Steam, Source Engine Get First-Rate Love On Mac OS X

[cl333r]

OS X also has actually usable video drivers, where as on Linux you pretty still need the binary NVIDIA drivers for any non-trivial graphics stuff.

Common, OS X also uses the "binary nvidia drivers", Apple doesn't create it's own version of Nvidia drivers, are you trying to inject some dichotomy between open source as a movement and the quality of the binary drivers on linux and os x.

[immudium]

Man do I hope they give Linux some love too. Counter Strike Source is the only reason I still maintain a Windows partition. Running it on Wine just hasn't been reliable enough. In my opinion no game company should ever worry about supporting all distros. They should just say were only going to officially support Ubuntu or OpenSuse or Whatever and be done with it. Most likely it will just work on most modern distros anyway and even if it didn't, switching distros would be a small price to pay. Certainly better than having to run Windows.

[Chewi]

This begs two questions. Will the OpenGL renderer be available for Windows? And if not, is there some kind of Wine equivalent for running OS X programs? I can't think of one off the top of my head, which I find surprising, given that it's a lot more like Linux than Windows is. Surely if FreeBSD can run Linux programs...? Or am I being naive?

[EarthMind]

And Linux ?

[bugmenot]

I highly doubt that we will see Steam on Linux anytime soon. Linux just doesn't have the consistency that OSX has in terms of 3D support. Performance too is far better on OSX than Linux shown in a fairly recent Phoronix test.

[deanjo]

Considering there is almost as many linux users as there is mac osx users and they now only depends on open source libraries.

How do you figure almost equal when pretty much any marketshare study out there shows OS X having anywhere 5-9x the number of installed systems on personal machines?

[bugmenot]

.... and Xorg seems to hate 3D games in my experience.

[tball]

How do you figure almost equal when pretty much any marketshare study out there shows OS X having anywhere 5-9x the number of installed systems on personal machines?

Well I have to draw that statement back

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

I just seemed to remember a counter actually stating macosx and linux to be used equally frequently.

[MaestroMaus]

First rate? Their Windows games don't even get first rate service. Valve games are some of the most buggy and poorly maintained games online.

Maybe having to port the code will make them find bugs and they'll fix them across the board.

You sure you actually played Valve games? They run 100% fine on my laptop and my mini-desktop.

[d2kx]

First rate? Their Windows games don't even get first rate service. Valve games are some of the most buggy and poorly maintained games online.

Dear Joe Sixpack,

With the most love, that anyone could possibly give, I was sent to tell you this: you just failed really hard.

All the best,

- d2kx

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Seriously though, Valve brings updates even for games that are years old on a regular basis, lots and lots of free content and they could, for today's standard, be considered as (nearly) bug-free.