Steam’s Cross Platform titles… Too early for performance testing?

Folks,

I’m really excited about Steam going cross platform and the Source based games heading that way to…

But I fear that folks are attempting to performance test the new titles just a little too quickly.  After all, it has only been 3 days…  And since then every day there have been updates to either the Steam application itself, or the games that are being benchmarked….

I know that we want hard statistics, but give Valve sometime to put this out to the public, and optimize their code.   Let some maturity and stability arrive before you start criticizing…  After all, I just read one Portal for the Mac review that pointed out that the “picture was fuzzy”.  Would you like to guess what had been resolved the previous night?  Fixed screen “fuzziness” caused by color correction operation.

Now, I’m not saying that we can’t criticize Valve, nor that we should hold our tongue, but we need to recognize that these applications are moving targets, and that they are not completely mature on the Macintosh side.  After all, the source engine is a living engine.  It’s being revised for the newer titles….  I don’t doubt that Valve has more optimizations just waiting for the Mac market…

Here’s the current history of the Macintosh patches from Valve.

5/14
Portal Update Released
Product Update – Valve
Updates to Portal have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

  • Fixed Portals being black rather than see-thru
  • Fixed crash when exiting
  • Fixed crash when using keyboard inside of key binding dialog

5/13
Portal Update Released
Product Update – Valve
Updates to Portal have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

  • Fixed screen “fuzziness” caused by color correction operation
  • Fixed text not rendering in game if font Tahoma was disabled
  • Fixed startup video not playing fullscreen
  • Added optional -snd_openal command line parameter to force the engine to use the OpenAL api, can be used if Portal is playing no audio when launched normally
  • Added mac_fsbackground convar, on Snow Leopard or better you can set this to have Portal still visible when it is not the foreground application

Steam client update released
Client Update – Valve
A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select “Check for Steam Client Updates…”. The specific changes include:

Steam Client

  • Win32 side support for Steam Play / Steam Cloud integration with upcoming Mac titles
  • Fix a regression causing Steam to fail if installed in a path with non-ascii characters
  • Fix to grant achievements based on stat progress if progress is 100% but the achievement was not previously granted
  • Fix a case where opt-in free games like the Counter-Strike: Source Beta would not appear in the library view until installed.