Mac running Steam are more powerful

... according to engadget's reporting style at least.

Macs running Steam are more powerful than PCs, on average -- Engadget

Interesting, no? Perhaps the NVidia drivers are better optimised than we thought?

Note the headline. Then read the very last line in the paragraph. Oh yeah, that's like an incidental throwaway thing, right?

There's Mactard, and there's drooling Mactard. Which comprises basically the editorial team at engadget. Never more clear than in this article though. Statistics are interesting, but the editorial skew is predictable - it's a circlejerk article. Even the submitter is predictable.

They've undoubtedly forgotten that the only Macs which can run Steam are post-2006 to start with.

 

Yeap, in my opinion, that says it all.

 

Or that apple doesn't offer low budget options.

 

Well at least he admits their GPUs are ****?

 

No, I don't think they have (forgotten it). that's one of their circlejerking tentposts I believe.

 

do these statistics count in old windows computers that date back pre-2006?

 

Yeah, this survey is complete bull taken out of context. Statistics fail.

 

Can you imagine how loud a MacBook Pro would be if it had a HD5850 in it? It's already quite loud.

Imagine the price tag.... If Apple charges $1,800 for 15" notebook with essentially a integrated on steroids... what will they charge for say a GTX 260M? $2,500 my guess.

Also believe a standard tower desktop came with the pathetic Nvidia 150... Had to pay a heap to upgrade to a 4800 series and the tower already over 2K...

 

apparently many pcs are still chugging along with single core cpus. i swear i heard somewhere that PCs always break in 24 month?

 

Yeah the Steam survey probably doesn't take into account for people who have steam installed just to keep in contact with friends, they don't actually game on that PC.

 

I don't mean to be an troll (yes, I did use the indefinite article 'an' purposefully) but this just about sums it up:

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/68/macvspc.jpg

4x GeForce GT 120s? Really now.

Basically, 100% of new Macs have 2 cores, whereas according to that link, 83% of PCs have 2 cores.

Last time I checked, games generally ran better with better graphics cards as well as better CPUs, so I don't see how 'better hardware', as a blanket term, can be used. Apple doesn't really use the highest end (or low end, as you would expect) components.

However, you have to think that Steam runs on Post-2006 macs only, whereas steam can run on much older PCs, so it makes sense that Steam on Mac (on average) is running on better hardware.

I do like the stability of Macs, but I like performance more.

 

Here's a counter article for the OP article

Windows 7, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu 10.04 meet up for an OpenGL benchmarking session -- Engadget

Let the fight continue, although it's like a no contest

 

mac's aren't even that more stable than decent windows 7 pc's these days

 

I don't see how a Mac can be more stable than Windows 7. Actually it's been years when I had stability issues with PC. Since XP SP2, I have had zero stability issues with Windows. And there have been plenty of statistics to prove Windows 2003 server had better stability than even Linux, and vice versa. The issue of stability in OS is really moot, regardless if you are a Windows, Linux or Mac user.

I think the whole notion of Windows being unstable is just some sort of campaign by Mac morons and hardcore Linux fans.

It could also be, there is just a substantial number of idiots out there who do something stupid, because Windows is an awesome OS that lets you do what you want (if you aren't stupid) and these stupid people are incapable of either realizing they screwed it up or use google. Either way they blame Microsoft for their own stupidity.

The irony is very heavy and it's not funny, just pathetic.

Also Microsoft has truly done a good job IMO is marketing Windows 7 not only as the business platform, but also a gaming platform. I personally don't understand why a game developer would even bother developing for Mac. Maybe they like to spend loads of money just for publicity? I mean for WoW it's OK since you may get years of subscription from the Mac user, but any other game other than MMORPG, makes little to no sense to me.
- Game developers seem incapable of making games run well on beefy PC hardware, why even bother trying to get it run on a Nvidia 150 or a crippled 330M?

 

yes, but if you figure many people out there still play counter-strike 1.6 on pentium 4's, it's safe to assume they're also playing on like the 6800 series gpu's or 7800/7900 gpus.

however, go figure, the majority of mac users who are 'gamers' on steam are probably not going to settle for the bottom of the barrel GPU solution for their desktops / notebooks, so i'm positive they have mid-ranged hardware in most of their machines.

 

Steam games still run worse on the Mac's OS/drivers.

Mac OS X Steam Performance: Half Life 2 Episode 2, Still Slower than Windows - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

 

This. I would like to see the statistics of purely the Mac crowd, just out of interest, like what percentage of the machines are running whatever specific graphics.

