other OpenGL apps on OS X!
Title: Re: Valve's experience developing OpenGL Steam on Mac
Post by: Echelon9 on May 23, 2010, 02:07:33 am
For the benefit of those not able to watch the whole vidcast, here is a discussion of the Mac graphics performance points above on Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/mac-lags-windows-in-gaming-performance-excels-at-stability.ars).
Title: Re: Valve's experience developing OpenGL Steam on Mac
Post by: chief1983 on May 23, 2010, 02:11:17 pm
I didn't know OS X 10.6.4 was so close.  Can't wait!  Maybe Portal will be able to keep above 25fps!
Title: Re: Valve's experience developing OpenGL Steam on Mac
Post by: blowfish on May 23, 2010, 02:16:11 pm
Maybe Portal will be able to keep above 25fps!

That would be nice... :D