The zombie-killing video game Left 4 Dead 2 launched on the Mac today. It’s available for download through Steam, a computer gaming platform that aims to elevate Mac gaming from its past reputation as second-rate to Windows-based gaming.
Left 4 Dead 2 was developed and published by Valve Software, a video game company famous for the Half-Life series and Portal. Most recently, Valve has dedicated most of its efforts to promoting Steam, which includes a direct download store and Xbox Live-like community features.
Valve released Steam for Mac computers earlier this year — a big event for gamers on a platform that has for at least two decades played second fiddle to Windows-based machines when it comes to gaming. Other than the critically acclaimed Portal and the pseudo-indie Diablo clone Torchlight, the initial library of Mac titles on Steam was unimpressive, but it’s growing.
Valve’s own Half-Life 2 was added to the Mac version of the service in May while third-party support has been limited to smaller games with just a few exceptions like Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Even though Steam has been slow to take off, Mac gaming overall has become more impressive than ever in recent months.
Major titles available on the Mac in addition to other platforms include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age Origins, StarCraft II, The Sims 3, The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition, BioShock and Spore. The Mac library still doesn’t rival those that Windows, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 gamers enjoy, but it’s been steadily gaining steam — no pun intended!
Mac Gaming: We Still Have Problems, People
Valve has been vocal with criticisms for the platform even as it commits resources to support it. Most importantly, Valve insists that the Mac’s overly standardized video drivers — the software that operates the computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU) — are ill-optimized for gaming, and that Apple and GPU manufacturers will have to take action.
I noticed this myself when I took Left 4 Dead 2 for a whirl on a MacBook Pro from early 2009. I had previously played the game in Microsoft Windows 7 on the same machine at max graphics settings. The 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, four gigabytes of RAM and GeForce 9600M GPU ran the game very smoothly in Windows with the default drivers from the GPU’s manufacturer.
I was forced to disable anti-aliasing and other graphical bells and whistles to achieve a playable state in the Mac version of the game, and even then I experienced frequent errors and crashes, as depicted in the image below.
In theory, a standardized platform like the Mac should be better optimized for gaming. Game developers are forced to consider an infinitude of hardware configuration options when optimizing and testing their products for Windows users, so PC gamers have always been plagued with technical problems simply because their unique configurations were not considered.
Those same developers could focus on only a few standardized hardware configurations with Mac machines, but Apple’s strong grip of control prevents drivers optimized for gamers from being easily available.
We’re thrilled to see all these games coming to the Mac, but we’ll be even more thrilled when Apple dedicates the same amount of effort to Mac gaming as it does to gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch.
