OSX is slower for gaming than Windows

[belgolas]

Gizmodo just posted an interesting article today. Steam for Mac Benchmarks: Windows Is Much Faster - Steam - Gizmodo

Basically OSX is much slower at games like Portal or WOW than running Windows in Boot Camp. They also tested it with a Hackintosh and the same happened there.

Why is OSX so bad at gaming? Maybe its because DX is so much better than OpenGL.

[Cheator]

Originally Posted by belgolas

Why is OSX so bad at gaming? Maybe its because DX is so much better than OpenGL.

No, thats not the case. Its probably due to drivers, and a number of other tweaks they've never made.

[Perineum]

What Cheator said..... I wouldn't say that DirectX is so much better than OpenGL

[kuddles]

Yeah, you have to remember that everything from graphics drivers to the actual Source engine had years to be optimized for gaming purposes on the PC. The conversion to OpenGL from DX probably wasn't very efficient either because I doubt it would be worth it to companies like Blizzard or Valve to remake their entire game engines from scratch for a small audience.

[zoob]

The guys over at Valve wrote a wrapper to translate DirectX calls to OpenGL...

The better comparison would be WoW OSX vs WoW Win32/64. I think they use OpenGL natively.

[bojangles]

Yeah wrappers aren't the best way to get maximum performance out of a program. It's like trying to translate a language instantly, but having to process it twice as much. If the game were natively ported to OpenGL, I think performance would be much better. Either way the frame rates are decent enough to play the game.

Heh, I just looked at the charts/tables, and Windows basically gets double the performance. Kind of proves my theory right haha.

[Dadi_oh]

Yeah I noticed this too. I have a Hackintosh that I use mainaly for video editing and as a server. Running a Q6600 @ 3.5GHz, 8GB memory, and an 8800GTS 512MB video card and on Portal @ 1680X1050 I actually have to turn down some settings to make it playable. Portal is not all tha a demanding a game so the 8800GTS should be able to handle it with ease with all settings maxed out on 1680X1050.

Problem is... I can't find anything like FRAPS on OSX to see what is actually happening with my framerates. So few Mac gamers I guess nobody has ever bothered developing something like fraps.

Oh well. This was just an experiment for me. I don't plan on gaming on that machine

[lowfat]

I only plan on using Steam for OSX for games like Braid, World of Goo or other indy games that take next to no resources. But I guess for Apple users who don't have a PC as well this isn't very good news. It would be nice if ATI/Nvidia would write updated video chipset drivers for OSX though.

[Neolithium_Wpg]

I'm hoping steam hitting OSX will help push some titles natively in there so I'm not stuck with WoW and CoD4; though bootcamp isn't the worst to deal with. Fortunately I have a year before my next purchase and there will be newer MBP refreshes by then...

[belgolas]

Well even some people were saying WOW is slower in OSX than boot camp Windows 7.

There are probably a lot of factors just shocking to see half of your FPS gone. One guy had a 150 FPS drop!