And as far as "low end" Macs go, supposedly Apple is in talks with DAAMIT (AMD+ATi) about getting Fusion into Apple machines, as Fusion has a pretty damn good feature set that is very Apple centric, with it's aim towards media/video functions using the GPU related parts of the APU. Honestly it might fair better at video decode than any current Macbook Pro configuration, though of course in general purpose performance it wouldn't be able to compete with Intel. It's also funny that the ISP speeds are not very well varied. To stay "honest" I would need to chose 2 Mbit, though in reality our service is 6 Mbit. The problem is that the next step up from 2 Mbit is 10 Mbit. Valve needs to put in a 5 Mbit option.

 

Lol, people who can afford to buy a high end Mac also have the extra cash needed for a better internet connection, if you believe the stats gathered by Steam.

 

/sigh

Isn't the service a bit new to be comparing their now handful of mac users to a backlog of half a decade+ of MILLIONS of PC users?

Given the data the "conclusions" taken are too stupid for words.

This isn't even a mac/PC thing... this is endgadget personnel requiring training in statistics.

 

You're being far too fair

 

I'd like to note a few things here: yes, this is an interesting comparison. Why this comes as a surprise is odd... considering Apple has consistently sold higher than average quality units ever since they switched to Intel. Furthermore, there are a number of other things to take into account: Steam also serves casual gamers. PopCap has a deal with Steam, this means that a large number of users play their games through Steam's service. "Casual" games are quite popular among people whom are not exactly interested in hardware, and just want some fun games. Is it a fair comparison? Probably not. Those people who have low end software should not expect to play modern games, it is the large group of people with high end hardware that should expect to run high end software. Yep... (Also it might be a more relevant metric if they listed price of the hardware as well, I'm willing to bet that the average PC is much cheaper)

 

Nevermind the fact that people who purchase macs tend to live in area's that offer larger pipelines. Large cities, college campus's and such. And i doubt many people are plugging macs into dial up. Which we still know there are plenty of PC users doing these days. Which again brings down the average much much more.

 

Macs are pretty


that is all i have to say on the subject, because the only person i have known to own a mac, was someone who had no idea about computers, and that was his reason for buying one.

 

Well I'm sure they want as much browser/user traffic as possible. If they click the advertisements, it's helps them make money. The best way to do this is to give the article a crazy, alerting title that makes people go "huh!?" and read. It's no different than news organizations and fear mongering in order to boost ratings.

 

1) more pcs are gaming than macs -> higher system are a smaller percentage
2) lower spec'd pcs can run games on steam -> macs are inefficient and require more hardware to run stuff

 

Somebody needs to get a calendar its not April fools day yet.

The highest model mac laptop right now is only about equivalent to the lower/mid range gaming windows machines for nearly 2x or more the price.

 

"More powerful on average" is perhaps accurate if you're not just looking at gaming performance. The actual article went on to say that while the Macs running Steam had better CPUs and more RAM on average, they typically had poor GPUs - and that GPUs are what really matters for games.

However, the article is misleading because mentioning Steam implies a focus on gaming, in which sense Macs are clearly weaker. In any case, Macs typically having better CPUs and more RAM is completely unsurprising, considering that they don't offer cheap models, while there are plenty of much cheaper Windows offerings on the market. It's no surprise to see that more expensive computers have better specs in some regards, although Mac specs are nonetheless underwhelming for the price (especially considering the GPUs).

 

Seriously, that guy who wrote this article at engadget needs to study up more on statistics, rather than coming out with such a BS and meaningless article that is wasting my time, wasting the internet bandwidth, wasting the air he's breathing while typing the article, <s>and wasting the plastic used to make his keyboard that's being used to type this article</s> Oops, that apple keyboard is already wasted the moment it's made.

 

@fzfzh
There's nothing wrong with putting statistics forward, and the content of the article doesn't really do anything other than summarize the results of the survey. The only issue with the article is the headline, and although Macs are clearly weaker as gaming machines, an average Mac running Steam is arguably more powerful than an average PC running Steam in an overall sense (though it depends how much of a role gaming plays in your metric of "overall performance").

Sean's article had a nice summary of the facts presented by the Steam survey. They might be irrelevant to you, but they're still a lot more informative than your last post.

 

my notebook and desktop (see sig) eat macs for breakfast ... and their looks scare little children. So Steve Jobs, go cry in a corner, muhahaaa

 

Well, it's clearly meaningless, because the statistics is meaningless and I really don't know what meaning anyone could get out of it. It's just like saying "The average population growth in US 10 years ago is more than the average population growth in Japan last year". It's like "So what?"

