News - Valve to bring Steam and Source to the Apple Mac

[HEXUS]

Gaming on Apple's Mac computers just got a whole lot more interesting.

Read more.

[shaithis]

I hope this won't end up in PC games being released with OpenGL instead of DirectX...

[aidanjt]

Why not? OpenGL is a much wider supported standard, heck, it is an actual standard. It would also make porting PC games to Linux *much* less painful.

[shaithis]

Because it doesn't seem to scale as well as DirectX does...at least in my experience. Perhaps it's the AMD and nVidia implementations but regardless of what manufacturer of gfx I have had, OpenGL performance when running games at large resolutions seems to be dire.

[Biscuit]

surely if it started being implimented more it would improve though

[aidanjt]

I haven't had any problems myself.

[99Flake]

That is because OpenGL is just badly implemented on PC games.

Most games use Directx because it is there, and it is easy and they know everyone will have it.

If they were more focused on OpenGL it would be just as good, remember the old 3dFX cards? They use Glide OpenGL where the game supported it. Was always better than D3D, that is because more effort went into it.

If anything it would stop lazy programming, plus OpenGL, in general, is actually the more powerful tool and in my experience has always given better image quality like for like.

[Hicks12]

This is a good thing, now mac users wont be able to say their Mac 'Just works' because the games will crash just like on windows .

All for multiplatform aslong as no one loses out (*console ports*) so good work valve.

[aidanjt]

I wouldn't say DX is particularly 'easier' for engine development, just more unified.

[Steve]

I hope this is a precursor to Linux support, but I doubt it.

People are worrying a lot about OpenGL/DirectX when game engines like idtech and Source often do a lot of work to support both - i mean look at the sheer backwards compatibility of Source on old DX versions.

[kalniel]

I hope this is a precursor to Linux support, but I doubt it.

People are worrying a lot about OpenGL/DirectX when game engines like idtech and Source often do a lot of work to support both - i mean look at the sheer backwards compatibility of Source on old DX versions.

That's because DirectX is so backwardly compatible in general. Developers don't want to work on these kind of things, just use a tech and have it work

[Steve]

Developers don't want to work on these kind of things, just use a tech and have it work

Whatever happened to real programming, eh?

[kalniel]

Whatever happened to real programming, eh?

Hehe they want to save that for the stuff that players really care about and will spend money on, like designing levels where you mow down civilians in airports. Not behind the scenes tech stuff like which API is used

[99Flake]

I wouldn't say DX is particularly 'easier' for engine development, just more unified.

I didn't mean it was 'easier' as in how it is programmed, just easier to know the support is there. It is the path of least resistance I suppose.

[Lee H]

Do the mice on the Mac still have only the 1 button?

If so what they going to use for Alt-fire/zoom ?

[shaithis]

The Apple mice have 4 buttons now I think.....plus you can always use 3rd party mice.

The old 1-button mouse got too embarrassing for them in the end I think