Alex Watson
Great news for gamers: Valve is bringing Steam to the Mac. But does your graphics processor have enough clout to actually run any of the games?
If the geeks born in the 1960s and 1970s were first attracted to computers by coding, then for those like me, who were born in the 1980s, it was games that did it – games were why I learned to use OS commands, why I learned how to tweak and fix a computer and why I learned about hardware. Every friend’s bedroom was centred around a desk with a pile of blue disks and a grey slab of computer on it, whether it was the Atari ST, with its lovely slanted Function keys, the chunky Amiga 500 or, as they were in those days, a 100% IBM compatible PC.
Macs held no interest to me nor my friends because they didn’t run any games. ‘The Mac’ was a pejorative term based on the fact an old Mac ran the school library catalogue. Even the wretched Acorn Archimedes machines in the IT lab were better. They at least had a half decent Bomberman clone.
You could get a few games for the Mac, but once Bungie had left for the vastly more profitable Xbox to make Halo games – the equivalent of a beloved minor-label band signing with Sony and writing a ubiquitous number 1 single – Mac gaming became a backwater filled with either obscure curiosities or dated ports. Every now and then it showed signs of life, and there was once even a Stevenote where he proclaimed gaming was back on the Mac as Electronic Arts was committing to the platform. Sadly, it was a false dawn – the games were literally the PC code running terribly via a translation layer – and Electronic Arts didn’t keep the line-up up to date, either.
All of this is about to change, though, because game developer Valve is bringing Steam to the Mac. Over the past five years, as Microsoft’s focus has drifted from PC gaming to the more profitable Xbox 360, it’s Valve that’s done the most to drive PC gaming forward. The games it develops are universally fantastic, whether we’re talking about the brutally competitive and fast-paced online shooter Counter-Strike Source, or Portal, a dystopian puzzle game that’s arguably the most vital piece of sci-fi to have emerged since The Matrix.
Then there’s the technology Valve uses. If I told you that it’s Valve – not Apple – that’s created the world’s best online content store, you might think I’m mad. But you’d only think that if you’ve used iTunes and not Steam, Valve’s online store.
Steam allows you to log into your account on as many machines as you like – there’s no authorisation count – and you can download the games you’ve bought with no hassle whatsoever. Games are automatically patched. In keeping with this machine-agnostic idea, Valve has said you won’t need to buy your games again for the Mac if you own them already for the PC. On some of the games, your configuration settings – custom keys, for instance – are saved to Valve’s servers and mirrored to all the machines on which you run Steam. There’s also a built-in friends list that supports text and voice chat. It works when you’re in games, and if you’re playing online, you can send a one-click invite to a friend so they can join you without fuss.
Excited yet?
Well, not so fast, because now comes the bad news. Valve’s games are renowned for being efficiently coded, but they still require a decent graphics chip (or GPU) to play, and here Apple’s miserly approach to specifying its hardware is going to make life difficult for its users. As recently as last month, if you bought a new MacBook Pro, the GPU with which it was supplied was a GeForce 9400M – a chip that retails for less than £30 if you buy it discretely when you’re building a Windows machine.
That said, it’s at least a chip that actually qualifies as a GPU: older MacBooks and the Mac mini come with Intel Integrated Graphics, a chip so chronically dreadful at creating 3D graphics that you’d get a faster frame rate if you got some crayons and drew polygons directly onto the screen.
The current range of iMacs fare quite a bit better – the Radeon HD 4670 that most come with might still get laughed at by a lot of PC gamers, but they are, by nature, elitists – but for a bit of light gaming, it’s really not too bad at all, especially for Valve’s tightly coded titles.
By now, you’ve probably realised that graphics cards are a numerological minefield, and if you’re wondering about playing Steam games on your Mac, you might be feeling a little bit of trepidation. So the first thing you need to do is identify the GPU in your Mac. System Profiler will help in this respect or, if you’re particularly geeky, you might remember it from when you ordered the system.
If it’s a graphics chip made by Intel, then seriously, go and buy yourself a copy of the Settlers of Catan boardgame – it will be much more fun than playing Counter-Strike. If, however, the chip is made by Nvidia (its brand is GeForce), or its main rival ATI (with its Radeons), then you should be able to look forward to some gaming action.
Of course, at the moment, Steam for Macs hasn’t yet launched, so we don’t know how well it will perform – and you may be happy just waiting to see – but looking into the tech specs of your GPU will mean you can make an educated guess. Contrary to popular belief, the most important specification for a GPU is not the amount of memory that it has. Instead, you want to look at its processing pipeline. Here, though, things are confused by the fact Nvidia and ATI use slightly different terminology, despite talking largely about the same thing.
GPUs are parallel-processor chips – that is, they work on many instructions at once. Since 2006 or so, they’ve comprised a number of very simple devices called arithmetic logic units (ALUs). The more of these a GPU has, the more instructions it can work on at once. Nvidia calls the ALUs inside its chips Cuda cores whereas ATI opts for stream processing units. ATI typically has far more stream processors in its chips because they’re simpler than its Nvidia rivals so you can’t compare them directly (Nvidia’s top-of-the range GPU has 480 stream processors, while ATI’s has 1440), but more is better. With that GeForce 9400M inside the MacBook Pro, you get 16 stream processors, and 32 with the 9600M they was in the 17in version.
Clock speeds are the next most important spec to look at, but given that Apple will mandate these – that is, you can choose the GPU, but it will run at a speed set by Apple, so as to stick within the thermal envelope – it’s essentially academic.
Memory is the next most important, but more doesn’t simply mean faster for a GPU, as memory comes in useful the higher the screen resolution. Here, Apple does the hard work for you, as it only tends to offer GPUs with more memory on bigger-screened Macs.
That brings us to the end of today’s lesson. Valve hasn’t announced a launch date for Steam for the Mac, so until then, it’s a case of wait and see…