Well, my last post wasn't meant to be informative.

 

This is simply because apple don't offer low spec machines and people who buy macs tend to be wealthier in the first place. End of.

I have a profound hate for macs, the only two things I'll give them is that they look nice and get good battery life. Other than that I hate the entire apple corporation because of their two faced nature. They advertise themselves as being "more user friendly" etc. when in reality apple is one of the most brute-ish companies on earth. For example, they actively try and break your iPhone if you jailbreak it, they charge the earth for their products, the list goes on and on. Basically I hate apple, Steve Jobs and all that goes with it.

-Die hard PC user

 

Dito . Couldn't say it better myself (although i could live with owning an iphone (but not for the full price))

 

Uhmmm, what is the point of this thread exactly? I'm both Mac and PC, have been almost all my life. Games section is mainly us PC users as we all know full well more games for us, so not many Mac people to respond against or even provide useful data/benchmarks.

Engadget? I Don't read them anymore , and I agree that they have a heavy Mac slant, but all we have is 4 pages of people who all know this.

If you were actually looking for some real feedback information wise try posting in the Mac section. They would be the ones who could benchmark and find hard evidence of how far off the info really is.

 

How do you evaluate "Steam performance" anyways?

I'm willing to try and check with Steam for Mac at my dad's house though if anyone wants some real numbers.

And reading that article the title it really isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. All they're saying is what we already know i.e. Macs past 2006(those who can run Steam) have better specs on average than PCs on average including before 2006(that also run Steam). It still says that Macs are quite horrible for gaming due to their subpar GPUs.

People jump the "anti-Mac" hate-wagon way too fast nowadays O_O

 

Title should read:

MACs running steam are more poorly balanced for games than PCs.

 

I just love Mac vs PC threads and do some good bashing/trolling just for fun . The whole debate is pointless anyway

 

I hate Macs...have so for years now...I am currently seeking help but I ended up choking my last therapist cuz he had an iphone.

 

On a side note, I don't eat apples anymore cause of Steve Jobs. That means I can't keep the doctor away D:

 

Just blend the apple into an apple juice. Satisfaction of crushing apples + keeping the doctor away

 

Well, first of all: what does mean to run Steam? As far as I know Steam is an interface for digital distribution of games....

 

It's not 'anti Mac hate'. It's circlejerking smug Apple fanboi blog dislike.

 

Yes I'm also confused about the whole concept.

Ohhhh well that makes a lot more sense lol

Don't get me wrong I think the whole "article" is just a load of rotten potato fries but this is engadget's wrong moreso than Apple's (for once ).

On a side note, I've started ingesting apples again after reizo's superb suggestion

 

Hey guys I breathe water.

 

who wants to go find me a macbook with my specs for under $1200 that is brand new from the factory?
I won't get a mac because they make people seem rich, which makes targets for theft. And then goes everyone staring at you.

Sorry for any typos, typing from a Zune hd. I'll save the money for games~

 

you do know how much other factors go in a notebook just than price, and performance?

battery life, the os, dimensions, weight.

im just saying. i dont like apple neither but what you said above Blaze-Senpai is only one way looking at apple negatively. (i could have worded that better lol)

 

I ran Portal on my Imac. I was not impressed at all to be honest. It would have been able to run with all its settings at the highest on a pc machine three times as weak as this Imac... and yet this Mac version felt like a 20-25 fps fest.

I have not tried HL2 and TF2 yet, but I heard they are worse.


It's too damn bad. it's all just computers and everyone should be able to enjoy all the software. restricting software to different platform is bad, because the potential marked grown is cut by the lower base.

if all games worked on mac, it would mean more sales for pc developers, which would give people more games. It's in everyones interest to have PC gaming being good for OSX and Linux.

I should really read up on the DirectX history. I heard the original architect and designer of it, hates Microsoft now with a passion. He has basically condemned them. Don't remember where i read that. Was probably BS.

 

How long until Steve decides he doesn't want to allow Steam to run on Macs cuz Valve is "too proprietary"? I'm pretty sure he is the only person who wants to be able to sell applications to his followers. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Apple was getting 60% of Steams revenue for games sold to Mac machines.

 

In before Apple announces iSteam.

 

IMO , Macbooks are crap and i really don't know why each moronic friend of mine wants to buy it.. jeezs by Dv5t eats a 2008 macbook for breakfast... and any laptop now can... so i don't believe this..