TF2 now for Mac

[Drake Wingfire]

I just thought this was rather interesting news, after all the Mac VS PC BS and the subtle bashing commercials and the never ending arguments, its about time we just the the fan-boys duke it out with each other! Im getting me some ring side seats! *grabs popcorn*

At least that sure seems like Valves intentions when you suddenly give in-game white ear-buds to the players who are playing on a Mac, IMNSHO its like painting a big bulls eye on those players, still should be fun to see what happens in-game XD\

Let the fights begin!  ;)

[Acco]

Performance of source on mac still suffers quite a bit. I'll be sticking to using my winbox for now.

[Drake Wingfire]

Performance of source on mac still suffers quite a bit. I'll be sticking to using my winbox for now.

I had pondered which machines Apple makes would be up to the task, all I ever see at stores are the whole "all in one" monitor form ones, or the notebooks.
Guess you gotta order in the better stuff?

[Acco]

It's more a combination of the drivers and gpu choices.

All the graphics options in macs nowadays are decently powerful... Not as much as some desktop machines, but they're usually more capable than a good amount of the stuff. Sure, a mbp won't have the performance of an actual gaming laptop, but the gpu is fairly beefy.

It's just that valve's had a ton of time to work on directx optimizations, whereas their opengl version of source still probably needs a ton more refinement. Driverwise, mac has always lagged in performance.

[Ravenwood]

It's more a combination of the drivers and gpu choices.

Mainly it seems to be the lack of performance-oriented GPUs on virtually all Macs.  Given that Macbooks makes up about half of all Mac sales (Last I heard) and the iMacs making up most of the rest, neither of which has great GPU options.

The Macbook Pro's 8600 can run TF2 @ 1024 x 768 with graphic settings on medium-low and it's actually playable.

But that's an $1500 laptop.

[Acco]

Currently, the baseline for performance on macs is actually pretty palatable:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.html

The 8600 in my old mbp doesn't score nearly as well as the integrated part mentioned there:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-8600M-GT.3986.0.html
World in Conflict for example on medium settings.

And driver issues: 50% performance hit on HL2Ep2:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3759/mac-os-x-steam-performance-half-life-2-episode-2-still-slower-than-windows