Portal for Mac Compared to PC Version

Earlier this week, Valve ended the long-standing drought of game titles available for the Mac by introducing a native Steam client for the OS, along with 56 different games. The company promises to release a slew of new titles each Wednesday for the next few, so it will be interesting to see just how fast this list will grow. Arguably, the most sought-after title for download has been Portal, and for good reason. Until May 24, you can download Portal for free… and that counts for PC users too!

Seeing as such an infamous FPS title was available for free, we knew it wouldn’t take too long before we began to see Mac vs. PC comparisons, and yesterday, one such comparison was posted over at AnandTech. The author did his experiments on a Hackintosh, but given his experience with such a machine, he believes the results are going to be representative of using a real Mac.

Since both the Mac and PC versions look good, the important thing to look at is performance, as it is today, it’s lacking quite a bit on the former. That’s to be expected, though, as Macs rely on OpenGL, while PCs using Windows can run DirectX, which is far more efficient given that A) it’s built for gaming and B) most games are designed from the ground up to make use of it.

At the modest resolution of 1280×800, the PC version had 52% more FPS on average, and at 2560×1600, the difference was even stronger… 82%. The performance the Mac did see though is far from poor, but unfortunately, Portal isn’t exactly a heavyweight in today’s scheme of gaming. To picture something like Crysis, Modern Warfare 2 or even F.E.A.R. 2 on the same machine is a little questionable. For what it’s worth, if the Steam client was available for Linux today, the performance differences would likely be identical, as Linux also relies on OpenGL and virtually the same overall base kernel (Unix is at each OS’ core).

If you’ve ever played a game in both DirectX and OpenGL modes, chances are you noticed some subtle differences, and in the case of Portal for the Mac, this case is no different. On the Mac version, the graphics as a whole are a little foggier and lack the total definition of the PC version. It certainly doesn’t affect the gameplay, but as the PC version clearly looks superior, hopefully we’ll be able to see the Mac version equal up at some point down the road.

Oh, and while we’re at it, perhaps Khronos could start taking OpenGL for gaming a little more seriously given that there’s major potential to be had. There’s a far better chance of this happening than Microsoft licensing out DirectX, that’s for sure.

Now some of this can be explained away due to gamma, since Mac OS X and Windows have different default gamma levels, but gamma could never explain the entire difference. There’s clearly a difference in IQ between the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Portal, and it’s not in the Mac’s favor. It’s by no means bad, but as one person put this when being shown these screenshots “It’s like looking at a magazine scan” when looking at the Mac.