Steam on Mac Tested

One of the arguments that PC fans have been throwing in the face of Mac users is the lack of gaming support. Then Steam announced a Mac version. Suddenly one of the biggest arguments is gone. Or is it?

imageImage source: Tom’s Hardware

Tom’s Hardware put the new version of Steam through the paces and found that it is somewhat lacking, but usable. As they point out, porting the gaming store/platform to the Mac had some big obstacles. Most PC games are made for Windows and thus take advantage of PC specific hardware like DirectX video cards. Steam is still working on the platform with multiple updates since its release just last week.

So what is the verdict? Not great. Testing the game Portal on both versions produced a 2 to 1 ratio in favor of the Windows based Steam running on a MacBook Pro. On a Hackintosh (a PC with a hacked version of Mac OSX running on it) the difference is not nearly as pronounced, but still convincing. The PC  version of Steam is much faster at this early stage.

Despite this the folks at Tom’s Hardware consider the Mac version playable. You can get all the details by following the link above to Tom’s.

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